Is the Future of HR — AI? Part 2

The next page of the HR story
By Dr Reg Butterfield © 2023

Wow, we offer our thanks to many of you for re-posting our link on LinkedIn for the first part of this discussion, which was published on 23 July 2023 [https://managementminefields.substack.com/p/is-the-future-of-hr-ai].

Your recommendations have increased our readership significantly and we look forward to more of you commenting here as we progress the idea of AI and HR creating a new page of HR and business history.

___________________________________________________________________________

On 23 July 2023, we discussed the history of HR, outlined some of the technology used to support HR, and concluded that the preferred popular model for HR currently seems to be the Prof. Dave Ulrich approach known as the HR Business Partner Model. The model is focused on three operating groups within the HR function: Strategic Business Partner; Centres of Excellence; and Shared Service Centre. These are based on four key roles that HR professionals can adopt: Strategic partner, Change agent; Administrative expert; and Employee champion.

We brought the newsletter to a conclusion by illustrating how the work of HR fits within three categories (see illustration below), administration, optimisation, and connecting activities: each requiring a different form of thinking and behaving.

As a “teaser” for today’s newsletter, we also suggested that it is important to harness AI to provide a “New Era HR business model”. In doing so, provided a short discussion around Bots; chatbots and voicebots.

However, the relationship between AI and HR is far more complex than just introducing an AI model or two. We have to understand where to start, and the relationships we want to create between people, technology, and AI, which requires us to start thinking about HR in a different way than most people have to date.

­­­­­­­___________________________________________________________________________

In last month’s newsletter we indicated that we would cover the discussion in two parts, with this being the second part. However, whilst writing this newsletter it became clear that it was important to discuss more about the foundation and future of HR before introducing the use of digital technology and AI. As you read this newsletter, we believe that this change makes sense and supports having a third part for the more detailed use of technology, next month.

Today, we lay the foundations and thinking that are necessary to meet the challenges that HR is currently facing when introducing AI, and a few that people have yet to realise will be part of the future HR landscape. In doing so, we suggest that the new core work of HR will include breaking away from many of the old models that have been used to motivate, train, and retain employees. For example, “strategic HRM” (sHRM) is probably the most used approach to employee motivation and engagement in one form or another. Yet it is not successful for reasons we have discussed in our past newsletters and papers.

It is necessary to identify different approaches to the activities of “optimisation” and “connecting” of the workforce so that HR supports the delivery of the desired outcomes of the organisation and also leads to the elusive ideal of employee engagement and retainment. At the same time, these ‘new’ ways need to be compatible with the changing landscape of people, society, and technology. This is the route to business success, the aim of HR.

For example, in a recent study by PwC (2023 Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey), 64% of respondents in the tech sector said they were satisfied with their job or jobs. A solid majority find their work fulfilling, have a high degree of autonomy in choosing how they do their work, and believe that their manager considers their input when making decisions.

So, they must be engaged according to most definitions and strategies to achieve employee engagement.

Not necessarily so, the study indicates that tech employees are also more likely than others to change employers (32% vs 26% of non-tech), even within the background of increasing numbers of layoffs in the tech sector.

This challenge to find different ways of linking both the business and personal needs is but one example that reinforces the importance of ensuring that organisations employ people who have not only the skills and motivation to undertake the emerging new core work of HR, but also have the ability to approach things differently.

This is an exciting challenge for HR professionals and will require many of them to develop a different set of beliefs that help them create new ways of thinking and working.

With this in mind, some of this newsletter’s discussion will ask readers to suspend judgement and consider how these ideas and methods of working can apply to their workplace and what that may mean for their own career and future development.

We are not offering solutions or the best way; we want to encourage a debate about what we write here, we want to read the views our readers have, and discuss those that are emerging in other media; all are food for such discussions and we look forward to reading them.

___________________________________________________________________________

Imagine…

You are a person who wants to become president of your country. A major challenge is to encourage people to do what you want them to do — vote for you. This means that it is crucial to ensure that your message and responses to questions from the electorate and press reach people wherever they are, particularly as your time is limited and taken up by travelling and attending strategically important campaign events across the country.

Let’s explore two different approaches to this challenge using technology.

