When I hear people within HR extolling the increasing importance of HR functions in the age of AI, I can’t help wondering what planet they may be living on.
Back in July 2020, I made the case that HR functions needed to wake up and smell the coffee. Conflating the strategic business and talent challenges presented by the dizzying array of technology advances with HR’s incumbency position struck me as being tone deaf.
HR is founded on necessity. A need to run payroll, maintain benefits, administer programs, hire and fire people, and be ombuds-people for compliance. The very things that AI promises to automate.
The challenges businesses currently face are of an entirely different and new nature. Specifically, debottlenecking decision-making, agility, speed and enabling a digital savvy workforce. Indeed, the currencies of existing HR; hierarchical organizations, grade levels, career ladders, annual cycles, and top-down cascades are the very things that businesses need to escape.
So, can HR reinvent itself from process wardens to organization liberators?
On International HR Day, I think it apt to once again lay down the challenge. If HR is to be relevant, necessary, essential in the coming years, it will need to completely rethink how it goes about developing people. Less emphasis on recruiting, reward, learning, and administration…. More on business consulting, strategy, finance, entrepreneurship, and bureaucracy busting.
You can read more about David’s digital age manifesto for HR and HR professions careers here and here.
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