SHRM Moderator 0:04
Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us for “Future-proofing, HR: Upskilling, mentorship and career growth for HR leaders.” This program is part of the SHRM webcast series. You can learn about upcoming and on demand events from our E newsletters and the webcast homepage at sherm.org/webcast SHRM thinks Eightfold AI for sponsoring this program and our series of free webcasts for the HR community.
Rebecca Warren 1:56
Hey everyone. Hey Kathi, good to see you. How are you good to see you too.
Kathi Enderes 2:01
Rebecca, I’m excited for this.
Rebecca Warren 2:05
Here we go. I suppose we should introduce ourselves. Do you want to start us off? And then I’ll go after you?
Kathi Enderes 2:11
Sure. I’ll get going. Kathi Enderes, Senior Vice President of Research and Global Industry Analyst at the Josh Bersin Company. If you don’t know who we are, we are a research and advisory company for the HR profession, and we’ve done a lot of research and support for the HR so I’m really excited because this webinar is actually for you. If you’re in HR, it’s for you. It’s not for you helping somebody else, it’s but for you, for your own career. So super excited about that. I’m currently in Nashville, Tennessee, because I’m here at a conference. Usually, I live in California. If you’re wondering about my accent, I’m originally from Austria, and I’ll stop here and won’t bore you with my life story. Rebecca, over to you.
Rebecca Warren 2:57
I actually want to hear your life story, but we’ll save that for another time. So Rebecca Warren, I am with Eightfold AI. I’ve been with the organization for about four years now. Started out in customer success, helped build up that department, and now have moved over into a new role, focusing on talent centered transformation, where we work on using AI and talent intelligence to transform the life cycle of the entire talent lifecycle, focusing on people instead of jobs, so creating a whole bunch of new things around what that looks like to focus on people, As Kathi said, that’s what we’re here to do today. I formerly was in talent acquisition, so spent a lot of time there, working with large agribusiness, CPG, as well as retail and restaurant organizations. So super excited to be able to talk about ways we can support the HR community, and what kind of things you can do to upskill, reskill, and drive your career forward. So I think Kathi, you have all kinds of amazing research that you’re going to start us off with. Is that right?
Kathi Enderes 4:08
I have lots of research, probably more research than you would want to hear about. So I’ll get us going with that. And if you do have questions in the audience, please put them in in the Q&A right away. I don’t want to hold them to the end, if you have a question right away, and then we can address them as we go. I’ll give you a little challenge. I was just doing a webinar on Tuesday, and we had 98 questions in there. We had 90. It was an hour-long webinar. So, I mean, I want as many questions as you have. So I’ll give you that challenge. Okay, so with that, let me, let me get started, and let’s talk a little bit about just a broader business environment, not too much, but I think it’s important to set the context to say, what are we facing in HR right now?
Well, we’re facing a lot of opportunities and challenges. The first opportunity. The first theme, the first trend that we see is the labor shortage. And I know you might say, labor shortage. What labor shortage? But if you’re in recruiting, or if you’re in HR in general, or if you work in L and D, whichever area you work in, you actually know that it continues to be very hard to hire, to recruit, because we just don’t have enough people. We have about over 8 million jobs open here now in the US, for example, and about 6 million people that are not working right now of the working population. So even if every single person matched one of these jobs, which, of course, it doesn’t exactly match, because they might not have the right skills, but even if they did, we would still not have enough people, and that’s going to get worse and worse and worse.
So we have to think about how we not just hire, but also how we grow from within, how we move talent around, how we use skills. To think about what skills people have to modularize is work, and as Rebecca you said, to think about people, not just jobs. In all of this, a second area that is happening actually in all organizations too, is organizations themselves are changing too. So every organization is getting much more agile, much more team based, much more project based, and is getting a much more dynamic structure where we have to think about work and how work happens in new ways, not just in hierarchies, break down the silos and what it means for us in HR, of course, we have to break down the silos within HR to support the organization effectively. The third theme, of course, is AI. And I don’t have to tell you about AI, because I know everybody is talking about it. Everybody is thinking about it. Everybody thinks about how we use AI in HR, but also, how do we use AI in the organization? It’s going to impact every single job, your operating models, your customer models, basically everything that we’re doing in the organization, and HR has a really important place in that. And the last area I wanted to call out briefly has to do with employees. Employees are looking for more from organizations.
They’re looking for more engagement, more involvement, more of the say, more autonomy, more flexibility, and just being really at the center of everything the organization does as they should be. So we call that concept employee activation. And how can we activate employees and help them basically have that voice and that say in the organization? Well, every problem that we have in HR right now, or really in the organization, is not a single domain problem. If you think, for example, I just talked a little bit about the labor shortage, well, the labor shortage is not just a recruiting problem, because the talent, if the talent doesn’t exist, we also have to think about, how do we bring gig workers, contract workers, in there? How do we modernize work and have a much more project based approach, a much more team based approach. What do we think about mobility? What do we think about re-skilling? What? What about leaders and leadership models? How do leaders need to work differently and lead differently? What about pay and benefits and employee experience and job architecture? So all of those kinds of things go together, and I just picked one of these problems.
