A foray into HR of mid-2020s and beyond

It has been nearly 70 years since Peter Drucker coined the phrase ‘human resource’. Human resources management or HR was a significant innovation over the more ancient practice of personnel management, which was essentially about job definitions, hiring and employment record-keeping. 

HR evolved in the 1960s and 70s as a comprehensive, modern approach to managing people and organisations and became a mainstream corporate function by the late 1970s.
The responsibility for organisational structuring, job of recruiting, selecting, appraising, rewarding and developing employees as well as the task of negotiating with labour unions in large corporations was taken on by the HR departments. Recruitment, contract management, compensation management, performance management, welfare management, conflict resolution, enforcement of discipline and retrenchment became the major focus areas of HR, in the 1990s.

HR has of course morphed significantly in the 21st century. So, for example, there is a greater emphasis today on digitising HR procedures, leading employer branding and labour market communications, providing job-related training, mitigating discriminatory and offensive practices, facilitating cross-cultural assimilation, counselling for career progress and incentivising employee well-being and fitness. 

So, what does the future hold for HR? Let us consider this problem, to try and envision a sneak preview of how HR practices might extend into the mid-2020s and beyond.

In order to do this, we must first grasp the emerging zeitgeist in the corporate world. The role of a for-profit company has changed significantly since the days of Drucker. It has evolved to a point where a company’s utopian mission is no longer to earn ever increasing profits for their shareholders, by all means legitimate, while treating their employees fairly.

Instead, companies are now increasingly thought of as ecosystems of human achievement that strive to bring about success stories in a given domain of human need or fascination. They do this while striving to be responsible in equal measure to shareholders, customers, employees, wider society and the environment. 

Companies like SpaceX, Amazon, Tesla, Mosa Meat, Underdog Pharmaceuticals, LivePerson, Impossible Foods and many others amply demonstrate this new kind of mission. They are not about fulfilling ordinary human needs for rapid profit.

Be it synthesised meat, gene editing, space transportation, longevity research, robotic transportation or artificial consciousness, companies in these domains are about experimentally discovering new conveniences and human experiences. They are about proactively researching for ways to enhance our daily lives. 

They are about advancing human knowledge in areas never before explored. They are about giving meaning and a sense of achievement to the lives of their employees and shareholders, the distinction between which is getting blurrier by the day. In fact, they are more or less about the progress of humanity as a whole.

Now I am not suggesting that the companies from the previous eras didn’t contribute to progress or that their leaders weren’t visionary. And I’m certainly not starry-eyed and thinking that these revolutionary new organisations are free from human and systemic failings. 

In fact, this is just what we must guard against through HR. But reminding ourselves that the mood has changed and that having broad, plural goals for companies is a serious, mainstream trend helps us understand the direction that HR must take.

The labour-oriented and throughput-oriented corporate mindsets of the previous eras would lose their significance, to be superseded by a mindset of fostering creativity and synergy. To give an example from software engineering, we’d be increasingly conceptualising and adapting self-learning models and neural networks to produce apps in the coming decades, rather than coding lengthy algorithms. 

Of course, there would always be some voluminous work but this would become of lesser significance as time goes by. Brainstorming and integration of ideas would be the name of the new game. 

Let’s consider five focus areas in HR that emerge from this background of lofty company goals, where the emphasis is on fostering creativity and synergy.

1. Migrating staff from irrelevant roles and dying professions into entry-level roles in more relevant professions
As Yuval Harari and others keep amply reminding us, many professions are dying and there is emerging a huge problem of professional and individual irrelevance. As companies close down due to automation or change their missions and adapt to emergent technology, employees find themselves saddled with irrelevant skills and careers.

The notion of firing staff from irrelevant professions and hiring new, skilled staff into emerging professions is a bit of a fallacy. Everyone would be new to the ‘new’ skill set, be it flying drones and monitoring robotic transportation instead of driving trucks or training neural networks to identify reversible genetic factors for aging, instead of researching on the effects of medicines on aging. Appealing to fresh graduates with professional degrees from brick and mortar universities would not help either; for even if the latest skill set, toolset and mindset happens to be with them, they are likely to lack other essential skills and attitudes that come with age and experience.

