How HR Can Survive the Next Decade

The Human Resources profession has been around since the 18th century but didn't emerge as an individual field until the early 20th century. What began as the personnel department became the human resources (HR) department. Back then, then the function of the personnel department was almost entirely built around collecting and filing new hire paperwork and nothing else. Companies needed these departments to expand their responsibilities to respond to business needs like labor compliance, enforcing rules and regulations and benefits packages. Today, most companies with at least fifty employees have at least one HR professional and those with fewer than fifty outsource to a vendor. HR departments now have a plethora of responsibilities focused on the entire employee experience including diversity and inclusion, compensation, benefits, performance management, organizational development, learning, coaching, hiring, safety and health, policies and procedures. Unlike personnel departments decades ago, HR has always aspired to "get a seat at the table" and be the "strategic partners" to their CEOs, yet has mostly come up short. This can be best summarized in the Fast Company article "Why We Hate HR", where it stays "they have no seat, and the table is locked inside a conference room to which they have no key." There's been this constant friction and frustration in HR circles, where they continue to seek more prominence in their company, yet are unsure how to do it.

HR is often portrayed as the enemy of employees because they are the ones that hire and fire instead of managers. If you don't get the job, or you get laid off, HR is the bearer of bad news. But, it goes even deeper than that. Employees know that HR represents the company's interests over their own. They resist complaining to HR because that may affect their job prospects even at the most innovative and forward-thinking companies. As evidence to this, a study of over 11,000 responses from eighteen of the most prominent technology companies found that up to 80 percent of employees don't trust HR. Yet, as more workplace issues occur related to mental health and burnout, employees are unwilling to seek help from HR because they don't believe the department protects their interests. What organizations will need from HR and what HR currently provides aren't aligned. More and more CEOs are looking for strategic advice, to drive business performance and win the hearts and minds of the best possible talent.

The biggest force that will disrupt HR over the next decade is automation through emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning. Software is the biggest threat to the future of HR that continues to function as administrators instead of strategic advisors. A study I led last year found that 40 percent of HR leaders admit that AI will make their profession obsolete! You heard that right, HR knows that their own jobs could be in jeopardy if they don't evolve along with the rest of the organization. Much of this automation will impact HR administrative tasks. One study found that 58 percent of these roles could be automated compared to fewer than a third of HR manager and director roles. Much like in the accounting and legal sectors, entry-level administrative HR roles won't exist in the future. A separate study by PeopleStrong discovered that about 80 percent of HR help desk, and 50 percent of compliance work, will be impacted by automation. The more senior the HR role, the less likely that role will be automated. McKinsey found that only 15 percent of an HR Manager's responsibilities could be handled by computers because the other 85 percent requires the soft skills required to connect with people. At some point in time, every HR person will have to access, reconfigure and expand their roles, moving away from administrative tasks and towards strategy, communication, and people management.

There are multiple ways that HR professionals can prepare for organizational change, decrease the likelihood that their job will be automated and become the strategic advisor their CEOs are looking for. Here are six strategies that will be core to HR's toolkit to survive and thrive in the next decade.

