The workplace is resetting and that's boosting the role of HR. SHRM's Johnny C. Taylor explains what comes next

In the spring of 2020, as companies worldwide were struggling with how to manage their workforces in the fog of COVID, a CEO had a frank conversation with Johnny C. Taylor, Jr., the head of the Society for Human Resource Management, the HR industry’s largest trade group.?

“I’m almost embarrassed to say this, but I now understand [HR],” Johnny said the CEO told him. “I have spent more time in the last eight weeks in really important strategic conversations with my HR team than I had in the prior eight years.” The CEO said that while he had always preached that his employees were the most important asset —?and therefore HR was important —?it had really been lip service.

The pandemic reset him.

Now, Johnny is on a mission to make sure everyone gets that reset — not just executives, but HR professionals, employees and policy makers. He has a new book titled, appropriately enough, Reset, in which he provides a guide to the new contract between employees and employers and explains why HR needs to lead the way.?(Or at least, innovative HR; he’s pretty critical of HR practitioners who just focus on relationships and make decisions by anecdote.)

For the latest This is Working, we talked about his findings, including why the pandemic is making skill-building even more essential and what the limits are of employee activism.?You can watch a recording here or listen to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.

Johnny brings more than just an HR pro’s perspective to this shift. He’s changed industries and roles enough to know how different companies and leaders respond to challenges and the language that he says ties them all together. A journalism grad turned corporate lawyer, Johnny worked his way to senior HR jobs at behemoths like Blockbuster, Paramount, and IAC before becoming the CEO of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund. In 2017, he joined SHRM (pronounced, “sherm”) as CEO, overseeing an industry group responsible for 300,000+ members.

When we talked, he’d just returned from pulling off SHRM’s annual event: Some 8,000 HR pros gathered in conference rooms — that’s right, in person — at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Another 4,000 tuned in virtually. I couldn’t totally wrap my head around that many people inside together. Johnny explained that they’d mandated vaccines and masks and just playing it safe. He was clearly thrilled to have seen so many people together and was eager to keep finding the new boundaries of how we work —?rather that just assuming how we’d done things the last 20 years, let alone the last two, was the right path.

Here’s our conversation, lightly edited for clarity:

Your book talks about this being a reset moment for industries, but also really for the HR role.

For the last two or three decades, there was this struggle of whether or not HR was really a strategic value partner and whether or not anyone could do it. Because of course we've all hired and fired people so, [people felt], “I can do HR as well as anyone.”

No, anyone can't do HR. There’s actually science, art and legal implications to our practice.

I think biz leaders have to be honest. We said people were our most important asset, but our actions suggested that it's all about finance, about shareholder returns. It was about everything but people.

What the pandemic helped us all do is really appreciate that this business does not work if you don't have the right people with the right cultural alignment and the right skill. Your business will fail. So it was really an opportunity for us all to say, "Yeah, people, human beings matter, and therefore, HR matters."

One of the big struggles these companies are trying to figure out is how to deal with hybrid or remote work. Your data here illustrates the problem: In one survey, you found that 52% of employees wanted permanent remote work (and more than a third of them would take a pay cut to get it). Yet over 70% of managers dealing with remote workers wanted those workers back in the office.

We now have to listen to the voice of our consumer and those consumers are employees. That’s a way to think about it. What would you do [as a consumer], if you told a hotel chain or an airline or any consumer-packaged-goods company, “This is what I want,” and they didn’t listen? You’d stop buying the product. And that is what has led to the “great resignation.”?

Employees are saying, “Listen to me. I want you as an employer to understand what matters to me.” Everyone [read this survey] as “Gosh, everyone wants to work remotely.” That's not accurate. What employees told us, if you really dug down into it, is that they want flexibility.

Human beings like being around human beings. People do want to come to the office, provided they can be safe. What they're saying is, "I just want some flexibility. And do I need to be in the office five days a week? No. Maybe it's three. Maybe it's four.” Who knows what the mix is. But that's what we have to respond to, or we're going to lose our internal customers — our employees — and they're going to go work elsewhere.

Ok, so for managers who are listening to their internal customers, how should they respond?

People don't typically leave companies. They leave their people manager. What we have do as HR professionals and other business leaders is to equip these people managers with the skills to operate in a very, very different.

There's no question managers would say their preference is to have people in place. There's value to that. We understand that lot really interesting things happen the workplace: People get together and they build relationships and they ideate and they innovate. So there's a lot said coming to coming to work.

We’ve got to help our people managers understand [though], that that was the 20th century. The 21st century demands … knowing how to manage a remote workplace.

?Many of these managers are not saying, “I'm unwilling to do it.” They're saying, “I don't how to do it. I don't how know how to know if person is being productive because they’re not sitting in the office.” We're making the case to them, "Well, a lot of these folks who were sitting in the office, they weren't being productive anyway.” So you can be as productive remotely, you can build a culture of people who are working remotely. It's just different.

I can tell you right here at SHRM, a lot of my managers felt the same way. Hell, I'm one of them. Let me be transparent. I've always said, "My assistant, my executive assistant, needed to be there." If you told me that you can hire someone to service an executive remotely, I'd say, "No way." Well, I was wrong.

And the pandemic showed me that my assistant can be as effective as she was in the office or working remotely a couple of days. It works. We've got to showcase for managers how it works, and we've got to challenge them to rethink, reset their ideas about how work gets done.

This seems to tie into some of your push to have HR pros focused on the skills gap.

If you haven't followed the demographics, Americans really stopped having children in meaningful numbers two decades ago. The year 2000, we began to see a slide, and it has continued. Last year during the pandemic, Americans had 4% fewer children. So not only do we have, in absolute terms, fewer people, but the demands of a technology-driven, knowledge-driven economy says that we also have a skills gap.

