I started my career in HR 16 years ago with a too-complex generalist role in a fast-growing and turbulent startup. 🚀 It was too complex because my primary job included everything from recruitment and onboarding to business partnering and talent development. One hour, I was interviewing people for marketing, operations, or store managers; the next hour, I went to do a training for regional sales managers, and a few hours later, I sat with a divisional manager and their direct report to facilitate the performance review conversation. For someone without experience in HR, my start was like diving into a turbulent ocean with cold water and figuring out how to survive best and fastest. And I loved it! ❤️
In the second year of my career, we were entering the global economic crisis of 2007-2008. While businesses were fighting to survive, the expectations of their employees were the highest in terms of performance, speed, and creativity. Optimization and cost-effective decisions were most expected of HR leaders back then. 💼
Today, I am thinking of the challenges that a modern HR or a P&C leader is facing and would be very curious to hear what you think and whether anyone can relate.
Driving the change from the passenger seat 🚗
First, the pandemic and then the horror of the war in Ukraine, and now in the Middle East, the speed with which we are ruining and exploiting our Planet has brought the world to a place of recalibration – recalibration of our personal values and goals, recalibration of what’s most important and how high on the list our well-being stands for us. In a world that is going crazy, the meaning of work, our profession, and our income is taking different shades for people globally. 🌎
Now, who better than HR leaders and P&C professionals can help a business navigate through these times in the best way possible?
Have you ever been in that front passenger seat, navigating the driver in some rural areas where the car navigation doesn’t work perfectly? This is exactly how I felt in my career very often, and some of you may feel the same even now 🙂 Working with the business leaders and founders as an HR leader means navigating our leaders to take the most effective route while not being in the driver’s seat. Here, patience, emotional agility, and the mastery of persuasion are coming to the front line of your skills, along with all the expertise and actual knowledge of your area.
We understand how our teams & people operate and “where/how” we should drive our “car full of people” to perform best as the business. But there are still times when drivers themselves make the final decision and drive a different way. Then you are the one who has to turn to other passengers and assure them that “yes, we have driven off the course,” but “please keep calm and continue performing, showing enthusiasm and engagement,” because “we will get back on track.”
This is a forever challenge that will still be present in 2024 and tens of years from now. HR leaders might know really well what it means to build business performance through people, our core and most valuable asset. Yet, we are not in the driver’s seat to push the accelerator towards that vision we are confident in or push the breaks when we need to slow down to figure out a better route or not drive our bus off the cliff.
This means we must learn how to influence and impact more effectively, or sometimes just change the vehicle and become a co-pilot for a leader who will listen to us much better. ✈
Attracting, developing, and retaining a global, multicultural, multigenerational, and diverse team 🌍
This is the challenge I love and am very excited about. As a person who is fascinated with human nature and human potential to grow, learn, and innovate, I love getting people to a place where we can work together well, understand each other greatly, co-create meaningful things, and learn from one another unique personalities. 🌈
The challenge of aligning people across cultures and continents isn’t new. What is becoming a new norm increasingly more is remote/hybrid work, gig contracts vs. FTEs, and all the complexity of the meanings of the word “team.”
Most companies that want to use the biggest potential of hiring globally face the reality of aligning their people regarding employee experiences and stakeholder management. When company X is developing and producing a product Y for a global market, it may be employing full-time employees in offices or on remote/hybrid, plus engaging some contractors, plus some part-time freelancers or almost-full-time-equivalent-to-an-employee contractors.
These complex structures create an enormous legal complexity regarding what a “team” is. We then need to make sure to reasonably separate the legal setups for each of these stakeholders while aligning them within one singular work culture, shared code of conduct, shared set of values and principles, and systemic and aligned people experience working with this company brand.
Keeping up with AI 🤖
There is so much speculation, predictions, analytics, and predictive analytics around what AI means for the jobs of regular human beings, along with how AI will affect such a people-focused but business-building function as HR and People and culture. My thoughts on this one could be put in the bucket with other “speculative” theories, so I am going to be brief: the major thing we would need to do in 2024 is to figure out to a very practical extent how we are going to use AI in our HR practices. We should and must use AI to benefit our productivity to bring better value and faster results to the people in our teams and systemically our businesses. 🚀
There are multiple ways we can incorporate AI without jeopardizing the function of a P&C professional but empowering and equipping ourselves substantially better:
- Automate your internal HR Admin services with AI. ⚙️
- Predict and better manage engagement or/and performance of the team, depending on the project stage, location, roles, compensation & benefits. 📊
- Make career development and learning more personalized for your employees. 🌱
- Use AI to predict your hiring needs and make better decisions on organizational design. 🎯
- Drive the onboarding process with AI, making it personal yet systemically effective for everyone. 🚀
- Automate all the repetitive tasks with AI and free your time for better purposes. ⏰
These are just a few examples of how we can improve HR lives with AI. There is so much more; the sooner we figure this out (I hope 2024 will be the year for that), the better. 🌟
I am sure you can foresee a wider range of challenges. Please share in comments what YOU feel are the biggest challenges in 2024.
Your perspective would be so valuable to hear! 🗣️