1. Develop cross-functional alliances. In the future, organizations won't have the silos they have today because the employee and customer experience must be orchestrated by multiple departments in unison. Both customers and employees are already seeking positive experiences that improve their lives and companies have to react by integrating their siloed departments so that they can deliver on their preferences. For HR professionals, this means connecting with those outside of your department in order to build alliances that will continue to become more valuable. The most obvious ones include facilities management (to improve workspaces), IT (to modernize collaboration in-person and virtually), marketing (to promote culture and connectivity) and operations (to make work more efficient). By forming a cross-functional team, HR is seen as more valuable, relevant and a key decision making on business decisions that go far beyond talent management.
2. Lean into your soft skills. In HR circles, I commonly hear the phrase "put the human back into HR" and that will only become truer over the next decade. In fact, everything that's not "human" about HR will be automated so we must double down on our soft skills in order to stay relevant moving forward. In the same study I led last year, HR said that robots are better than them at providing unbiased information, maintaining work schedules, problem-solving and managing a budget, all of which are tasks that require hard skills. On the other hand, HR said that they are better at understanding feelings, coaching and creating a work culture, all of which require soft skills. This research is supported by a study KPMG conducted about automation in the HR function. Out of twenty-one responsibilities analyzed, they found that the ones that are least susceptible to automation are worker performance, HR strategy, organizational effectiveness, change management, and employee relations. HR will become the department most charged with managing the growing mental health and burnout crisis that is plaguing the global workforce. "Therapy at the office" is one of my biggest trends for this year because of the growing demand to support employee health, yet the stigma around talking to HR about these issues persists. Smart HR professionals will get training on how to manage these growing issues because being human is HR's most sustainable option moving forward.
3. Make lateral moves across your organization. In the past five years, I've noticed that more and more heads of HR are coming from the business instead of up through HR. They are getting hired from operations and sales because they can bring a new perspective to the table and turn HR from a cost center to a valuable asset and money maker. Instead of trying to get a promotion to Manager or Director of HR, position yourself for the future by applying to a job in a different department. Since you're already in HR, you have access to what jobs are available and who is hiring for those jobs within your company. Even though in the present you may think this is a bad move because you're "taking a step back", what you're really doing is getting another perspective on how the business works, challenging yourself and positioning yourself for bigger roles.
4. Automate your current role. This might sound very counterintuitive but it's also very strategic. There's no doubt that humans and robots will be working side-by-side in the future and that a portion of our tasks will be left to robots, while we manage the rest. Write down your list of daily responsibilities and then circle the ones that are routine, annoying and provide very little value to your overall job role. Then, assess the technology tools available through your IT department or online and see which can automate the tasks you circled. For instance, if you find yourself spending too much time scheduling meetings every day, get a subscription to AI scheduling software provider x.ai. Automate your role proactively instead of having your role be automated for you. By doing this, you are not only saving yourself time so you can focus on high-value tasks, but you're learning how to use the technology first-hand.
5. Turn HR into a profit-making department. On ABC's Shark Tank, the sharks always say "money cures all" and within an organization, the closer you get to sales, the more protected your position is. That's why HR is the last to get hired and the first to get fired when an organization grows or declines. HR professionals need to show a return on investment for their programs that either save or make their company money. While this might have been unfathomable a decade ago, the use of big data and analytics has enabled and empowered HR to do so now. For instance, I led a study with Career Arc several years ago that linked candidate experience to consumer behavior. We found that 64 percent of job seekers say that a poor candidate experience would make them less likely to purchase goods and services from the employer and 91 percent of HR agrees, yet only 26 percent measure it. While retention numbers, employee satisfaction scores, and performance reviews are valuable, you must take things further in order to make a bigger impact. Both candidates and employees are or could be customers that can be affected by their experience with your company.
6. Be a generalist instead of a specialist. Back when I worked for a big company, the title of "HR generalist" was not respected like it should be today. While you may take pride in being the best at running your organization's payroll, that position might be automated out of existence so it won't matter. Being a specialist in an area where the value of that specialization is declining isn't a great career strategy. If you want to protect your future, be a generalist so that you can be agile and adapt to workforce changes. In David Epstein's book "Range", he examined overachievers from various industries and discovered that while generalists find their path late, they are more creative, agile and are better at making connections. Epstein argues that specialists excel in a repeatable task environment, the kind of environment that will be run by robots over people in the future. This is compared to generalists who excel in random environments where there are rapid changes and more complex problems to solve.

I genuinely believe the future is bright for HR professionals, having been in the industry now for a decade. But, it's also clear that technology will be significantly disrupting the profession and that we have to make changes today as we prepare for what's ahead. No one knows exactly what the next ten years will look like, but the one thing we all have believed throughout our lives is that change is constant and those who resist it are most likely to be affected by it.

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