"Where HR Meets the Future of Work Report"

Where HR Meets the Future of Work Report

White Paper: The Ready

Why HR Desperately Needs a Rethink

Organizations are like a human body.

The brains—a.k.a. the strategy-focused C-Suite—reign over internal systems and plan. The legs are the teams executing daily operations, like production, sales, and accounting. The immune system prevents the body from getting sick or growing sluggish; IT secures data, legal protects against liabilities, and R&D finds ways to preserve long-term health.

Humming alongside these functions is the nervous system, better known as human resources. Its branches include critical functions and activities like compensation and benefits, training and development, hiring and onboarding, conflict resolution, and risk management. But things don’t always go smoothly. The brain gets stuck in indecision. When the unexpected occurs (and it always does), the legs struggle to change course. Each part focuses so rigidly on its own tasks that coordination becomes a challenge, hindering forward movement.

And despite—or perhaps because of—its centralized role, HR’s nervous system is often among the body’s greatest vulnerabilities. Tasked with both delivering strategic partnership to internal clients and operational support for employees, despite these directives requiring very different (if not downright conflicting) ways of working, HR finds itself overloaded without the infrastructure needed to meet its multipronged mandate.

The net result: A body lacking the ability to clear obstacles—one that relies so heavily on muscle memory that innovation or improvement is hard to achieve. (Ever watched your organization repeat an annual process that doesn’t work? Us, too.) This stuckness invariably leads to missteps, and even the occasional faceplant.

But HR also holds the possibility of a new operational model, one that embraces mission-driven, cross-functional coordination with an emphasis on experimentation, adaptivity, data literacy, and automation—and can nimbly shift its approach as it’s fed new insights. It starts with reimagining the role HR plays, then spreading the transformation across other internal functions. HR’s diversity of directives may be the Achilles heel of the familiar body-like model of operations, but it’s also its superpower. HR is uniquely positioned to usher in real change—the kind that increases efficiency, strengthens agility, creates value, and fosters a way of working that feels human and meaningful.