These days, the HR department resembles something quite different to what an HR department may have looked like even just a decade ago.

It goes without saying that factors such as technology has played a big role in taking more traditional organisational departments such as HR into a more complex place. As well as technology, there are also other strong influencing factors at play – such as modern legislation on levels of data privacy and protection, stringent requirements regarding information security, and a myriad of additional company policies relating to social media, health and safety, employee wellbeing, maternity and paternity rights, and gender discrimination – to name just a handful.

Developments such as these have transformed the HR industry massively. They’ve also had a knock-on effect on the average employee’s expectations of their employer (in that they’re far higher!), as well as their ability to positively affect staff retention levels.

Here, we look at a couple of the biggest challenges likely to impact HR teams in the year ahead.

Technology and software

We briefly touched on this factor above, but technological developments, including software and the use of AI, are likely to play a role within the average HR department in 2019:

• HR software: No longer confined to just recording and requesting holidays and sick leave, managing employee benefits and professional development records. More advanced features are now appearing, including that of allowing organisations to better recruit, evaluate and analyse potential job candidates – potentially reducing human error or any bias, and bringing with it a new level of ‘transparency’ regarding the hiring process.

Another future use for HR software extends to evaluating work performance in real time; no longer confining the activity to just monthly 1:1 meetings or annual appraisals.

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