This document summarizes 10 key human capital trends from 2017 to 2020 according to annual surveys. The trends include the changing nature of careers, learning, talent acquisition, employee experience, performance management, leadership, digital HR, people analytics, diversity and inclusion, and the future of work involving new technologies. Organizations are shifting from hierarchies to empowered networks and teams and redesigning jobs to leverage both human and technological capabilities. Learning is becoming more continuous, personalized and integrated with work. Well-being, the hyper-connected workplace, data privacy, and social impact are also emerging as important issues.

1. Department of Business Administration
An Assignment on ‘Human Capital Trends 2017 to 2020’
Course code: BUS-402
Course Title: Business Communications
Submitted To:
Mohammad Shibli Shahriar
Associate Professor
Department Business Administration
Daffodil International University
Submitted BY:
212-14-311
Jubayer Alam
Department of Business of Administration
Daffodil International University
Submitted date: 11-08-2021

2. 2017
TREND 1. THE ORGANIZATION OF THE FUTURE:
ARRIVING NOW Given the pace of change and the constant pressure to adapt, it is not
surprising that executives identified building the organization of the future as the most important
challenge for 2017. In this year’s survey, nearly 60 percent of respondents rated this problem as
very important, and 90 percent rated it as important or very important. This level of interest
signals a shift from designing the new organization to actively building organizational
ecosystems and networks. Agility plays a central role in the organization of the future, as
companies race to replace structural hierarchies with networks of teams empowered to take
action.
TREND 2. CAREERS AND LEARNING:
REAL TIME, ALL THE TIME The concept of a “career” is being shaken to its core, driving
companies toward “always-on” learning experiences that allow employees to build skills quickly,
easily, and on their own terms. This year, careers and learning rose to second place in rated
importance, with 83 percent of executives identifying these issues as important or very
important. At leading companies, HR organizations are helping employees grow and thrive as
they adopt the radical concept of a career described in The 100-Year Life. 7 New learning
models both challenge the idea of a static career and reflect the declining half-life of skills
critical to the 21st-century organization.
TREND 3. TALENT ACQUISITION:
ENTER THE COGNITIVE RECRUITER as jobs and skills change, finding and recruiting the
right people become more important than ever. Talent acquisition is now the third-most-
important challenge companies face, with 81 percent of respondents calling it important or very
important. Our chapter on talent acquisition highlights how leading organizations use social
networking, analytics, and cognitive tools to find people in new ways, attract them through a
global brand, and determine who will best fit the job, team, and company. A new breed of
cognitive technologies is radically transforming recruiting, which stands at the early stages of a
revolution.
TREND 4. THE EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE:

3. CULTURE, ENGAGEMENT, AND BEYOND Culture and engagement are vital parts of the
employee experience, and leading organizations are broadening their focus to include a person’s
first contact with a potential employer through retirement and beyond. Today, companies are
looking at employee journeys, studying the needs of their workforce, and using net promoter
scores to understand the employee experience. Workplace redesign, well-being, and work
productivity systems are all becoming part of the mandate for HR.
TREND 5. PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT:
PLAY A WINNING HAND For the last five years, companies have been experimenting with
new performance management approaches that emphasize continuous feedback and coaching,
reducing the focus on appraisal. This year, companies are moving beyond experimentation to
deploy new models on a wide scale. Even though HR technology tools have not quite caught up,
new approaches to performance management are working, and they are increasing productivity
and changing corporate culture.
TREND 6. LEADERSHIP DISRUPTED:
PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES as companies transform and digital organizational models
emerge, leadership needs change as well. Eighty percent of our respondents say that leadership is
an important issue, and 42 percent call it very important. Organizations are clamoring for more
agile, diverse, and younger leaders, as well as new leadership models that capture the “digital
way” to run businesses. While the leadership development industry continues to struggle,
companies are pushing the boundaries of their traditional leadership hierarchies, empowering a
new breed of leaders who can thrive in a rapidly changing network.
TREND 7. DIGITAL HR:
PLATFORMS, PEOPLE, AND WORK as the enterprise as a whole becomes digital, HR must
become a leader in the digital organization. This means going beyond digitizing HR platforms to
developing digital workplaces and digital workforces, and to deploying technology that changes
how people work and the way they relate to each other at work. Fortunately, the path to digital
HR is becoming clearer, with expanded options, new platforms, and a wide variety of tools to
build the 21st-century digital organization, workforce, and workplace.
TREND 8. PEOPLE ANALYTICS:
RECALCULATING THE ROUTE Data about people at work has become more important than
ever, but the focus of people analytics has changed. Formerly a technical discipline owned by
data specialists, people analytics is now a business discipline, supporting everything from
operations and management to talent acquisition and financial performance. Readiness to