But you see, with all these connections, every single problem that we’re facing today in HR is actually not a single domain problem anymore. It’s really a multi domain problem. That’s how we came up with the concept of systemic HR. And all I could talk an hour or more about is just systemic HR, I’ll just talk a little bit about what we mean by systemic HR. Systemic HR is really for us. It’s not just a new operating model for HR. It’s an operating system for HR. So when you think about an operating system, it really is not just about org structures. It’s about how you support your internal customers, and we have to support our internal customers in different ways. Used to be HR was a service delivery function, a cost center where basically we had two problems come in, and we worked them off and on. Now we have to be much more consultative, much more forward looking, much more not reactive, but proactive and predictive, much more agile and dynamic, and for that, we in HR need to be what we call full stack HR professionals, and that’s where it gets to the skills that we’re going to talk about, and the careers and the career models. So HR people are cross trained. I know we’re all specialized, probably in one area, but we need to understand all the different areas of HR too, in order to support the business in these new ways, rotating in and out of the business, rotating in and out of HR as well. All of that is important because in systemic HR, it’s really an integrated system, not just disconnected Centers of Excellence or disconnected parts. Really means that. We’re moving from this orientation to service, from service delivery to consulting and products from cost to value.
And let me tell you when, when you’re adding a lot of value on really strategic priorities, like, where should we expand? Which geography should we put our resources in? What new business areas can we open up? How are we going to do an M and A all of those kinds of things? When you add value to that, nobody’s going to ask about cost anymore. It’s really not going to be about cost roles and of the HR business partners that are changing, of course, the HR professionals overall need to be full stack professionals, as I talked about before, it’s like the full stack engineer, right? They don’t just know UI or back end systems or anything like that. They know the entire stack enough to basically walk through the entire stack. And we need to do the same thing for HR as well. And being driven not just by users, what, like, who screams loudest, basically, who has the biggest problem? But we need data. We need intelligence. We need talent. Intelligence insights on knowing basically what problems are going to be next, and be much more proactive on that. And the goal for that is not just low cost, high kind of service delivery function or something like that, or high quality, but driving transformation, driving productivity and driving growth. So that’s the big shift that we see with systemic HR. Well, most organizations are not very good at this, and I don’t even have our maturity model in there, because I didn’t want to get distracted on that. But here you just have some statistics, some insights on some of the key factors of systemic HR, and how little most organizations are actually doing this. So if you are not doing these things that I’m going to talk about, don’t feel bad because you’re in really good company. Most companies are actually not very far along. And we are going to talk much more about careers and skill development and professional development. You see here in the first row here that only 7% of organizations actually have a formal professional development approach for HR. Only 8% have career paths that are defined for HR professionals. And only 8% of organizations rotate HR people between the different HR functions, only 3% outside of HR, and not on this slide. But I’ll tell you a little story about spending. So we’re working with a large consulting company, I won’t tell you the name, and they said, well, there’s how much they’re spending on their consultants per year, on their professional development, $5,000 when we asked them, How much are you spending on, on HR people a year, $500 so it’s like order of magnitude. But if we’re supposed to be kind of driving transformation and driving AI, for example, in the organization, how can we do this if we don’t get invested on so there is some companies that are doing this well, and I don’t have time to, of course, to tell you about all these case studies, but we have amazing, amazing case studies from all of these companies that we have here on systemic HR. And I think the key point here is that we have companies around the globe, across the globe, and different geographies, different industries, that are actually moving towards systemic HR so it’s not just a pipe dream. Basically, it’s real, and organizations are actually doing this and getting traction on it.
