Another year has passed for HR. If it felt like time flew by, perhaps that’s because HR professionals were busy, caught between the tail end of the Great Resignation and the belt tightening that marked 2022’s waning days — not to mention chatter about a potential recession.

That doesn’t even take into account the changing nature of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has more or less defined HR’s objectives for the past two years. HR leaders are still sorting out the pandemic’s long-term impact on how people work, not the least of which is how their organizations will approach flexibility and the role of remote work and hybrid work.

The same conversations dominating HR’s attention in 2022 largely overlapped with that of CEOs, CFOs and other C-suite executives. The pandemic may have demonstrated just how central people issues are to core business processes and goals. Now that HR has the attention of leadership, it will be up to the profession to highlight its role in responding to the challenges of 2023.

The following are five HR trends that may dominate this year.

#1: Positioning HR as a partner for leadership

At its core, HR has to partner with leaders to maintain influence on the direction of an organization, said Rebecca Kehoe, associate professor of HR studies at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. “This is a two-way street,” Kehoe noted, but that doesn’t absolve HR from getting outside of its comfort zone to understand the needs of the business.

In her work teaching for Cornell ILR’s master’s program, Kehoe said such conversations have taken center stage: “Increasingly, we’re doing a good job of training them to understand the needs of the business and that those needs need to be at the center of our policies and decisions.”

It’s much the same for executives who are veterans of the field. Reggie Willis, chief diversity officer at Ally Financial, told HR Dive in an interview that interacting with management and leadership has been a core component of his work during the past few years.

“For many HR leaders it’s, ‘How do you provide that guidance?,’” Willis said. “That’s the million dollar question.”

Part of that work is communicating organizational priorities to workers, too. That work has always been important, but it’s especially top of mind after a year in which workers across multiple industries made their voices heard. Public discourse around wage increases, leave benefits, flexibility and other issues soared in 2022, and Kehoe said she expects many of these trends to continue.

“At a certain point, each organization is going to have to land on how they’re going to address each of those trends,” she added. “From an HR perspective, there’s a really clear need to be more proactive in establishing the stance and the role of HR within the organization around different issues.”

#2: Flexibility: An opportunity for HR to prove itself

Transparency became a central theme of 2022’s final months, with employees and regulators alike demanding it from organizations. Internal pressure is also building. An October 2022 Conference Board report found that investors are looking to company boards to form clear human capital management strategies and connect those strategies to business and financial outcomes.

Flexible work is just one opportunity for HR to engage with leadership and show transparency in 2023. In the early stages of office reopening conversations, Kehoe said she was surprised to hear that many organizations pushed return-to-office decisions onto managers, letting them decide which arrangements worked best for their teams.

Some may still take this approach, but “what HR found in many cases was that managers themselves were uncomfortable having to navigate that flexibility within their teams, and they didn’t want to have the burden of that decision landing on them,” Kehoe said.

Instead, HR can step into a more supportive role, providing policy information, guidance and support for managers who may not know how to navigate flexibility. Willis said that Ally’s HR department has done this work in part by educating leaders on authentic, purpose-driven leadership strategies.

“It’s really about having that adaptiveness,” Willis said. “For some people, coming into the workplace is an outlet and a needed opportunity for collaboration and for heads-down working.” But an organization’s core values, he noted, must extend to wherever an employee is working.

Regardless of where an organization lands on whether it will permit employees to work from home permanently, some of the time, or none of the time, it must take a clear stand — and HR can be a key player in forming that stance, said Mike Lamm, VP of people, America at technology company Monday.com.

According to Lamm, collaboration has weighed heavily on the minds of HR staff at Monday.com throughout the past few years. The company shifted to fully remote work and only recently began to open new brick-and-mortar hubs to bolster its North American operations. Throughout that process, he said, Monday.com had to balance the in-person collaboration and community aspects it views as central to its culture while maintaining the flexibility that served employees.

“With in-office expectations, the overall play is that you have to take a stand on it,” Lamm said. “What has worked really well for us and for other companies is that transparency is what people want to hear.”

The work doesn’t end at setting a policy. HR needs to be there for leaders to help manage through the changes brought on by flexibility and other trends, Willis said. He noted that Ally seeks to help leaders think through what it means to be authentic, act with purpose and express themselves.

Read the full report here