4. capitalize on people analytics remains a challenge, however. Only 8 percent of organizations
report they have usable data, while only 9 percent believe they have a good understanding of the
talent factors that drive performance.
TREND 9. DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION:
THE REALITY GAP Fairness, equity, and inclusion are now CEO-level issues around the
world. Executives can no longer abdicate diversity strategies to the CHRO or chief diversity
officer. A new focus on accountability, data, transparency, and “diversity through process” is
driving efforts around unconscious bias training and education throughout the business
community. Despite these efforts, however, we see a reality gap. Issues around diversity and
inclusion continue to be frustrating and challenging for many organizations.
TREND 10. THE FUTURE OF WORK:
THE AUGMENTED WORKFORCE Robotics, AI, sensors, and cognitive computing have gone
mainstream, along with the open talent economy. Companies can no longer consider their
workforce to be only the employees on their balance sheet, but must include freelancers, “gig
economy” workers, and crowds. These on- and off-balancesheet workers are being augmented
with machines and software. Together, these trends will result in the redesign of almost every
job, as well as a new way of thinking about workforce planning and the nature of work. Change
is already taking place: In this year’s survey, 41 percent of our respondents have either fully
implemented or made significant process in adopting cognitive and AI technologies, and another
35 percent report pilot programs
2020
Trend 1- From careers to experiences:
New pathways in a 21st-century career, the individual and his or her experiences take center
stage. Instead of a steady progression along a job-based pathway, leading organizations are
shifting towards a model that empowers individuals to acquire valuable experiences, explore new
roles and continually reinvent themselves.
Trend 2- Wellbeing:
a strategy and a responsibility As the line between work and life blurs further, employees are
demanding that organizations expand their benefits offerings to include a wide range of

5. programmers for physical, mental, financial, and spiritual health. In response, employers are
investing in wellbeing programmers as both a societal responsibility and a talent Strategy
Trend 3-The hyper-connected workplace:
will productivity reign? New communications tools are rapidly entering the workplace. But as
these tools migrate from personal life to the Workplace organizations must apply their expertise
in team management, goal-setting, and S employee development to ensure that they actually
improve organizational, team, and individual performance and promote the necessary
collaboration to truly become a social enterprise. Like the Outside world, organizations are
becoming hyper-Connected; can they also become hyper-productive?
Trend 4- People data:
how far is too far? The rapid increase in data availability and the advent of powerful people
analytics tools have generated rich opportunities for HR- but they are now also generating a
variety of potential risks. Organizations face a tipping point: develop a set of well-defined
policies, security safeguards, transparency measures, and ongoing Communication around the
use of people data, or risk employee, customer and societal backlash.
Trend 5-The Symphonic C-suite:
teams leading teams Behaving as a social enterprise and managing the external environment's
macro trends effectively demands an unprecedented level of cross-functional Vision,
connectivity, and Collaboration from Suite leaders. To do this, they must behave as what we call
the 'Symphonic Suite, in which an organization’s top executives play together as a team while
their own functional teams, all in harmony,
Trend 6- Citizenship and social impact:
society holds the mirror an organization’s track record of corporate citizenship and Social impact
now has a direct bearing on its core identity and strategy. Engagement with other stakeholders on
topics such as diversity gender pay equity, income inequality immigration and climate change
can lift financial performance and brand value, while failure to engage can destroy reputation
and alienate key audiences.
Trend 7- New rewards:

6. personalized, agile and holistic Leveraging their power as individuals, employees are asking for
more personalized, agile, and holistic rewards, including a focus on fair and open pay. While
companies recognize this overall shift, only eight per cent report that their rewards programmer
is 'very effective ‘a creating a personalized, flexible solution. Early experiments are exploring
how to develop a holistic variety of rewards and match them to individual preferences, across
diverse talent segments and on a continuous basis
Trend 8-Al, robotics, and automation:
put humans in the loop The influx of Al, robotics, and automation in the workplace has
dramatically accelerated in the last year, transforming in-demand roles and skills inside and
outside organizations. Perhaps surprisingly, those roles and skills focus on the 'uniquely human'
rather than the purely technical. To be able to maximize the potential value of these technologies
today and minimize the potential adverse impacts on the Workforce tomorrow, organizations
must put humans in the loop- reconstructing work, retraining people and rearranging the
organization. The greatest opportunity is not just to redesign jobs or automate routine work, but
to fundamentally rethink 'work architecture' to benefit organizations, teams and individuals.
Trend 9- The longevity dividend:
work in an era of 100-year lives Forward-looking organizations see extended longevity and
population aging as an opportunity. 20 per cent of this year's survey respondents said that they
are partnering with older workers to develop new career models. This longevity dividend enables
companies both to address a pressing societal issue and to tap into a proven, Committed, and
diverse set of workers. However, doing this requires innovative practices and policies to support
extended careers, as well as Collaboration between business leaders and workers, to tackle
shared challenges Such as age bias and pension shortfalls.
Trend 10-The workforce ecosystem:
managing beyond the enterprise Business leaders and Chief Human Resource Officers (CHROS)
recognize the need to actively and strategically manage relationships with workforce segments
beyond the enterprise, which increasingly affect how an organization delivers services and
interacts with customers. Organizations are finding ways to align their Culture and management
practices with these external talent segments engaging the workforce ecosystem for mutual
benefit.
2019
Trend 1 - he alternative workforce:

7. It’s now mainstream. For years, many considered contract, freelance, and gig employment to be
“alternative work,” options supplementary to full-time jobs. Today, this segment of the
workforce has grown and gone mainstream even as talent markets have tightened, leading
organizations to look strategically at all types of work arrangements in their plans for growth.
Best practices to access and deploy alternative workers are just now being invented. If the
economy continues to grow, organizations must be more flexible in adapting to these new work
arrangements, and plan to use them in a strategic way.
Trend 2- From jobs to superjobs.
A vast majority of organizations told us they expect to increase or significantly increase their use
of AI, cognitive technologies, robotic process automation, and robotics over the next three years.
As organizations adopt these technologies, they’re finding that virtually every job must change,
and that the jobs of the future are more digital, more multidisciplinary, and more data- and
information-driven. Paradoxically, to be able to take full advantage of technology, organizations
must redesign jobs to focus on finding the human dimension of work. This will create new roles
that we call “superjobs”: jobs that combine parts of different traditional jobs into integrated roles
that leverage the significant productivity and efficiency gains that can arise when people work
with technology.
Trend 3- Leadership for the 21st century:
The intersection of the traditional and the new. Developing leaders is the perennial issue of our
time. Eighty percent of survey respondents told us that leadership was an important or very
important issue, and 80 percent of respondents said that “21stcentury leaders” face unique and
new requirements. To be effective in the 21st century, leaders must take a nuanced approach to
pursuing traditional business
Trend 4- From employee experience to human experience:
Putting meaning back into work. One of the biggest challenges we identified this year is the need
to improve what is often called the “employee experience”: Eighty-four percent of our survey
respondents rated this issue important, and 28 percent rated it urgent. But the concept of
employee experience falls short in that it fails to capture the need for meaning in work that
people are looking for. We see an opportunity for employers to refresh and expand the concept
of “employee experience” to address the “human experience” at work—building on an
understanding of worker aspirations to connect work back to the impact it has on not only the
organization, but society as a whole