And so let me talk a little bit about who the HR profession is and who we see as HR professionals right now, and this is based on, and it’s going to blow your mind how big that the data side was here, this is based on 7.1 million HR people that are in LinkedIn. We collaborated with LinkedIn on that, and they basically pulled the entire LinkedIn database and said there’s 7.5 million HR people in the world, and if you think about who is on LinkedIn, there’s probably another twice as many that are not on LinkedIn, right? Because there’s entire countries that are not on LinkedIn, there’s many people probably that are not on LinkedIn, maybe in smaller organizations, or maybe in more local areas, right, that are not on LinkedIn. So lots and lots of people that are on LinkedIn, and not surprisingly, 66% of them are women. I think we see this everywhere we go, that many women are obviously in HR. And by the way, that same statistic also holds true for that top level of HR, the CHROs are also about 66-67% female. Millennials. So 51% are millennials. So lots of millennials, and they’re very highly educated. I know we’re talking about careers in education, but most HR people already have a bachelor’s degree or higher. So it’s not so formal. Education, but much more about business acumen, training on HR, training on basically different and learning about different disciplines and different areas of HR. Pretty short tenure, 1.6 years tenure, 400 HR skills. So there’s 400 HR skills, and that has improved, increased by a third in the last five years. So let us just sink in as 400 different HR skills that are based on the LinkedIn kind of data set, 250 HR roles that have increased by 25% in the last five years. And the most common role is basically the HR specialist role, but there’s hundreds of different roles, and as we see here, and job titles where the HR practitioners work, let me talk a little bit about capabilities and skills. And we distinguish between skills and capabilities. For us, the capabilities are the kind of the higher order areas where you need many different skills. Obviously, to do these, these kinds of capability areas, you see things like, for example, on our capability model, pay and recognition systems, that’s not a skill, right? That has many different underlying skills in order to manage and design pay and recognition systems, it’s not one thing, it’s many different things. But we have on our capability model 96 different capabilities in 20 capability areas so, and we’re constantly adding to that too, by the way, I think we just added a few on AI and we’re going to add more on the AI area. So as constantly new things come around. You see also things like business acumen, working with executives, all of those kinds of areas factor into that too. So it’s not just basically HR disciplines. It’s really the full spectrum of what HR has. And we have had, I think, over 9000 people assess their capabilities in our HR capability assessment, and we see some really interesting insights on what matters. So first, we actually correlated capabilities, HR capabilities, with company growth. We see that company growth rate is directly correlated to the strength of the HR capabilities, which is very powerful, right? So you could say to your senior executives, if they say, why does it matter if HR people have capabilities or not, how good they are in their capability area as well? We see that those that have the highest capability, capability is basically much more likely to be rapidly growing as an organization. So there’s a direct correlation. So it really, really matters how many capabilities you have, basically, what capabilities should you prioritize? I talked about that. There’s 96 and of course, there’s lots of them that’s lots to pay attention to. We also saw which one of those correlates to overall company growth again, like diving a level deeper, which ones are most impactful? And we see that a few are more impactful than any other ones. Doesn’t mean you don’t need the other ones. Obviously, if you’re a talent acquisition person, you need to be highly skilled in talent acquisition, so no doubt you need this for your job. But what about some of these maybe higher order things? Well, delivering developing leaders and managers is the most impactful and maybe not surprising, right? Because if leaders and managers are running the company well, then the company is going to be more rapidly growing, more set up for success. So that’s one of the most impactful things you can do and be good at in all of the capabilities change management and communication may be also not surprising, right? Because we’re talking about change being so fast and changing faster than ever, and then applying the principles of organization design are also very important. And maybe that’s also explainable by when AI comes into place, we need to redesign a whole organization. Who’s going to do this? It’s not going to be it that’s going to redesign the organization. It has to be us in HR that think about the people and how they work and how we’re organizing and how we’re designing the work. So not to say that the other other capabilities are not important. But I thought that was always interesting. Let me talk a little bit about, sorry, this is a build so I’ll build it up right now. Talk a little bit about HR roles and which roles have emerged in the last five years. I really told you about the number of skills, the number of roles and how much they have improved, I should say, in the last few years, which basically means the HR profession is getting much more complex, and it’s also getting much more strategic. So we see these 50 new roles that have emerged, and you have some of them highlighted here, not, not all 50. Well, these are all 50, actually, of them that we have on the right. Hand side, or about 50 roles, and we have highlighted here also how which ones of them are leadership roles. So there’s actually a lot of new leadership roles too that have evolved as a kind of a SDF function is getting much more strategic, much more business oriented as well. So the function is moving into this direction, to be much more complex, much more strategic. But it’s not all, not a straight line, and this is going to blow your mind, too. We were very surprised to see this. When you think about what roles are actually fastest rising and what roles are fastest declining. We saw that the roles that are fastest rising are actually accounting and administration related. So you see an accounting kind of administrative assistant, specialist. So some of the more administrative, more finance oriented roles are fastest rising, while some of the roles that are fastest declining are a kind of head of business management you see here, human resources, business partner, recruit a strategic advisor, some of this more strategic one. So that was kind of a surprise. So I think what this tells us is, there’s, it’s not a straight line. It’s not all Forward, forward thinking. Not every organization is catching up with the more strategic approach to HR, but it’s kind of a couple steps forward and maybe a step back as well. And so I think this, this was, this was pretty, pretty fascinating. I’ll share a few more of these insights with you. Rebecca, before we keep going, anything that you’d add to any of the things that I had said. I know I have talked a lot. So anyway, where do you want to jump in? I mean,
Rebecca Warren 21:46
I’ve just been taking notes furiously. I know I looked at the slides before we started, and there were so many things on there that I think are fascinating, right? Like thinking about how quickly the roles are growing, I was a little dismayed, and we’ll have to talk about this, maybe in our chat about the HR business partner and the recruiter declining. What does that look like for those roles? Where does that go? We talked about how only 7% of organizations have development programs for HR. I mean, I literally, like, almost started crying, like, Oh, that’s terrible. So the things that you’re saying are so relevant, and I think when we have our conversation and ask some of our questions, I think we’ll be able to pull this in. But even thinking about the labor shortage, right, when you say there’s physically and not enough people, and then you tie in the challenge of a job description looking like this and a skill set of a person looking like this, and they don’t connect. So you’ve got an even bigger gap, because we’re not looking at the right things when we’re looking at the roles right so, I mean, all of these things, I think, are super relevant, super fascinating. I’m so glad that you’re bringing these up, and some of these I think are going to have to have, I think maybe some folks in the audience are going to have to maybe reset expectations or think about things a little differently. So I’m glad that we’re bringing this up now before we get to a point of feeling like there’s no return or no hope.
