World is full of trends. There are trends for marketing, fashion, leadership, sports, and in this case in human resources. I am very interested about HR management, and it is good to know, what kind of trends go around worldwide regarding the subject right now. Emma Parry has gathered a book about some of the biggest trends in human resource management, and I think it will be useful to me to know them for my upcoming university training, which might be HR related. I think as a trend worldwide, the HR itself has lifted its head during last ten years and become more widely respected a profession. But trends can be inside of a trend, so HR can be splitted.

Biggest trends on which I am going to focus on are embracing remote working from HR more than before, its effects to well being, cross border compliance and globalizing the talent pool in recruiting. I selected these trends from the book, because they all involve one another and interact with global trends like remote working as a whole, globalization and internationalization.

HR embracing people to work remotely is quite interesting to me. Mostly, people think that the key of HR is to get people to interact with each other face to face as much as possible, but after coronavirus, that’s no longer the case. The trend is to embrace employees to work from positions they are the most comfortable in, and if the person is most comfortable working at home, in HR it is necessary to try to keep the employee in their comfort zone at least as much as it is possible. I think this makes sense, and people tend to work better when they can operate within their own comfort zone. With modern technology, even face to face interacting can happen via Zoom or Teams. So HR tries to embrace people to work from their own comfort zone, even when it isn’t at the office.

This embracing to remote working also comes together with cross border compliance and globalizing the talent pool within the company. With a possibility to work remotely, HR can hire people from basically anywhere. It is very good opportunity to recruit people from different cultures and different backgrounds from all around the world, globalizing the company at the same time. Cross border communicating is also easy through teams or Zoom, so I see why this trend is happening. Also regarding the recruitment, the company can also save money when hiring employees from cheaper countries. It might sound morally questionable, but that’s just how it is. It is cheaper to hire a coder from India to work remotely than to hire one in Finland. For human resources management, managing these employees isn’t an issue, as it is a trend now that one HR employee can for example communicate with Indian employees, and another HR employee communicates with America, and so on. The roles are clear, and internationalization is accomplished.

All of these main trends in HR management are logical to me. The attempt to globalize and get people within their comfort zones is logical. For HR analytics department, the data can be gathered as easily from here than from some other country. HR is taking big role in recruitment and employee management, and that role will only grow in the future.