United States in 2016

During his campaign to become the President of the United States in the 2016 election, Donald Trump used social media extensively. His use of social media, particularly Twitter, became a defining characteristic of his campaign strategy.

Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump used Twitter as his primary means of communication, often posting multiple tweets per day. He used this platform to share his views, attack opponents, and connect directly with his supporters. His tweets were often controversial and garnered significant media attention, which further amplified his message.

Trump’s social media presence during the 2016 campaign allowed him to reach millions of people directly, bypassing traditional media channels and controlling the narrative around his campaign. This approach was unconventional but proved to be highly effective in engaging with his base and energising his supporters.

In terms of the popular vote, Donald Trump received 46.1% of the total votes, while his opponent Hillary Clinton received 48.2%. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by approximately 2.1 percentage points. Nevertheless, Trump secured the presidency by winning in key swing states and gaining the necessary electoral votes to reach the 270-vote majority in the Electoral College. The US election process is ripe for discussion, yet we will pass!

South Korea 2022

Now let’s fast forward to 2022. How do you make a middle-aged, establishment South Korean conservative who is new to politics, a presidential candidate who is cool? This was his challenge because research indicated that Yoon Suk-yeol needed the votes of the new generation of voters to have any chance of winning the presidential race.

Yoon has been compared to the former United States president Donald Trump in many ways and had been prone to social and diplomatic blunders throughout his campaign.

Mr Yoon, a political novice, edged out a victory over the Democratic Party’s Lee Jae-myung with what he called a “victory of the great South Korean people”. The result was one of the closest in South Korean history — with the final count separated by less than 1%.

Mr Yoon learnt from the likes of not only Trump’s open combative approach, but also how AI technology had been used before in politics, from a deepfake video of Barack Obama insulting Donald Trump to failed New York mayoral candidate Andrew Yang campaigning in the metaverse.

Mr Yoon’s technology team created what is attributed to being the world’s first deepfake political candidate. With neatly combed black hair and a smart suit, the avatar looked near-identical to the real South Korean candidate but used salty language and meme-ready quips in a bid to engage younger voters who get their news online. He was called “AI Yoon” to clearly differentiate between the real person and the avatar so that there was no deception about its true identity. AI Yoon attracted millions of views almost immediately after it was broadcast on its “Wiki Yoon” website.

During the campaign tens of thousands of people asked AI Yoon questions, but it was not the usual policy-related fare. The team constructed a mix of humorous and satirical answers. The real Yoon recorded more than 3,000 sentences, and 20 hours of audio and video to provide enough data for a local deepfake technology company to create the avatar.

If they had only produced politically correct statements, they probably would not have had the press reactions and headlines in the South Korean media that garnered amazing levels of attention. AI Yoon was a major success in its contribution to the surprising result of the election.

___________________________________________________________________________

Reading and understanding the situation

Irrespective of the politics of the individuals, both Trump and Yoon read the political mood and national environment and responded accordingly in their own respective styles. The rest of the political establishment in both countries had been too slow to break out of conventional approaches in the face of a fast-changing society and the need to use new technology to advantage. It was also important to move the dialogue to one that the intended audience understood and wanted, in both cases short messages and a break from boring statements of facts. Controversy, whether through humour or otherwise was a shock to the establishments of both countries; they were not prepared for such a strategic use of technology and unconventional rhetoric.

What can HR learn from these two cases, both used the technology of their time to win against all traditional logic and expectations of the opinion formers and electoral “experts”?

Hard and Soft HR Management

HR is in the middle of increasing tensions between the different approaches to determine and create relationships between the management and workforce of organisations. If we bring this down to a basic, simple, and narrow perspective, currently there seem to be at least two rival paradigms, hard and soft human resources management (HRM); two sides of the same coin. Whether hard (‘people as a resource to be deployed, utilised, and, if need be disposed of’) or soft (‘people friendly’), HRM is about the management of people in a particular way. Historically, this meant both variations placed an emphasis on optimising shareholder outcomes, with enhancing outcomes for other stakeholders being at the best a secondary objective, and at worst, an unnecessary distraction.

