As we wrap up 2024, now is a good time to reflect and take stock of the employment landscape that lies ahead to ensure you are prepared to protect your business in 2025.
With the Employment Rights Bill, and the soon to be published Equality (Race and Disability) Bill, we are expecting 28 different reforms to worker rights and protections, many of which are significant, and collectively will bring the most significant developments in employment law that we will have seen in decades.
We are also expecting other Bills to be introduced, which, although are more broader in scope, will have an impact on employment, such as the Digital Information & Smart Data Bill and the Children’s Wellbeing Bill.
With significant developments on the horizon now is the time to consider how your HR must evolve in order to be ready to protect your business in 2025 and beyond. Here are our 5 key actions:
- Strategic HR planning: Develop a clearly defined people plan to ensure you have the right structure, resource and skills in place to support in the delivery of your organisation’s goals and objectives. It is vital that this aligns with your organisation’s business plan (and vice versa) so that the organisation is putting itself in the best possible position to deliver and achieves its goals through its people.
- Compliance: There has never been a more important time to stay up to date with employment legislation than now. HR professionals must stay up to date with these new Bills, the laws that develop from them, and how best practices may evolve as a result. This is the heart of any business and HR team, because compliance to new legislation protects the business from legal claims.
- Upskilling and reskilling: With new legislation comes training needs. Not just for managers and employees, but for your HR team. The planned reforms impact the entire employment lifecycle and will touch on areas that are infrequently dealt with – trade unions, redundancy consultation, probation periods. So it is going to be vital that you train your HR team too, since they will be advising the business on how to remain compliant and therefore protect the business from legal claims.
- AI integration: It is expected that the new Bill around data, will incorporate rules and standards for how AI is used. We have seen an increase in the use of AI over the last couple of years, and it is only going to become more apparent. HR need to embrace this technology if the organisation is going to stay ahead of its competitors.
- Data driven HR: Data analytics is rapidly evolving from a ‘nice-to-have’ feature to a ‘must-have’ capability within HR. The potential to uncover actionable insights and make data-driven decisions can offer an unparalleled competitive advantage. By being proficient in data analysis tools and platforms , HR practitioners can gain insights needed to make informed decisions that will go on to influence and shape the people and business strategy and have the ability to measure the value of any decision made.
Our next webinar, ‘2025 – The HR year ahead’ is taking place on Thursday 12 December 2024 at 10am. Please join our free event, where we will expand on this important topic further as well as provide more detail about the legislative changes ahead. You can register for our webinar here.
You can also read our recently published white paper “Strategic HR thinking for 2024: Aligning People and Business Strategy”, in which we delve into the latest HR trends and best practice that should be the key focus for every SME business owner and HR practitioner and accompany our top 5 tips covered in this article.
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