The Top Three HR Trends in the Life Sciences Industry

Workforces around the world are rapidly transforming in response to the fluctuating economic, social, demographic, technical, and global human health challenges. These factors are all influencing how we work, interact, and communicate. The ideal future workforce, especially in the Life Sciences, will need to be diverse, technologically driven, geographically distributed, and comprise a wide range of ages, skills, attitudes, and goals.

The sector is being faced with its own singular set of business issues. As new digitally driven competitors upset the status quo with creative business models and diverse methods of working, digitalization is altering a historically conservative industry. As a result of the disruption, there is more competition for both talent and customers. At the same time, the regulatory landscape is always shifting, making it critical to be able to track employee training, certifications, and compliance.

Life sciences organizations, like all employers, experience personnel and skills shortages in crucial areas, and attracting and preserving top talent remains a fundamental priority for HR. The advent of new technology and software will further increase the pace of change, putting even more pressure on managers to keep up with the changing workforce. What are the current problems that HR professionals in your industry face, and how can they effectively respond?

1. Building The Workforce Of The Future

It’s a two-step process for an organisation to prepare for the future workforce. You will first need to establish the most critical changes required, and then fully prepare for them. Second, you must ensure that you have the necessary data and systems in place to respond rapidly and efficiently to both the expected and the unforeseen developments in your industry. We’ve discovered three distinct changes that are trending, and are already taking place. These trends will likely become more visible in the future:

Diversity

Increased worker diversity can boost creativity, efficiency, and productivity. Businesses should accept and support change, but they must also incorporate this new variety into the unified company culture.

Transient Workers

Freelancers, contractors, and other temporary employees make up a sizable and growing portion of the workforce today, these workers represent part-time, contingent and full-time staff. Attitudes about permanent employment are shifting, particularly among the younger generation, and these new methods are putting traditional employer-worker relationships under strain. Businesses must have the technology and procedures in place to give the same employee experience to all employees, regardless of where they work or what hours they choose to work, in order to efficiently manage the complete workforce.

Competitive Benefits

Benefit packages are growing more dynamic and impressive as the competition for skilled talent increases, and employee expectations shift—it’s not all about salary anymore. Employers are rethinking their benefits packages as a result of potential candidates voicing shifting attitudes towards work/life balance, career progression and company values. Comparatively unusual new benefits, such as “pawternity leave,” which allows employees to take time off to train a new puppy, are becoming increasingly popular. Organisations must not only equal these advantages, but also develop their own unique packages in order to stand out. Those unique benefits should lead from what the current staff need, checking in with your staff can help lead you down avenues you weren’t aware were desirable. Flexible working hours, locations and job shares, increased social gatherings, or different childcare options are all quite common now

2. Continuous and Personalised Learning

Thanks to AI and machine learning’s capacity to assess a learner’s needs and provide individualised learning content, personalised learning is more crucial and required than ever before. More Life Sciences companies are providing numerous career pathways for their employees and investing in individualised learning and development, which is critical in attracting and maintaining talent in this highly competitive field. Continuous professional learning, which outpaces one-time training, can be aided by the correct HR solution.

Employees at all levels of the organisation will need to reskill and upskill their power skills in order to manage and operate in teams in a rapidly changing workplace environment. Nearly all of their personnel will need to alter skills and capabilities in the next three years, according to 39 percent of surveyed Life Sciences companies.

3. Delivering a Consumer Style Experience

Every employee is also a consumer, and regardless of the situation, they demand the same straightforward, engaging, and personalised digital experience. HR professionals are seeing how these same ideas apply to the business-employee relationship, and they’re searching for new and exciting ways to give employees more freedom and access to self-service tools that they can use across devices with intuitive, easy-to-use interfaces. Personalisation is crucial to offering a wonderful employee experience in the workplace, just as it is in online purchasing – from basic personalised welcome messages on employee dashboards to tailored training and career development possibilities. This new experience is intended to be more engaging and useful. You’ll need the correct technologies to deliver an interesting and productive consumer-style employee experience. A streamlined experience requires an HR solution that can deliver flexible, self-service employee portals as well as AI-driven personalization.