Over time, particularly since the mid 1940s, how organisations were designed reflected the gradual change in how they were managed. Currently, most organisations are hierarchical designs that support top-down power relationships and control, using both hard and soft approaches. This is now being challenged by the workforce who argue that the existing ways of control, whether hard or soft, are at their expense. Employees are now rebelling against the ideas of the past that insisted on their individual and collective compliance and strict one-sided power-relationships that favour management.

Worker rebellions against management have a long and complex history that spans centuries and is intertwined with the evolution of labour movements and industrialisation. The current situation is arguably another page in this history where employees are playing a crucial role in shaping labour laws, regulations, and workplace conditions. They are also contributing to the development of labour rights and the broader conversation around social justice and economic equality. Today, the rebellion is in many ways more subtle than the industrial strikes of the past, albeit these have not entirely vanished. This current tension actually provides a strategic opportunity for organisations, and HR can play a major part in concert with AI.

Whilst we have highlighted the tension that HR finds itself in, the situation is not the same for all organisations, particularly SMEs (small to medium enterprises), which arguably employ a majority of people worldwide.

It is generally accepted that an informal rather than bureaucratised relationship is one of the major defining characteristics of HRM in SMEs. Small firms rarely consider formalising their working practices and rely on an emergent approach with an absence of structured or professional HR management; albeit as they grow in size and number of employees, formalisation comes into play quite quickly.

This lack of formalisation is partly the result of a lack of resources, with ‘informal routinisation’ playing a large part in the day-to-day running of the organisation. Informality, however, does not imply a particular view of the substance of work relations: it could be associated with an autocratic as much as a harmonious enterprise. This results in a situation where management policy and practice are ‘unpredictable’ and at times ‘indifferent’ to the human resource needs of an organisation. Whilst the content is not exhaustive, in Table 1 we provide an overview of some of the differences and reasons for HR practices in SMEs and larger organisations.

These differences are important to understand as the successful use of AI relies on ensuring that the operating environment and desired outcomes are clearly understood and articulated prior to identifying the relevant technology and its form.

Table 1: Comparison of HR activities and role in SMEs vs Larger Organisations

In summary, organisations are going through a major process of change that is predominantly technology and market driven. The technology is the primary driver of both the “what” and “how” of doing business. At the same time, a new breed of employee is emerging with a different understanding and demand of what work means to them and where it takes place; hybrid working, and a transient workforce with different expectations of what a career and work life means when compared to the past is the result. Irrespective of the size and nature of the organisation, HR is in the middle of this change. The challenge for HR is that it needs to react to and reduce or remove this tension in ways that enable the organisation to flourish whilst attracting and retaining “new era” employees.

To date, the Ulrich “HR Business Partner Model” tries to bring about the necessary focus and emphasis of HR needed for success in business. It does so through four key roles that HR professionals can adopt: Strategic partner; Change agent; Administrative expert; and Employee champion. Whilst all of these are still pertinent, the challenge is how to implement them in this new era of work and technology.

New Era HR and new approaches to how AI is used may be the solution, albeit this will lead to some difficult challenges that may move beyond the traditional HR boundaries.

___________________________________________________________________________

AI and HR have worked together for decades

___________________________________________________________________________

As we explained last month in part one of this HR discussion, there are different types of AI. The predominant approach in HR is to use various applications and tools based on versions of machine learning (ML) and digital assistants (DA). This makes sense because these have been around for decades, and the work of HR involves significant administration irrespective of the HR function’s focus. Whilst ML and DA are ideal for this type of work its use has many critics, particularly relating to the quality of the customer end-users’ experiences, such as the difficulties in gaining human support when things do not work, or the user’s enquiry is not a standard one that the software programme can handle. These customer complaints are both internal and external to the organisation.

The message is clear, whatever form or use of AI that HR uses; it must be fit for purpose.

Experience of using AI in HR over such a long period has enabled a library of common issues or risks to be compiled that need to be considered when substituting or supporting people with AI. We will refer to some of these as we move through the discussion, particularly in part three. Apart from the common operating issues, there are some major foundational points to understand about AI.