Besides, with increasing longevity and with the commitment to employees and to wider society that companies now have, they cannot afford to ignore a vast populous of otherwise intelligent and energetic 30, 40 or 50-year-olds, simply because they lack the newly relevant skills.

So, it would be HR’s job to pre-empt these emerging skills of significance to a firm and proactively plan the reskilling of staff. And focused training conducted by domain experts seems like the way forward. Apart from anticipating, researching and organising training, the most important contribution from HR along these lines would be to dispel human squeamishness to professional change and instil a can-do mindset in employees and employers.

2. Introducing more effective working patterns for different job roles
The COVID-19 pandemic shook HR departments and reminded us all of the need for continuous improvement on how we work together as teams, to meet different, often complex objectives. Can we work more effectively from home? Can we have different work habits for different job roles and teams in a firm? What is more important: a superficial sense of ‘fairness’ by having everyone hit the grindstone from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. or discovering the best work pattern for the job or team?

Yes, self organising teams and flexi hours have been with us for decades but one wonders if the patterns discovered from this vast global experiment have gone mainstream as yet. If indeed the experiment was conducted honestly, by the firms that claimed to adopt these HR practices.

For example, are UX designers more productive working isolated in the quiet of their homes, reaching out to their teammates entirely through electronic means? Do senior managers, who make most of their valuable contributions through intense brainstorming and subsequent offline writing to structure their conclusions, have to distract themselves with 40 or 48-hour work-weeks, ostensibly to mingle with co-workers?

Should employees be allowed afternoon naps on their bean bags, if it helps them think better once they wake up? Is the entire corporate world better off doing a four-day work-week, so that increased family-time and alone-time strengthens the purpose and character of each individual, as suggested by the prime minister of New Zealand?
HR departments would have to champion the answers to these and other questions related to work patterns and implement a more sensible, productive and albeit slightly more complex framework of employee engagement, to support a company’s mission.

3. Facilitating psychological well-being in workplace
The HR departments are nowadays alert to patterns of gender discrimination, sexual harassment and overt violence but mitigating the sly, long-term psychological damage caused by personality disorders at the workplace is not something that the HR departments investigate today.

There is an immense, growing body of evidence surrounding the damage caused through toxic work relationships. Although only prevalent in under 5 percent of the overall population, many carriers of personality disorders of the Cluster-B variety, particularly those with narcissistic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder, are highly competitive and intelligent and are represented in very high proportions in positions of leadership in the corporate world. Their inner competitiveness and complete lack of empathy are a fantastic combination for driving teams towards rapid results initially.

However, this leadership style burns out teams, causes vast psychological damage to their unsuspecting victim-colleagues and ultimately affects the natural, synergistic growth of companies beyond the individual visions and wants of these social bad apples. This problem doesn’t sit in well with the modern attitude of inclusive, collective leadership and it would be the role of future HR departments to dismantle such unhealthy work relationships.

HR would be responsible for facilitating therapy for those affected by such malignant personalities and lobbying for professional empowerment to restructure teams and organisations that show symptoms of toxic interpersonal relations.

4. Setting up simple, autonomous mechanisms for performance appraisal
Digital transformation has seized HR departments like a storm. Paperless, technology-driven HR management is almost the norm now. However, come appraisal time, we still see complex online forms and workflows that are a throwback to the 1980s. These appraisal inputs often demand high-level, subjective judgment. How do you rate the cultural empathy of your colleague? How productive are they? Can you rate them one to five, where one is worst and five is best? Give three examples to support your rating and suchlike.

The performance appraisal of the future would have learned a trick or two from the world of advanced analytics. First of all, appraisal ‘questions’ would be highly focused and the expected answers binary or quantitative. The data would likely be already available, only needing to be scraped from one digital form or another. For example, the productivity of a software engineer is available systemically, in a codebase and a task backlog. HR systems would be implemented to extract and abstract this data into informative performance reports.

