Read an Excerpt
Point Counterpoint II
New Perspectives on People + Strategy
By Richard Vosburgh, Anna Tavis, March Sokol Society For Human Resource Management
Copyright © 2017 HR People + Strategy
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-58644-418-1
CHAPTER 1
The Future of Work
By Marc Sokol
Perhaps you know the William Gibson saying, "The future is already here; it's just not very evenly distributed." Some people really do get to the future sooner than others, and we would be wise to learn from them.
In our lead Perspective, Eva Sage-Gavin and Kaye Foster-Cheek describe the future of work and human resources — a future that has arrived for some of us and, in time, will involve all of us. This is not just their opinion, but reflects a consensus of experts across our profession. They summarize five major trends that will increasingly impact all companies in the coming decade.
In the commentaries that follow, you can read examples of how the world of HR is evolving and how the future has indeed arrived. John Boudreau reminds us that the lead Perspective isn't just forecasting trends; it's about changing how we see and define the world of work — and that can fundamentally change everything we do in human resources.
Eric Severson reports how retail companies are already thinking big as they take the lead addressing the expectations of Millennials. As employees and as customers, Millennials will have more and more impact on the workplace. Eric illustrates how human resources leaders and their companies can make a profound difference.
Tom Gaunt sees a different implication from the lead Perspective, alerting us to ways that networking increases the capacity of companies to form agile teams, while also advancing the careers of individuals.
Bob Black, a seasoned P&L executive, closes out the set of commentaries with an observation that the story here is not just about some aspirational future for human resources, but rather it's also about running a business and should be a priority for every executive.
If you have been wondering how human resources can embrace the future, and even shape what work looks like in the coming decade, then this installment of Perspectives is for you.
It's about changing how we see and define the world of work-and that can fundamentally change everything we do in human resources.
Marc Sokol, Ph.D., is Perspectives editor.
POINT
The Transformation of Work: Will HR Lead or Follow?
By Eva Sage-Gavin and Kaye Foster-Cheek
The pace of change and demands of the workplace require traditional HR roles to proactively evolve and transform. An increasingly connected world — fueled by rapid advances in technology — is driving massive workplace change.
These changes present new challenges and opportunities for HR leaders. A unique collaboration of professionals, The Future of HR project was chartered to envision what work will look like in 2025. This open-source project received sponsorship from the National Academy of HR, HR People + Strategy, University of Southern California's Center for Effective Organizations, and Pricewa-terhouseCoopers. Fortune 500 CHROs, Silicon Valley HR leaders, HR thought leaders, and academics have collaborated virtually over the last year and identified five emerging roles for HR practitioners that, if embraced, will keep our profession at the helm of change.
Five Emerging Roles for HR Practitioners
1. Trend Forecasting and Change Leadership
Business and HR leaders need to anticipate trends and then proactively lead change so organizations can thrive in the new world of work. One critical skill will be the ability to analyze diverse sources of data and develop insights, providing "sense making" with strategic recommendations that can guide CEOs, boards, and organizations — in advance of a trend's impact. As important, HR must shift its mindset from change management to change leadership and foster truly agile leadership.
2. Talent Sourcing and Community Building
Talent management will extend beyond our current view of company to include those who will come together to deliver work outside a regular employment relationship, such as e-lancers, contractors, and partners. Sourcing and recruiting must evolve to develop relationships over an extended period of time, leveraging global talent pools, and using crowd-sourcing or technology-enabled channels. HR leaders have the opportunity to serve as connectors, orchestrators, and brokers of a constantly evolving talent marketplace, bringing unique and innovative solutions to best match the demand and supply of skills and capabilities.
3. Organization and Performance Architecture
Diverse forms of "employment" and new ways of collaborating will challenge traditional approaches to how organizations have inspired and rewarded people to deliver results. Business practices will need to truly optimize talent and create less hierarchical, non-employment relationships. Organizations will need to apply a market segmentation approach to develop highly personalized "deals" for individuals that are still considered fair and equitable across a global framework.
4. Culture and Community Activism
We will continue to shift away from legacy, company-centric views of the world and toward views that consider an ecosystem of stakeholders, including customers, vendors, and current and future "employees," be they freelancers, partners, or shareholders. Company brand and reputation management strategies will shift from being externally focused to engaging employees and the larger talent ecosystem, as companies realize that these employees and extended influencers are the best brand ambassadors.