When trying to use AI in roles or areas that lack predictability or are based on complex relationships that constantly shift, the major points to remember tend to fall into three categories: (1) AI’s lack of understanding of the nuances or context of data or situations [generative AI is beginning to move in this direction], (2) AI has no emotional intelligence, and (3) AI brings data and/or words together and yet lacks any reference to or understanding of meaning. In essence, AI lacks the wisdom of people. Once these points are understood, the relevance and use of AI becomes clearer, we suggest.

The importance of AI for HR

___________________________________________________________________________

At the beginning of this newsletter, we mentioned three key high-level elements of the Ulrich “HR Strategic Business Partner” model:

A. Strategic Business Partner.

B. Centres of Excellence; and

C. Shared Service Centre.

In this part of the discussion around the use of AI by HR, we suggest that element ‘B’ is a means of achieving something, and element ‘C’ may be an outcome in organisational design terms; both ‘B’ and ‘C’ are highly contextual to the history, nature, size, and work of an organisation. As such, we want to focus on element ‘A’ at this stage as this is a more generic aspect of HR’s work and by its very nature has to consider not only the context of the history, nature, size, and work, but also the purpose of the organisation, and its associated strategic objectives.

The purpose of an organisation is the highest level of strategic intent and as such, we suggest this is the main signpost for HR (and AI support), with the objectives a secondary moving target over time. From this high-level strategic perspective, the work of HR is identified and put into practice. It is also important that HR uses its position as being involved at all organisational levels and actively supports a bottom-up route of information, identified opportunities, and risks, etc., which are seldom heard at the top-table.

Strategic Business Partner

To be a strategic business partner can mean different things. The concept of the Ulrich “HR strategic business partner” model emphasises that HR professionals should not merely focus on administrative tasks and transactional activities, but rather actively engage in shaping and executing the organisation’s strategic direction. This means that whatever use of AI is made by HR personnel in their day-to-day administrative and transactional activities, they need to link to and be part of the overarching “Business Strategy and Performance ERM (Enterprise Risk Management)”, and other relevant management systems. To make sense of the reason for this interconnection with other systems we outline some of the key elements of what we believe Prof. Ulrich means by the term “strategic business partner” in his HR Business Partner Model. The numbering system is used to help us refer to each one if necessary and does not denote any sequence or order of preference:

1. Alignment with Business Goals: Strategic business partners collaborate closely with top management and business leaders to understand the organisation’s strategic objectives and challenges. They work to align HR practices and initiatives with these goals, ensuring that the workforce supports the overall business strategy.

2. Influence and Decision-Making: HR professionals in the strategic business partner role have a seat at the table when important decisions are being made. They contribute their insights into workforce trends, talent management, leadership development, and other people-related aspects that can impact the organisation’s success.

3. Anticipating and Addressing Business Needs: Rather than reacting to requests of HR, strategic business partners proactively identify potential challenges and opportunities related to the workforce. They provide forward-looking insights and recommendations to help the organisation address emerging needs effectively.

4. Linking People and Performance: Strategic business partners connect HR practices with organisational performance. They help design and implement initiatives that enhance employee engagement, productivity, and development, ultimately contributing to the bottom line.

5. Data-Driven Decision-Making: Strategic business partners rely on data and analytics to inform their recommendations and decisions. They use HR metrics and analytics to assess the effectiveness of HR programs and make informed choices about workforce strategies.

6. Change Management and Innovation: These HR professionals are actively involved in managing organisational change. They support initiatives such as restructuring, mergers, and acquisitions by guiding leadership through the people-related aspects of these transitions.

7. Building Relationships: Strategic business partners build strong relationships across different levels of the organisation. They act as liaisons between HR and other departments, fostering collaboration and understanding.

8. Continuous Learning and Development: Given the dynamic nature of business environments, strategic business partners need to continuously update their skills and knowledge to stay relevant and effective in their role.

These key elements are a mix of activities that inform and/or create an operating environment that supports and delivers the organisation’s strategy and associated objectives. For them to be individually successful, each activity needs to be harmonised collectively across the whole organisation, and, on occasions externally, for example candidates and training organisations. This requires a significant number of integrated behaviours and sources of information. The information is the result of a mix of data that is collected, inputted, filed, analysed, and regurgitated in various forms dependent on the needs of the users of that information.

