HR revolution or reimagining required

In order to easier comprehend the consideration on what the HR world would look like in the future, one should start from the context. The fourth industrial revolution and the new technologies it has brought favour digital companies. They appear out of nowhere in an accelerated fashion, and as competition that did not exist until yesterday, they penetrate the market incredibly fast and bring in revolutionary changes.

Let’s just take the example of how Airbnb and Booking.com have completely transformed the tourism and travel industry. The same goes for iPhone, LinkedIn, Twitter or Kindle, the list is huge, and it is growing with every new day. Each industry is affected.

COVID-19 pandemic and the new reality, that has appeared with it, have additionally accelerated the need for new technologies and demonstrated the direction in which the world of tomorrow would move. Overnight, it demanded a switch to models of working from home (very often in the segments where we had thought it would be absolutely impossible), also requiring the use of digital skills and platforms most people did not even know existed.

It also demanded removing borders between private life and business, between home and working environment, causing anxiousness about how to fit all that in and reconcile the irreconcilable.

This ‘in vivo’ demonstration has shown us that the world of tomorrow will be so different and that today’s concepts will not be appropriate for the future. They were designed for some other time and they should remain there. It is clear now that if we continue to build the HR profession through enhancement and ‘evolution’, it will not remain relevant. The world which is getting ready for tomorrow will need a revolution or re-imagination of the HR profession.

In the context of future of work, HR will need to focus on creating agile workforce. In the new world of labour, we will have to develop a methodology for planning skills or abilities which are needed for today and for tomorrow.

We will probably have to be discovering new models of work and organisation, including horizontal management, project organisations, flexible workforce (e.g. through outsourcing of work via platforms, such as the Upwork or the Gigwalk).

This will require us to simultaneously juggle the combination of workforce on and outside the payroll, and to design a string of interventions focused on their experience (today, we call it the experience of employees).

This in fact requires the HR to understand at the individual level what should be done in order to have each individual in the company integrated fast and have an accelerated learning curve, with the aim of instant productivity. Here, it will be necessary to understand the style, preferences, capabilities, and limitations of each individual, and design individualised, consumerised, and personalised involvement. By this, HR will create competitive advantage, generate value, and use technologies to facilitate the return of the ‘human’ in ‘human resources’.

In this manner, HR can remain relevant in the years to come. The experience of other industries and professions teaches us that everyone will inevitably be affected, while the speed and size of this impact will a great deal be dictated by our ‘appetite for change’. It will determine where we would end up on the S-curve of transformation – at the front, as someone who wishes to be the bearer of changes, in the middle – going with the flow, or… The choice is ours!