AI is reinventing HR roles

Let's be honest. The human resources department has never been the cool kid in the workplace. Behind their back many people used to call this function "human remains." In fact, the working assumption for years has been that HR is more often on the side of the top brass and too bossy itself. A Harvard Business Review article once put it like this: "We don't like being told how to behave — and no other group in organizational life, not even finance, bosses us around as systematically as HR does."

Distrust of HR reached a zenith pre-pandemic when an admission in a regulatory filing from Uber ahead of its public offering noted within the summary of risk factors: "Our workplace culture and forward-leaning approach created operational, compliance, and cultural challenges." This was a reference to sexism which the HR department sat on and ignored until engineer Susan Fowler blew the whistle. The situation led, ultimately, to the resignation of founder Travis Kalanick.

But HR is changing. Far from being an enabler of whatever the C-suite wants, it's now moving big time into strategy, data and talent acquisition using generative AI. The HR thought leader Josh Bersin, head of human capital advisory firm The Josh Bersin Company told me: "Despite HR's history as a compliance and administrative function, today's professionals play a business-critical role in reskilling, leadership development and job transformation. As the job market remains highly competitive (and getting tougher), they are responsible for employee retention, engagement and productivity. It's a vital role and a huge step up in responsibility for the profession."

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This chimes with data from LinkedIn's Future of Recruiting 2023 report which shows that 87% of recruiting  professionals globally say talent acquisition has become more strategic in the last year, while in France, Germany and the UK, the second fastest growing c-suite role was that of chief people officer. Brett Baumoel, vice president of global talent acquisition —  engineering at Microsoft is quoted in the report saying "you used to be able to say 'these hires helped our company'. Now you can say 'I changed the makeup of our company, I changed where we work."

HR has always been a bellwether for the challenges faced by an industry and its executives. It was Henry Ford in the 1920s who made use of Frederick Winslow Taylor's so-called scientific principles of management, to improve worker productivity. Although his work was ostensibly focused on assembly line efficiencies in the 1920s, it's not coincidental that by 1926 the Ford factory introduced the five-day work week which acknowledged the "human" aspect of workers and their need for rest and leisure. The emergence of contemporary human relations management is the direct descendent of the awareness that scaled corporate activity needs humans who must feel like more than cogs in the machine where they work.

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The receding waters of COVID-19 have left a tidemark of issues which challenge everything to do with the productivity, placement, recruitment and retention of people. The person with the word "human" or "people" in their job title is going to be very visible and indispensable if they can deliver for all sides.

Right now HR is the department which picks up the pieces for the fluid nature of return-to-office policies. Leaders have oscillated considerably around this causing consternation with Google the latest to be caught up in the chaos. And it's the department which handles an increasingly complex issue called "talent mobility" in HR speak.

Until 2020, the aspect of HR which handled movement of people was relatively niche and focused on relocation and virtual assignments driven by globalization. Today it warrants reports of its own, such as the EY 2023 Mobility Reimagined Survey which argues that workforce mobility programs are of "powerful strategic and operational importance in the global race for talent."

For many who love to hate HR, the annoying box-ticking character of Toby Flenderson on the popular television satire The Office provided endless entertainment and reinforces our bias against HR. 

But we all need to look at our bias and we need to look beyond the stereotype. Organizations need brokers who can parlay between different teams and they need strategists who can see what's happening in one group (employees or talent) and another (managers).

It turns out that the much maligned and often self-sabotaging HR manager might just become the hero of this very complicated moment in corporate history after all.