HR’s New Imperative Trifecta: The Future of Work, Employee Experience, and Leadership

It's time for HR leaders around the world to ditch human resources. CHROs are moving beyond traditional HR to focus on making their teams future ready. Here's what that means.

When you think about all of the roles inside of an organization, no role or function has been as transformed as that of HR. I’m in the process of working on a new employee experience book and am just wrapping up interviewing over 100 CHROs at companies around the world. Almost every CHRO I interviewed has echoed this sentiment.

Historically, the HR function was rooted in administrative and transactional tasks. This included managing employee records, ensuring compliance with labor laws, handling compensation and benefits, and overseeing hiring and firing processes.

HR was often seen as a back-office function, primarily concerned with mitigating risk and ensuring that the company adhered to regulatory requirements. HR professionals were responsible for creating policies and procedures, managing employee relations issues, and ensuring that the workforce was functioning within the company’s set boundaries.

While important, this role was often seen as administrative rather than strategic, and HR professionals were rarely invited to participate in conversations about the overall direction of the company. HR used to be a nice to have and today it’s the lifeblood of every organization.

Simply put, HR is responsible for making the company future-ready which is a combination of three things: Leadership, The Future of Work, and Employee Experience.

It’s for this exact reason that I put together the world’s first and only global CHRO community focused on these topics called Future of Work Leaders. If you’re a CHRO/CPO, you can request an invite to join other CHROs from companies like Johnson & Johnson, Dow, Neiman Marcus, Lego, Northrop Grumman, Tractor Supply, and dozens of others.

Let’s take a deeper look at what HR is actually becoming…