This is where AI comes into the HR equation with a role that is more than supporting the processes and administration, which has been the main thrust to date. If HR is to take on a more strategic role, and deliver the eight elements above, then HR’s AI must move beyond its current position and actively interact with the whole organisational AI, data systems, ERMs, and more. What does this mean?

Zeynep Ton, professor of the Practice at the MIT Sloan School of Management and president and co-founder of the Good Jobs Institute, sums the situation nicely.

“Data can tell what happens when we increase staffing levels to support profitability, but it doesn’t tell us about the impact on our customers, on our employees, the overall morale, and people’s ability to do a good job.”

If HR is going to take on a more strategic role and deliver on the eight elements, it needs to start to think and behave differently; AI can help join many of these data sets together if used wisely and not to just replace mundane work and/or reduce time, which is its main focus in HR currently.

It is also important to remember that, for most generative AI insights, a human must interpret them to have impact. The notion of a human in the loop is critical.

___________________________________________________________________________

Approach HR’s relationship with AI with care

___________________________________________________________________________

Over the last few decades, HR leaders have found themselves a part of the organisational cost-efficiency treadmill that applies analytics and big data wherever and as much as possible, including HR operating models. Their people have lived in a worthy, stressful, but uninspiring role of optimising labour costs, reinforcing compliance using standardised measures, and supporting the adoption of technology beyond IT.

For example, recruitment has traditionally been imbued with meaning and cultural significance, and yet the more recent emphasis has been on productivity and how to measure it. A McKinsey (2021) report shows that CHROs (chief human-resource officers) now question whether processes have replaced the creativity and innovation they need to attract and develop talent, manage, and reward performance, and optimise workforce strategy.

It was clear from the survey that CHROs were eager to shift to an HR approach that McKinsey calls “back to human.” During and post-Covid, the demands on HR to meet physical and mental health needs, as well as intensified moral concerns about a company’s overall impact on society, highlights the urgency of their view that some core human element has been lost in all these technological advancements.

This is a stark warning when considering increased relationships between AI and HR.

Mastering AI and other technology to improve standard HR processes and develop insights through advanced analytics will need to continue. However, the challenge for HR is to strategically build organisational resilience and generate value. To achieve this HR will need to include policies and activities such as:

· strategic people-centric policies and processes to attract and retain talent,

· identifying ways of valuing the skills and ability of people, including shifting more decision-making to front line workers,

· creating talent ecosystems by expanding the size of the talent pool, which includes internal talent, to be ready for changes in demand and the nature of work required,

· re-think what work means and the associated types of employment — internal and external sources,

· use HR as a role model by organising for the future, strategically.

Re-thinking what working in HR means.

___________________________________________________________________________

As with any change, it will be crucial for HR to re-think how it works and what that means for those who work in HR. HR has evolved into a predominantly well-educated workforce with a fairly linear career structure based around strategic, administrative, and transactional functions (see Tables 2 and 3). This “functional expertise” approach has served it well in a world where individual expertise and associated focused thinking and behaviour was highly valued. The remuneration structure in HR in many countries tended to reflect this by rewarding the experts more than the generalists, particularly in larger organisations.

However, the trend to move away from the “functional silo” approach to work has seen a rise in the “one-firm” or “one-team” organisation, irrespective of whether it is a traditional hierarchical or New Era flatter organisation. For such an approach to work means encouraging people to bring their “whole person” to work and not just their body, which means moving on from the mechanistic skill and talent management to addressing the employee experience through meeting both their physical and mental needs. This cannot be achieved or managed by an “app”.

Table 2: Transactional and Administrative HR activities.

Table 3: Strategic HR functions and activities.

Creating an environment that encourages people to bring their “whole person” to work is a major step beyond most current HR programmes. To replace the outdated models and processes used by HR in response to work methods of the industrial age, such as sHRM mentioned earlier, will require a different approach that breaks away from the current linear expert models used by most HR organisations.

If organisations are becoming one-team or one-firm through an increased range of team working and shared platforms, then HR needs to acknowledge this and, as we mentioned earlier, lead these strategic changes by example. One-firm organisations place great emphasis on organisation-wide coordination of decision-making, group identity, cooperative teamwork, and institutional commitment. HR should not be an exception even though it may mean a radical shift from how it works today, and the skills required for this new work.