Someone could argue that software engineers form a special category of knowledge worker, on whom there is always a vast, growing body of empirical performance data. So, let us consider the role of a tea server (extinct in Silicon Valley I’m afraid but still common in Sri Lanka). The performance evaluation for tea servers would consist of a questionnaire to all their clients, circulated monthly, which takes 30 seconds to fill. The questions would be: Are they on time? Is the tea tasty? Are they courteous? These questions would pop up in your corporate HR app and you’d just tap, tap, tap and be done.

A similar procedure could be done for evaluating janitorial and sanitary services, for company lunch, for visa assistance, for reimbursements, for facilities, for transport. The rollup of the admin department’s performance could be obtained painlessly and accurately from such rapid, atomic surveys that lack fanfare. It would make the final result more objective.
If we return to the question of judging the cultural empathy of a colleague, we could make this important assessment in a more reliable way. HR would circulate a survey through their app, after an employee’s recent visit or assimilation to another country, culture or team. Was your recent guest or team member from Transylvania amiable? Could you understand their needs? Did they understand yours? If not, what went wrong?

The point here is not only that the data gathered be atomic, immediate and involve less high-level judgment but also that in many cases this data is just waiting to be processed and consumed by the HR departments. This is the case for factories, malls, schools, hospitals and suchlike, where large quantities of proto-performance data keep gathering dust. It would be HR’s role in the future to align the correct hardware, software and AI expertise to leverage this data seamlessly and build the right analytical models and reports, which would show the individual performance quotient relevant for increments.

5. Demonstrating ethical leadership 
In a classical company, a corporate counsel would verify the legitimacy of every significant move the company makes, be it contractual or communicatory. Lawyers deal with a written procedure, the violation of which could lead to immediate monetary or physical penalties. Ethics on the other hand is about conforming to ambient attitudes, about fairness and about earning respect in society.

Ethics has been largely kept out of companies in the past, arguably for sound historical reasons, such as the very way in which free enterprise developed in the first place. Elixir sellers, loan sharks, insider traders and market gamers pioneered the creation of the capitalist system, long before their practices were outlawed on paper.

But times are changing. We live today in a maelstrom of social justice, resulting from a massive clash between the so-called Alt Right and Far Left, with the former group aligning themselves strongly with personal freedoms and the latter with community interest. Strange manifestations of this clash of ideas have arisen in the corporate world. Some corporations are castigating or firing people who hold beliefs or share ideas that don’t conform to a perceived ‘greater good’.

Be it a rebuttal to equality of gender performance across professions or an alignment with the eccentric (and in my opinion malign) politics of Donald Trump, we have seen companies taking stances on what employees and shareholders should believe or say. These types of corporate stances are a major departure from enlightenment philosophy and jurisprudence, where offensive ideas and thought crimes are not considered crimes at all.

Global companies are closing down partnerships across the pond due to the alleged unethical nature of their supply chains. Some of these decisions are based on clear-cut considerations like the use of minors in their workforce, the exploitation or ill-treatment of workers or their disregard for the environment. But other partnerships have been suspended due to geopolitical clashes between the countries they are headquartered in.

Social media companies are turning away customers who share ideas offensive to some. They are not just withdrawing content reported as offensive or mindless, they are also disabling the accounts of the posters.

GDPR and the outcomes of the Cambridge Analytica scandal may serve as a sort of base guideline for ethical data use but it won’t stop companies from exploiting trends obtained from anonymised data, to produce profitable yet unethical outcomes. Consider an online bookseller. Would it be ethical to be recommended books only of the sort that seem to interest you? What if your first online book as a 10-year-old is a trashy fantasy novel? When you finish it, you see five other even more trashy fantasy novels. You become hooked to this genus. 

The above caricatures of ethical conundrums are just mere scratches on the surface of modern corporate ethics, where ideas are the major commodity and the issues complex. Such complex ethical decisions require empathetic decision makers, with a strong grounding in human psychology, secular moral philosophy and jurisprudence. These are ultimately problems in interpersonal human relations that the HR departments of the future would have to deal with.
(Ruwan Rajapakse, a Management Consultant, can be reached via 
[email protected])