Predicting the future has never been easy. Great entrepreneurs and researchers have often mistaken in their estimates, even if they subsequently made extraordinary strides. Take Bill Gates, who declared in 1981 - ‘No one will ever need more than 637KB of memory on a personal computer’. Or Thomas Watson, Founder of IBM, declaring in 1943 - 'I think that there is a worldwide market for maybe five computers'.

Although it is difficult to predict the future, it is still essential to identify and understand the basic social, economic and technological tendencies or 'mega-trends' that will affect businesses in the next few years, in order to anticipate and prepare for the ensuing transformations that will need to take place. To funnel down, here are some of the key HR challenges & trends that one can expect in 2018.

Link Personal Goals to Professional Goals – Turning Theory into Reality!
Personal success is the underlying motivation that generates differential contribution. The key role of HR will be helping people realize and understand how their personal goals can be milestones of the organization’s success chart. While most organizations talk about their mission, vision and values, there isn’t much emphasis on how this links with people’s vision and values. While communicating the mission and vision does attract the relevant talent (for ex: most innovative minds do look up to Google as their ‘Go-To’ company, however, helping the existing people understand the intersection of personal goals with organizational goals will be a key factor. A measured and practical roadmap is going to be a key element to create buy-in from the top talent.

Different Strokes for Different Folks – Customization is the Key
Considering that a 'one size fits all' approach is no longer viable; the challenge of tomorrow’s HR will be to meet the needs of many different employee segments in a more tailored fashion. HR must thus understand their specific expectations and motivation drivers, particularly those of the arriving Millennials and the future talent.

Tailoring of the HR policies will increasingly be required, parallelly ensuring that these customizations that are made keeping in mind different talent pools don’t come across as differential treatment. HR must also develop multiple approaches (based on strong communication and logic) to treat certain segments collectively and others with relevant customized offerings. Employees, to satisfy their respective aspirations and needs, based on their profile

and lifecycle stage, must be allowed to build a personalized ‘HR proposition’ (balance of compensation, vacation time, and other aspects from an adapted menu of choices proposed by HR.

HR will be responsible for defining and building the backbone of the transformative & systemic leadership model, thus identifying new leaders of the organization

Use Data & Analytics for Quantifiable/Tangible Impact
Data analysis will increasingly become an important tool for HR to tailor these offerings. HR will be able to use 'Big Data' to understand employees better by measuring and assessing the impact of HR initiatives on employee satisfaction, performance and retention.

Innovative Capability Building
To facilitate employee personal development, HR must invent new paths that are very different from traditional career paths even if they worked in the past. The cornerstone of the traditional career path used to be employment, but tomorrow it will be capability and leaning agility, as this is the best guarantee of future employability that raises several challenges for Human Resources:

1. Gain a Real-time Understanding of Individual Capabilities: technical, managerial, behavioral, etc.-regardless of whether these capabilities were acquired inside or outside the company, before arriving in the organization or while participating in hobbies for example. Establishing a Big Data bank of capabilities is a massive project for HR.

2. Establish Internal & External Capability Pools: Establishing capability pools across different divisions and countries within the same company is a huge job. Experience says, the key is to establish these pools step by step, focusing first on scarce expertise, which will be increasingly in demand in the coming years (developers, security and cloud experts, etc.). The other big job is to widen these pools with external expertise, by including freelancers, partners, service providers, consultants, etc. whose capabilities and availability must also be kept up to date.

3. Look Beyond Vertical Career Growth Path: Lateral mobility across divisions, communities and countries is of course nothing new, greater mobility is nonetheless essential to the smooth flow of capabilities and best practices, as well as to all-important employability development. In other words, mobility is the best guarantee of never being unemployed. The challenge for HR is hence to explore new forms of mobility with company partners and start-ups, while offering people the chance to come back to the company after wards.

Develop the Managerial Leadership Model
The goal is not only to define a behavioral leadership model which adequately reflects the company strategy, but also build a breed of promising managers that can take up the leadership roles in the coming year. What has changed is the scope and importance of these new leadership models. The new leadership models are transformative, because they serve as a benchmark for the managerial posture required to rethink business models, get people engaged in transformation and provide them with day-to-day support in dealing with the profound changes to their profession, know-how and capabilities. They are systemic, because their vocation is to provide overall direction in line with managerial initiatives. HR will be responsible for defining and building the backbone of this transformative and systemic leadership model and thus identifying new leaders of the organization.

In gist, these are some of the points that appear essential to reinforce the value created by HR. Otherwise, the HR function effectively runs the risk of losing its legitimacy for professional managers who possess the digital tools required to manage individual HR dimensions on their own, and if this happens, HR may disappear altogether as a distinct function.