With the end of the year fast approaching, many business leaders will be wondering what the next year has in store when it comes to their workforce. What staffing challenges do they need to prepare for? How do they need to adapt their employee experience? What trends will most affect them?
When it comes to salary expectations and planning your workforce costs, we’ve got you covered in our 2020 Salary Predictions Guide. Using our expert knowledge and our own data from the past year, we examined where we expect salaries to go for the key areas in which we recruit: sales and marketing, IT and PMO, HR and talent acquisition, accounting and finance, and business support services.
Download 2020 Salary Predictions Guide
But aside from salaries, what else should leaders know about their 2020 workforce? Generationally speaking, millennials are likely to make up the majority of their staff. In fact, EY and Accenture have already reported that millennials make up more than two-thirds of their entire employee base. What does this generation of workers want? They want to work in a company where their hard work is recognised, one that has value and meaning.
These traits tend to go hand in hand with a good company culture, which is something that can’t be faked. It takes time to mould a company culture into a positive employee experience and every company has a culture, whether it’s intentional or not. Having a good company culture is not a new concept, but as we head into 2020, the need for the very best talent is growing for all companies and an engaging and attractive culture has never been more important.
How to fix your company culture
There’s another trend that leaders need to watch out for in 2020 and that is the growth of the contingent workforce. Research from Intuit notes that 25-30% of the workforce is currently involved in ‘contingent work’ and this is expected to exceed 40% by 2020. A 2017 Randstad Sourceright report showed that more than 60% of employers had planned to replace one-third of their permanent staff with contingent workers. And according to KPMG’s 2018 CEO Outlook survey, almost all companies in the US (99%) are using a contingent workforce in some capacity.
While these contingent workers had previously mostly been found in the tech sector, this evolution is now leaking into other sectors. In fact, in 2017, PwC estimated that the finance industry was made up of around 30-40% contingent workers and from our own data, we can see a contract roles coming in from a much broader range of sectors and industries, particularly the finance and accounting sector, which is not surprising given the benefits a finance professional can reap by taking on some contract work.
As the future workforce becomes more contingent than permanent, companies have to safeguard themselves the right way when it comes to their contingent workforce. At the same time, with employer branding becoming more important than ever, companies also need to make sure that they are attractive enough to entice the contingent workforce because they will still be battling it out for top talent, even in the contracting space.
To find out more about how you can prepare for 2020, download our 2020 Salary Predictions Guide here.
Written with contributions from the RECRUITERS team
2020 Photo by Rodney, Gainous on Unsplash
