The massive changes induced by the pandemic are escalating the importance of HR within an organization at titanic scales. Research says that 73% of employees depend on their employers for guidance to deal with the “new normal” and future of work. If the 2008 financial crisis was the time for the CFOs to expand their scope, this pandemic is the chance for the CHROs to do the same. HR has a tremendous opportunity and responsibility to navigate this part of the journey for the near future as new roles continue to emerge. 

The Cognizant Center for Future of Work and Future Workplace tried to understand what exactly will this future look like for HR. Their summit drew up a list of 60 possible HR roles that will evolve in the next 10 years. This brainstorm session considered various aspects such as economic, political, demographic, societal, cultural, business, and technology in this prediction.  Harvard Business Review (HBR) identified five core themes or patterns to these alleged new roles. 

Individual and Organizational Resilience

The remote work measures adopted worldwide have caused the digital economy to grow exponentially than ever before. This has put even more stress on our work-life balance. Even before the pandemic, various researches and think-tanks have reported worker burnouts. This paved the way for more emphasis on the importance of worker health that includes mental, emotional, and spiritual health with the same importance as physical.  This logically follows that a new HR role to be created that focuses on holistic employee well-being as a business strategy. For example, the role Director of Wellbeing could provide strategic management over wellness and design services and practices to nurture the emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual health of all employees.

With more than 88% of employees working away from the office, this role will need to work cross-functionally to ensure the employees outside the office receives the same benefits as the ones on site. Another role that appears is that of the “Work from Home Facilitator”. This person will have the responsibility of ensuring the organization’s processes, policies, and technologies are optimal for remote workers. 

Organizational Trust and Safety

HR professionals are situated uniquely to be the guardians of the ethical workplace. As organizations increase their involvement in the “Data Culture”, general expectations to uphold responsibility will increase. A 2019 study conducted on the individual attitudes towards AI across 10 countries found that 38% of individuals said that they were “very concerned” while 71% were “somewhat concerned” about AI collecting their data. Questions have been raised about bias, inaccuracy, lack of transparency, and privacy. 

These issues call for the need for more systems that involved humans in the system to ensure fairness and accountability. This could lead to the creation of a new role like a “Human Bias Officer”, responsible for helping mitigate bias across all business functions. These professionals would ensure that people are treated fairly throughout the entire employee lifecycle, without discrimination. In addition, there is another role that ensures employee safety at the business strategy level – Strategic HR Business Continuity Director. This person leads the HR response team and works with the C-Suite leadership to propose how to create a safe workplace — for both onsite and remote workers.

Creativity and Innovation

As business leaders envision new ways to grow their organizations amid exponential change, a new role at the intersection of corporate strategy and HR must arise, like “The Future of Work Leader”. This individual would be responsible for studying the skills that will be the most essential in the future. This role would focus both on setting the organization’s strategy for the future of work, as well as on proposing reskilling and upskilling efforts for current employees. The position would also synthesize big-picture inputs from academia, industry, and competition in the marketplace to envision new jobs and skills critical to the organization’s success.

Data Literacy

Currently, there are only a handful of HR functions that incorporate analytics to solve key people challenges such as team performance disparities and employee performance, etc. In the future, we can expect HR to follow the lead of their counterparts inside the organization and adopt data analytics. Doing so would allow them to provide more accurate insights around everything from employee performance and retention to the engagement level of C-suite leaders. A new role, “HR Data Detective”, could help bring about this change. This person would be responsible for synthesizing disparate data streams to help solve business problems. 

Human-Machine Partnerships

With the increase in robots and automation in companies, it has become fundamental for more human-machine collaborations. It is usually easier for humans to make judgments and pattern recognition. Meanwhile, computers are excellent with numbers and recognizing the “science” of the job but may not necessarily be able to decide, “What’s the right thing to do” in a given situation. This imbalance will resonate with the creation of new HR roles focused on how both can work together intuitively.

One new job that could be created is the Human-Machine Teaming Manager, a role that operates at the intersection between humans and machines and aims to create seamless collaborations. These managers would look for ways to increase cooperation rather than competition. A related role to this job is the Chatbot Coach, as predicted by James Loo (Head of HR, DBS Bank, Taiwan). A Chatbot Coach is responsible for creating a seamless candidate experience and works in conjunction with the recruitment team.

The point of this longer than usual blog was to give head start to a change that is coming in the near future. Organizations that can anticipate the coming changes in organizational structure are better positioned to out-maneuver their competition and weaponize HR as a business driver. With the evolution of new and existing roles, the most successful organizations will have a clear understanding of what needs to change to meet future business priorities.