8. Trend 5- Organizational performance:
It’s a team sport. The shift from hierarchies to teams is well underway. Thirty-one percent of
survey respondents told us they now operate mostly or almost wholly in teams, with another 65
percent saying they are mostly hierarchical but with some cross-functional team-based work. Yet
most organizations have not yet refreshed leadership, job design, and rewards to adapt. Our
research shows that many leaders do not know how to operate in teams and have not yet adopted
the team model of engaging with each other. Deeper in the enterprise, many organizations are
still struggling to build programs and incentives that support teaming as well. In 2019,
technology is making team models of work easier: Organizations must now refresh the rest of
our talent practices to keep up.
Trend 6- Rewards:
Closing the gap. Organizations are exploring a dizzying array of perks and rewards to motivate
their people. But they are not keeping up: In our 2019 survey, only 11 percent of respondents
told us their rewards systems were highly aligned with their organizational goals, and 23 percent
reported that they did not know what rewards their workers value. How can organizations
develop motivate people to take advantage of learning opportunities, and a focus on helping
individuals identify and develop new, needed skills.
Trend 7- Accessing talent:
It’s more than acquisition. In this 11th year of the economic recovery, recruiting has become
harder than ever. As the job market remains competitive and organizations’ skills requirements
undergo rapid change, it’s time for organizations to think about how they can continuously
“access talent” in varying ways: mobilizing internal resources, finding people in the alternative
workforce, and strategically leveraging technology to augment sourcing and boost recruiting
productivity.
Trend 8- productivity.
Learning in the flow of life. The number-one trend for 2019 is the need for organizations to
change the way people learn; 86 percent of respondents cited this as an important or very
important issue. It’s not hard to understand why. Evolving work demands and skills requirements
are creating an enormous demand for new skills and capabilities, while a tight labor market is
making it challenging for organizations to hire people from outside. Within this context, we see
three broader trends in how learning is evolving: It is becoming more integrated with work; it is
becoming more personal; and it is shifting—slowly—toward lifelong models.
Trend 9- Talent mobility:

9. Winning the war on the home front. As organizations globalize and compete aggressively for top
talent, the importance of internal, enterprise wide talent mobility has become paramount.
Organizations can no longer expect to source and hire enough people with all the capabilities
they need; they must move and develop people internally to be able to thrive. A new set of norms
governing internal mobility is needed to do this well. At leading organizations, mobility should
be perceived as a natural, normal progression instead of as a major change in one’s career;
opportunities to move should be extended to workers at all levels, not just managers and team
leaders; and technology should enable a streamlined mobility process for moves between
functions, jobs, and projects as well as geographies.
Trend 10- Talent mobility:
Winning the war on the home front. As organizations globalize and compete aggressively for top
talent, the importance of internal, enterprise wide talent mobility has become paramount.
Organizations can no longer expect to source and hire enough people with all the capabilities
they need; they must move and develop people internally to be able to thrive. A new set of norms
governing internal mobility is needed to do this well. At leading organizations, mobility should
be perceived as a natural, normal progression instead of as a major change in one’s career;
opportunities to move should be extended to workers at all levels, not just managers and team
leaders; and technology should enable a streamlined mobility process for moves between
functions, jobs, and projects as well as geographies.
2020
Trend 1-Designing work for well-being: The end ofwork/life balance
The Trend: Organizations are taking well-being beyond work/life balance by starting to design
well-being into work—and life—itself.
Surviving: Supporting well-being through programs adjacent to work.
Thriving: Integrating well-being into work through thoughtful work design.
Trend 2- Beyond reskilling: Unleashing worker potential
The Trend: Organizations need a workforce development approach that considers both the
dynamic nature of work and the equally dynamic potential of workers to reinvent themselves.

10. Surviving: Pushing training to workers from the top down, assuming the organization knows best
what skills workers need.
Thriving:Empoweringworkerswith agencyandchoice overwhatworktheydo,unleashingtheir
potential byallowingthemtoapplytheirinterestsandpassionstoorganizational needs.
Trend 3- Super teams: Where work happens
The Trend: COVID-19 has taught organizations that teams are even more important to thriving amid
constant disruption than they might have thought before.
Surviving: Using technology as a tool to make teams more efficient.
Thriving: Integrating humans and technology into super teams that use their complementary capabilities
to re-architect work in more human ways.
Trend 4- Governing workforce strategies: Setting new directions for work and the
workforce
The Trend: Organizations are looking for forward-facing insights about their workforce that can
help them quickly pivot and set new directions in the face of uncertainty.
Surviving: Using metrics and measurements that describe the workforce’s current state.
Thriving: Accessing and acting on real-time workforce insights that can support better, faster
decisions based on an understanding of what the workforce is capable of in the future.
Trend 5- A memo to HR: Accelerating the shift to re-architecting work
The Trend: Thanks to their handling of COVID-19’s challenges, HR organizations have earned
the right to expand HR’s remit to re-architecting work throughout the enterprise.
Surviving: Having a functional mindset that focuses on optimizing and redesigning HR processes
to manage the workforce.
Thriving: Embracing an enterprise mindset that prioritizes re-architecting work to capitalize on
unique human strengths.