During the COVID-19 crisis, HR pivoted dramatically but will that elevated role last?
Human resources has undergone major changes during the pandemic, taking a much more strategic focus around issues such as workforce planning, health and safety, work from home, reduced hours and changes to compensation, layoffs and digital technology.
But once things calm down, will this transformation be forgotten? The C-suite may not be entirely convinced that the changes are permanent or more strategic, according to a recent Sage survey of 1,500 senior HR professionals, C-suite executives and employees from Canada, the U.K., U.S. and Australia.
Two-thirds (65 per cent) of HR leaders say their teams have had a vital role to play in the pandemic and 72 per cent say that the crisis has helped them demonstrate their value and increase people’s understanding of HR’s role. A further 59 per cent say that they feel they have become more influential as leaders.
However, while 87 per cent of executives agree that the pandemic has accelerated changes in HR, such as having greater influence, 52 per cent feel these changes are only temporary, finds Sage.
And while the C-suite expects HR teams to pick up more strategic work, 57 per cent also see HR as largely an administrative function.
While many HR professionals have pivoted, the world remains at a turning point that could go either way, says David Zweig, chair of the department of management at the University of Toronto-Scarborough.
“Once the pandemic settles down, HR has a real opportunity to develop a new strategic approach to bringing people back to work and how they’re going to manage the tension between people who want to continue working from home and people who want to actually go back to the workplace,” he says. “HR can play a really important role and demonstrate, finally, that they add strategic value.”
How HR has been transformed
HR is being counted on to provide workplace solutions much more frequently than in past emergency situations, says Jill Birch, founder and CEO of BirchGrove, a leadership development service, and chair of the Human Resources Professionals Association (HRPA) board nominating committee in Toronto.
“If we think about what happened during the financial crash in 2008, what we saw was that CEOs and the C-suite looked toward the chief operating officer to try and steer the ship,” she says. “[One member] said to me that, ‘In 2008, we had a financial crisis with some people issues, and today we have a people crisis with some financial implications.’”
HR has really become a strategic partner in business operations during the COVID-19 pandemic “to help lead them to another future state of what that organization is going to be,” says Rodney Miller, president and CEO of the Chartered Professionals in Human Resources (CPHR) Alberta in Calgary.
“There’s a real transformation of the profession moving away from being simply a tactical organization to beginning to lead what the future of work is going to look like.”
Because of that pivot, all of a sudden, the spotlight was turned on the role of the CHRO — and all of the people working in human resources — to quickly come up with creative ways “to shore up employee anxiety, to understand the concerns that people had in terms of how do we make the shift to remote,” says Birch.
“HR found themselves as the proverbial jack of all trades and master of none, having to provide consultation to a wide variety of different levels of concern from all sorts of different departments.”
One of the most important ways HR has stepped up is in maintaining employee culture and engagement, especially for employees working from home.
“Zoom meetings aren’t the same, but it means doing more activities over those mechanisms. It means that supervisors need to be engaging with employees on a more frequent basis,” says Rick Brick, assistant lecturer in the department of strategy entrepreneurship and management at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.
“One of the things we need to encourage managers to do is not only to reach out to teams as a team and have them working together as we would in a regular workplace but also those one-on-one communications become really critical. HR has been stressing the need for that.”
Will the changes last?
But whether or not HR departments are shunted aside post-pandemic will depend on many factors, says Miller.
“If organizations are thinking about going back to what was normal, that’s going to put HR back into just being that administrative, tactical function. But if organizations are reflective and they stick to the value that’s been created through the pandemic with the HR function, that conversation is going to move forward,” he says. “HR plays an important role to help lead organizations… The future of the profession is actually in a great place now as a strategic advisor for organizations going forward.”
How HR practises its craft will also go a long way in determining its future responsibilities, according to Zweig.
“The longstanding problem with HR, for over a century, [is that it] has been practised like it’s an art but, really, it should be understood as a science and then delivered like art. What I mean by that is the fundamental tenants of understanding human behaviour — we know a lot about it, we have lots of scientific evidence about it — and the key is to be able to use that knowledge and practise it effectively as a practitioner in HR.”
But many still cling to the older ways, and that is to HR’s detriment, he says.
“It’s incumbent on people who are engaged in HR to understand and stay abreast of real scientific evidence — not the garbage, not the stuff that’s being peddled, not the stuff that’s actually harmful for employees — but real scientific evidence can have an impact that demonstrates their strategic value.”
Once more workers return to the workplace, managing where to seat them will be another challenge that can illustrate HR’s strategic expertise, says Brick.
“Most people seem to have adapted pretty well to working away from the office and, frankly, the productivity has been much better than anyone expected, [but] there are employees who just aren’t suited to that environment and we’re finding that as well. That’s going to lead to problems when we move back into the workplace.”
Keeping HR’s value updated
For HR professionals to stay within that strategic mindset, a number of new areas will have to be studied, says Miller, and none is more important than recognizing an organization’s core business purpose.
“If you can understand and connect to the business operations, you can then take a look at it as an HR professional to say, ’How do I create value for our organization that’s going to help us grow and prosper, even in times of dramatic change?’ That value alignment between your role as an HR professional and what the business does is going to be critically important as we move into the future.”
Gaining knowledge into human insight and behaviour is another needed tool in the HR arsenal, according to Zweig.
“HR is about people, so advanced degrees in psychology, advanced degrees in any area that’s going to give you the training and engaging and understanding scientific evidence will help.”
But once that level of scientific knowledge is achieved, it’s important not to slip into the old ways, he says.
“Rely on people to provide you evidence that have those qualifications, not consultants that just have a lot of experience in some industry at some time; not people who speak well and again engage in virtue signalling but have nothing to back it up. The biggest question an HR person needs to ask is: ‘Show me the evidence.’”
In addition to formal education, talking to other experienced professionals is always a good idea, says Birch.
“You’ve got to reach out to your colleagues. I know several CHROs who formed their own learning networks because they were just grappling with what do we do next and so they quickly came together in a network to support each other. It was a great hands-on-deck moment for HR, and they came through in so many ways.”