We're saying is, "We're going to build into organizations this cultural mandate that you constantly learn." That your education is not just your education, it's our education. We as an employer will benefit from your skills improving. So we are investing, not just giving this to an employee as a perk or as an accommodation for someone who's failing.

That's a real paradigm shift for HR people. And I think it's not going to go away.?

So you're saying, "Yeah, right now you have ultra low unemployment, and we haven't been able to get people back into the workplace. But Johnny, this too shall pass." Well, because of the demographic numbers that I shared earlier, it's not going to go away anytime sooner.?

Let me add even a finer point to this. As a result of the pandemic, many of our students missed two years of formal education. So think about what this feels like five, seven years from now when these kids who were in middle school who missed two years of math, missed two years of English. The skills gap that we have now is only going to get worse. So that means it's incumbent upon employers to build within their organizations the capacity to build up the skills of the people who are coming in, because you get the workforce that you get.

In Reset, you take a pretty nuanced view of the increasing amount of employee activism: Walkouts, demands, petitions. You said that embracing it can actually be good for business. But also: you don’t have to listen to all of it.

Listening to your customer is incredibly important, but you can't respond to them all. And this is why we always end up —?when you talk about employee activism or just listen to your employees —?you end up with [your] culture.?

An employee says, "I want X from my employer." If the employer is honest about who they are —?we talk about transparency, it is incredibly important to be transparent —?and say, “This is our employer brand. This is our culture… This is how things work around here, how things get done, what we believe in, our purpose. This is what we do here. And it could be, Mr. Star Technical Employee, that this is not the right place for you because you're just not culturally aligned.”?

I have always said —?and most recently began amplifying the message of — when you're hiring people, you want someone who is technically competent... but you also want someone who's culturally aligned. So in the process of employee activism, as people have begun to talk about, I want to hear from the employees. But sometimes what you hear from someone gives you a confirmation that maybe they're not right for your culture. And that's okay to say to people. And what I've said to employees is, "Listen, I want you to be happy. You owe it to yourself, if you're going to spend 40 hours or more a week with us, then you need to do it in an organization that is aligned with you. So I'm going to hear you, and where what you say makes sense for us to consider and make changes around, we're going to do it. Management doesn't know it all. But there is a point at which you have to decide: Is this a relationship you want to be in."?

You know, you think about our work family, our work wives. But it really is important to understand that companies can't be everything to everyone. And it's really frustrating when someone comes into us and says, "Well, they're doing this at Google." And you kind of want to say under your breath, "Well, go work there if that's what works for you." You're not being glib. You're not being disrespectful and dismissive. What you're saying is, "We have a unique culture. We're going to live that culture. Our guiding principles are going to be lived, and hopefully you are aligned with them. If not, then this doesn't work for you, and you owe it to yourself to find a place where you can really contribute and feel like you belong."

We’ve talked a lot about how the pandemic has given HR a seat at the table. But what’s your advice for HR pros in companies where that hasn’t been the case?

Like any other profession, I always fought back with data. You know, it's one thing to go in and say, "I'm the HR person. Trust me. This is my worldview of what I'm hearing,” and you talk about anecdotal stories. There's nothing worse — and I can tell you as a CEO —?when someone comes in and says, "Well, I heard from an employee X." And you're like, "Well, is that just that employee's opinion? Is that part of a trend? Is this..." That doesn't mean anything to me. Gather data — surveys, employee pulse surveys, annual surveys and satisfaction and all of that —?[and] go back to your organization and say, "Here, Mr. or Ms. CEO. I'm not telling you this just because this is what I feel. This is what the data is telling us.”?

When I was a CHRO at Fortune 500 company, I worked for a guy who you couldn't come in and tell him what you thought. You had to have data to support your position. And that is the No. 1 thing that HR practitioners better adopt, because every other part of the business relies on data.

You're talking about Barry Diller, aren't you?

Yes, Barry Diller. That's right. [laughs]

He's like, "I don't care what you think." Right? [laughs] I can see him saying that.

By the way, I learned a lot from him. You had to understand and look at things through the lens of the business person. (Now, I will make the case to you that HR people are business people, too. That's why, between us, I kind of don't like the term HR business partner, because it sounds like you're a partner to the business —?as if it's something else. Semantics you may call it, but it's a mindset.)

So, sitting in those meetings, I really began to understand how the rest of my business colleagues were thinking. And therefore, I changed my language. I changed my approach. Even my ability to persuade them was influenced by getting outside of my traditional HR mindset and just listening. They're trying to win. That's all. At the end of the day, they want to win. And they know that it takes employees to win the game, so you've got to help them be on this journey with them so that you are seen as a true part of the business, and not just somehow a partner to the business.

That’s part of the reinvention idea.

If you had said two years ago, "Johnny, we're going to hire, fire, educate, and develop all of our employees remotely," all of us would say, "That can't happen." And especially, I want to focus on firing. The idea was, well, you’ve got to bring the person in. Well, when I was a practicing labor employment lawyer, I always said, "Hmmm. How much sense does it make to bring someone into an environment where they could become hostile and this could become explosive?"

We have to be more thoughtful. What we've done is turned it all on a dime. You can actually terminate someone's employment with dignity and respect remotely. What has happened is we now know we can do it.

You can hire someone, you can recruit them, you can onboard them remotely. Now, is it perfect? No.?

But what we've learned in this reset moment the last 18 months is everything that we thought, every notion that we had of, “This is the way things should — should — occur in the workspace,” has now been challenged.?

And if you're not willing to challenge everything that you think or thought two years ago, then you're likely failing at your job.