While corporate social responsibility will remain critically important, employees want to bring their whole selves to work in a very different way. They want to share their knowledge and skills beyond simply building houses or serving the less advantaged in limited volunteer engagements. They want their personal contributions outside and at work to serve a greater good, and they want to constantly experience personal growth. They want to craft employment to leverage their strengths, while also enabling them to have an impact on social capital priorities they consider important. In anticipation of this trend, HR needs to lead the shift of community activism focus from "nice to do" to being essential for talent attraction and retention.
5. Operational Excellence
The influence of technology will increasingly present options for work to be deconstructed and delivered by diverse talent pools anywhere and anytime. This will change the landscape of human capital contracting and service delivery as we contend with new practices, regulations, and governance. Private and public partnerships will emerge to shape new global ways of working, with transparency and equity as key themes by which these efforts are evaluated. HR is positioned to navigate the establishment of new structures and policies that enable and ensure equity of access to opportunities across the globe.
So Now What?
Challenging times offer an opportunity to flip our perspectives and throw away calcified assumptions. It is an understatement to say that we are on the precipice of a sustained period of change. This is an inflection point for our profession, and we have a choice: We can play it safe, making small adjustments to our own organizations. Or we can take up the real challenges and become leaders that leave a legacy, having made deep and significant changes to our profession and the global workplace.
This is the time to think big. We need to understand the shifts ahead and respond with bold and proactive strategies. Providing leadership to this future workplace is not without risk, just like those that CEOs, CFOs, and other top executives bear. And if we do not provide leadership on the new world of work, who will?
HR is positioned to navigate the establishment of new structures and policies that enable and ensure equity of access to opportunities across the globe.
Eva Sage-Gavin is vice chairman of the Aspen Institute's Skills for America's Future Advisory Board and the former CHRO and head of corporate affairs at Gap Inc.
Kaye Foster-Cheek is a senior advisor to the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and former CHRO at Onyx Pharmaceuticals and Johnson & Johnson.
COUNTERPOINT
Work and Community: Two Words That Change Everything
By John Boudreau
Eva Sage-Gavin and Kaye Foster-Cheek propose revolutionary ideas. What may be less apparent is how their model provides a bridge from today to tomorrow, and through two simple word substitutions.
The outside words in their model look familiar enough: HR has long embraced the need to plan, attract, align, and engage workers, supported by HR service delivery. Yet, inside the circles, greater distinctions emerge, and two in particular illustrate just how much may change.
From Employment to Work
"Employment" is pervasive in HR. Our plans relieve employment gaps, we attract employment candidates, we align employee performance, and we increase employee engagement. But what if you assumed that your work will not be done by your employees? The trend toward organization and performance architecture to include an extended workforce outside traditional company boundaries means just that. Can your HR operating models and strategies handle it? Most fall short.
Sage-Gavin and Foster-Cheek's framework encompasses the work that will continue to be done by employees, but only as one option. The future work and workplace also reside beyond traditional employment, such as creative work done by volunteer gamers, or software development done by freelancers on a cloud platform. Iconic organizations like Disney, Siemens, Apple, IBM, and Visa have avoided employment competition by loaning and borrowing employees from each other. Why shouldn't you?
Look again at their framework and you see that detaching work from employment fundamentally changes every HR concept. What does it mean to plan, attract, align, and engage volunteers, freelancers, or contractors? Put simply, winning organizations in the future will lead the work, not only the employees.
From Organization to Community
Consider how ideas like organization design, accountability, effectiveness, change, and management evolve when you simply substitute the word "community" for the word "organization." Traditional organization and management now become agile and boundary-less community building. Sage-Gavin and Foster-Cheek's framework reminds us that in a community transparency often trumps secrecy, democracy often trumps authority, and networks often trump hierarchies.
Indeed, even the Future of HR consortium that they acknowledge is itself a model of getting work done beyond employment and organization. For more than two years, prominent and creative executives and other leaders have devoted hundreds of hours to this work. Why? Each of them is motivated to give back to a profession that has given them so much, and they know that this profession must accelerate to meet its future potential. So they work beyond their day jobs to design this "future of HR" community collectively.
Two Simple Words
With two simple words — work and community — Sage-Gavin and Foster-Cheek describe a future that can be either wonderful or awful, or even both. On one hand, it can devolve into a winner-take-all and commoditized work world that serves few and exploits many. Or it can evolve into a sustainable ecosystem of empowerment across many varieties of work, of transparency and boundary-less opportunities, and all freed from the exclusive reliance on traditional concepts of employment and organization.
