What is the future of your HR function?

When it comes to future of HR, employers may be forgiven for scratching their heads. Technology has flooded into our offices, automating our processes and enhancing our data drives – but it’s also left the people function feeling somewhat misplaced.

HRD spoke to Nahal Yousefian, chief people experience officer (CPXO) at MEC and speaker at our HR Leaders Summit Vancouver, who explained what she believes the future of HR will look like.

“About three years ago I had an existential crisis,” she told HRD. “I began to realize that as an HR function, we have the spent the better part of our careers pulling away the core competencies and accountabilities for managers, and centralizing them under this empire called HR. By doing this we were telling management that they can’t do anything without us being there to babysit them. At times, we were even using legalese as a way of ensuring they would comply.

“After doing this for a few years, without really realizing it, culture and engagement began surfacing on massive headlines and invariably ended up on the HR portfolio. And so, now I was going out there saying, yes management do need our support to do their day to day roles, and although you’re the decision makers please make sure you’re consulting with us. But at the same time, I was wondering why they were being so robotic with employees, and why their teams were not engaged.”

Instead, Nahal wants to put the onus on organization capability – not in the context of some blanket framework or leadership training, but specific areas in specific teams in order to help them become better at managing change.

To hear more from Nahal, book your ticket to HR Leaders Summit in  Vancouver here.