Moving beyond the HR strategic role

Thus far we have focused on the “strategic” element of Prof. Ulrich’s HR model. If we now consider the other two elements: Centres of Excellence and Shared Service Centre, we can start to consider how HR needs to operate in the future.

We do this bearing in mind that the Ulrich model was developed in the 1990s to move HR forward as a driver for change when organisations were still very much of the industrial age in design and thinking. As such, we are not suggesting HR introduces the exact Ulrich model and his definitions of these two elements. We are suggesting that HR management understands what these elements are trying to achieve and then decide how to apply their underlying philosophies in ways that suit their organisation. In doing so, considering the wider changes in business, society, and employees discussed earlier.

The philosophy behind having Centers of Excellence (CoE) is to enable HR operations to function more strategically by allowing them to allocate resources, expertise, and effort effectively. The CoE approach recognises the need for specialisation and expertise in various HR domains, it is how they are designed, resourced, and operate that we need to consider.

The concept of Shared Service Centers (SSC) aligns with the Ulrich Model’s emphasis on HR’s strategic role in supporting the organisation’s goals. By centralising and standardising certain functions, organisations can create a more efficient and effective HR service delivery model, allowing HR professionals to focus on driving value through strategic initiatives and business partnerships. This idea of centralisation and standardisation is at risk of diverging from the flexibility that is required of organisations today. The challenge is how to deliver its admirable intentions of freeing up HR professionals for more added value ways of working with people.

When deciding how to set up the new HR strategic business approach, it is easy to be drawn into the dead-end road where professional experts only see what is important for them.

It is crucial to remember, “Don’t make this about employees; make this about customers.”

To grow and survive, organisations have to win with their customers. To win with their customers, they have to execute well operationally. In order to execute well operationally, they have to keep the employee turnover low and set their employees up for success. Therefore, organisations must invest in their people and make the operational choices that deliver.

Moving on from HR administration to optimising and connecting.

Earlier, we mentioned the idea of HR’s work moving into three main areas: administrating, optimising, and connecting activities. We know from experience that swathes of the administration work can be managed effectively by different forms of AI such as machine learning (ML) and digital assistants (DA). Earlier, we discussed some of the difficulties associated with early methods of reducing the human element of HR administrative activities and in next month’s newsletter we will address this in more detail.

In order to work at a more strategic level and support the delivery of the organisation’s products and/or services, we suggest that the HR optimising and connecting activities are the most important on which to focus. Without the social and network collaboration the one-team and/or one-firm concept will fail.

Killing the golden goose

So often senior management seem to forget one of Aesop’s Fables, “The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs”.

In their haste to create standardisation and integration top management often stifles operational-level innovation, entrepreneurship, and active customer relationships. Ironically, these are the very things that reduce their ability to attract and retain the talent that they need for success. On the other hand, those who advocate local autonomy do so in ways that create significant inefficiencies, competing priorities, and poor customer service.

The outcome of both approaches is that the organisation relies on specific individuals to hold things together and maintain the customer relationships; individual instead of institutional ownership of customers is not good for business.

For ease of reference, we provide a reminder of the optimising and connecting graphic below.

Generative AI is now creating a lot of noise and energy amongst the top echelons of organisations as an additional route within their digitalisation strategy to reduce time and costs across the business.

While generative AI is gaining a lot of publicity, we know from experience that gaining the full value from a technology and implementing it across an organisation takes time, talent, and hard work. What its role is in areas beyond administration is still at the embryonic stage for organisations, albeit it is growing quickly in other areas such as research.

The need to listen and learn from today’s Luddites

The original Luddites were nineteenth century English textile workers protesting against the use of labour-saving machinery. They feared that the new technology would take their jobs away. However, their fears were not only unfounded, but a worse scenario was the result that we see so often today. Much of today’s office technologies encourage people to behave in ways that are wasteful and unproductive; unnecessary emails overload and an avalanche of (easily) scheduled meetings are common examples.