The ultimate path will depend on those who are willing to lead the transformation of work, and the profession that supports them. As duly noted, it is time to think big.
John W. Boudreau is professor at the Marshall School of Business and research director of the Center for Effective Organizations, University of Southern California.
Employers Can No Longer Stand on the Sidelines
By Eric Severson
It was a watershed moment. In March 2015, nearly a dozen Fortune 500 CEOs — including leaders of Apple, Salesforce.com, Gap Inc., and the world's largest employer, Walmart — publicly denounced legislation in Indiana and Arkansas that they believed discriminated against the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) community.
Such corporate activism on a controversial social issue would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Yet in a world where Millennials make up a growing percentage of the workforce, taking a stand on community issues is no longer taboo for companies; in fact, it's fast becoming a necessity. As a generation, Millennials are social activists — and they expect their employers to be too. According to the 2013 Cone Communications Social Impact Study, a majority of Millennials make critical decisions, such as where to shop or which stocks to invest in, based on a company's corporate social responsibility reputation. Of critical importance to HR leaders: 78 percent of Millennials said company reputation for social responsibility influences where they choose to work.
According to Deloitte's 2014 Millennial Survey, by 2025, 75 percent of the global workforce will be Millennial. That means "culture and community activism," one of the five critical skills identified in the Future of HR Project, will be more important than ever
Leading from the Front
For Millennials, social activism isn't something reserved for one's personal life or an all-employee volunteer outing. It's about how a company does business every day, Millennials expect businesses, not government, to take the lead on social change. "The biggest 'aha' for us in the whole study," said Scott Beaudoin, author of the Cone report, "was that although trust in business is still low, Millennials see business as the only solution for a better future. They've given up on government."
A poignant recent example of this phenomenon involves the minimum wage. After President Obama unsuccessfully lobbied Congress to increase the federal minimum to $10.10, Gap Inc. decided to lead on the issue by announcing it was raising its minimum wage to $10.00. Walmart, IKEA, Target, TJX, and others soon followed, announcing their own minimum wage thresholds. This single issue illustrates the power of business to significantly improve the quality of life for millions of Americans — just by changing a single business practice.
For Millennials, social activism isn't something reserved for one's personal life or an all-employee volunteer outing. It's about how a company does business every day.
Co-Creating a Better Community
As the lead Perspectives authors observe, "employees want to share their knowledge and skills beyond simply building houses or serving the less advantaged in limited volunteer engagements. They want their personal contributions outside and at work to serve a greater good, and they want to constantly experience personal growth."
According to a 2014 study commissioned by MSLGROUP, 69 percent of Millennials want business to make it easier for them to get involved in creating social change. One example of this co-creative approach was at Gap Inc., where we collaborated with our 74 percent female workforce to advocate for pay equality. On Equal Pay Day 2015 (April 14), while the company spoke out for pay equality at press conferences and in blogs, over 100,000 employees were encouraged to wear red to work (symbolic of women being "in the red" globally when their average earnings are compared with men's) and to post pro-pay equality messaging on social media.
A World Without Borders
The Millennial world is getting smaller — and less siloed. Having grown up in a digital world where physical proximity was irrelevant and boundaries blurred, Millennials expect the workplace to be like their Facebook page — a mashup of all of the interests in their lives, including work, home, family, friends, hobbies, and causes.
Demographers tell us that Millennials don't see the world in dichotomies the way their predecessors did (work vs. life, commerce vs. social responsibility, global vs. local). Instead, they focus on synergies and convergences, bringing together the diverse aspects of their lives. At Gap Inc. this meant we stopped focusing on work-life balance and instead focused on work-life integration. It's also why we encouraged employees to join us in advocating for social change both globally (for example, worker safety in Bangladesh) and locally (for instance, a local breast cancer awareness walk for store employees in Minnesota).
Who Better Than Human Resources?
Corporations have enormous power to create positive change in the communities where they do business. Given their substantial brand equity, marketing savvy, and human and financial capital, they are poised to be the change agents of the 21st century. And Millennials, as the primary consumers of the future, will hold them accountable for doing so. But who will lead business into this largely unexplored territory? Who better than human resources — the ones with "human" right in our name? Let's own it.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Point Counterpoint II by Richard Vosburgh, Anna Tavis, March Sokol. Copyright © 2017 HR People + Strategy. Excerpted by permission of Society For Human Resource Management.
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