For most generative AI insights, a human must interpret them to have impact and the notion of a human in the loop is critical. With this in mind, it is important to identify how the HR function needs to approach not only the administrative activities but also those associated with optimising and connecting within the notion of one-firm or one-team style business models. In doing so, we need to remove the post-Luddite factor and ensure real HR productivity and collaboration ensues.

The Identity Crisis for HR

With a background of organisations moving to make sense of new business models, technologies, and changing expectations of, and by, the employees, HR teams are often straddling the needs of the legacy (old style) organisation while planning to address the needs of the future in their strategic role.

In trying to deal with these challenges, many organisations have re-branded HR as “Employee Experience”, “People Organisation”, “People Operations”, and other more interesting or exotic names. If you change the name of the brand without any discernible understanding by the employees and customers as to what the change means in operation, it will backfire (we await the outcome of Twitter ‘X’). AI now brings the opportunity to not only re-brand, but also change the operations of HR to ensure that it delivers what is needed now and with an eye on what is needed for the future.

At this stage, it is important to realise that simply incorporating emerging technologies and methods into current ways of doing business is not going to be enough to achieve what is needed. Experience across organisations generally, demonstrates this and identifies the need to revisit, and change, often entire business models in all fields such as: product and services development, sales, production, leadership teams, back office, and the HR function.

The Future for HR and its Collaboration between People, Technology, and AI

Shifting to the future of HR is all about achieving business outcomes in the context of the three futures happening now, which Deloitte (2019, “Reimagining Human Resources | The future of enterprise demands a new future of HR”) describes as: Future of Enterprise, Future of Workforce, and Future of How Work Gets Done.

For this to become a reality for HR it will need to reshape the organisation’s behaviour to act with agility and collaboration so that customers feel the results in ways that delight them. This will mean HR working with managers to curate and engage an innovative workforce. This will require HR to re-imagine what work means and the skills required across roles in and outside of HR. In doing so, maximise the potential of the workforce and gain advantage through cognitive and digital automation, together with other emerging AI methodologies.

HR professionals from tomorrow must not only bring new capabilities with them, but also give constant attention to growing and stretching their skills. They will need to know how to apply advanced techniques and technologies that enable them to provide reimagined solutions that deliver services to elevate the business impact they create.

The old solutions based on out-of-date historical data and values need to be replaced with ways that engage people because they enjoy what they do, how they do it, and where they do it. In doing so, align them across the whole organisation in collaboration and partnership with employees who deliver the business success.

The Shape of Things to Come

Throughout this and last month’s newsletter, we have used the Professor Ulrich “HR Business Partner Model” to illustrate the importance of linking into what is understood as the predominant HR model currently in use in many organisations across a wide range of countries. We did so because we want what we discuss to make sense and meet the current situation in which HR professionals find themselves.

His model is from the 1990s and as such it can be no surprise that it is very tilted towards the use of standardisation, specialisation, and centralisation of HR. However, he has not rested on his laurels and his work continues to explore the role and relationship of HR with organisations and society. Whilst the application of HR may now need to be different from the 1990s, the values and principles behind what Prof Ulrich identified remain fairly constant.

In our third part to this chapter of HR’s life story, we will move into how HR can meet the difficult challenges of helping organisations to move from their current state into a New Era approach to work. In doing so, offer our thoughts and ideas on what this means for the HR operation, its customers, and partners, and importantly, the success of the business, without which there is no HR required.

We leave you with the words of Prof Ulrich and look forward to your comments here on Substack, on LinkedIn, or our Futocracy.network website and discussion platform.

“Reinventing HR is not new and will continue. In our work, the “best year” of your life is always the “next twelve months.” Likewise, reinventing HR is about what’s next, not what has been. …HR is not limited by its past but can be reinvented by seizing uncertain futures with vision and increasing impact. … In our work, HR is not about HR but about the value HR creates for stakeholders. This simple mantra means that we connect the business context and the HR function. We call this the HR value creation logic because it has an outside-in logic with HR actions designed to create value for stakeholders.” (Dave Ulrich — July 25, 2023)

Reference:

Deloitte, 2019, “Reimagining Human Resources | The future of enterprise demands a new future of HR”, Deloitte Development LLC.