Kathi Enderes 23:17
No, certainly. And I think that’s certainly a lot of hope and a lot of things that we can do. Because the other, the other thing that I’d also mentioned, and we’ll, we’ll talk about this more when we, when we get to our chat, basically, is, it doesn’t have to be so expensive, right? It doesn’t have to be this like, oh my god, we have this huge HR development program where we need everybody to have spent basically $5,000 like the consulting company that spent on their consultants, right? Some of the things could be smaller things. It could be shadowing. It could be mentoring. It could be working on projects, or just talking with people, basically getting coffee with an HR business partner. If you’re not an HR business partner and understand what their role is about, or when you’re in recruiting, maybe you work with somebody in learning right to understand what their role is about. So some of the things can be little things that really don’t have to cost anything. I know cost is always a factor, too. So let me keep going. I have a few more things that I wanted to share with you, and then we can turn to the questions, and then also turn to our conversation. So it’s great. And keep the questions coming. We’ll get to your questions as we go along. So I love that there’s some questions already in there. Okay, let me talk about a very important concept of systemic HR that’s really relevant also for building, kind of building your career in HR and building full stack HR capabilities, and that’s the 4r framework that we have created. And the 4r framework basically says, in a nutshell, any problem that you have, don’t just think about it from one kind of area. Think about it from many different areas. So for example, if you have faced a skill shortage or a labor shortage, a talent gap, or. Or a group is underperforming, or you want to open up a new site, or whatever it is, don’t just think about recruiting. I think recruiting is always the natural inclination where we say, well, we’ll just, if we want to open up this new site, we’ll hire 15 people there with a skill set, and off we go. And of course, in the labor shortage, and also with the labor pool being so kind of imbalanced, we can’t just focus on recruiting. Of course, you always have to do recruiting. It’s a given, right? We can’t just focus on recruiting alone. So you have to think about retaining the people that you already have as well. Because oftentimes it’s, oh, we’re going to recruit all these people meanwhile, I mean, people with maybe an adjacent or related skill sets are leaving out of the door, because you’re not thinking about their experience. You’re not thinking about pay equity. You’re not thinking about how leaders can lead better. So thinking about retention, retaining as well at the same time, thinking also about re-skilling at the same time. So thinking about, how can we give people, maybe with adjacent skills that are close? How can we help them have mobility, for example, with the talent marketplace, how can we upskill them, give them a career pathway that takes them from one role into another role? Maybe we can give them education. Maybe we can give them projects, learning opportunities, of course. And the last area is the redesign area, and that’s usually the most overlooked area, and that means maybe we have to think about the jobs completely differently. Maybe we have to use AI, for example, to supplement people, because AI is, of course, here to support people to do their work faster, better, cheaper, that kind of thing. And if you don’t have enough people, well, AI and work redesign different employment models, gig work, contract work, outsourcing, all of those kinds of things help with getting kind of closing that talent gap. And when I know we did a study with you guys with eight fold data based on eight fold data a couple of years ago on the healthcare industry, like the healthcare industry overall in the US, and we saw the massive gap that exists in clinical talent. It’s about 2 million people. It will be about 2 million people at some point. Redesign is accounting for almost 50% of closing that gap just needing less people, and that’s actually a good thing. It doesn’t mean anybody is going to lose their job. It actually means you’re going to be able to still do what you need to do as an organization, because the people that you already have are just not enough. Basically I just don’t have enough of them. So this is a really important concept. It really relates to what we have to do and what skills do we need to have as an HR team if we want to execute on this for our framework in an effective way? We also saw that the skills are actually overlapping these different functions. If you think about recruiting, for example, this is usually your talent acquisition team. Retain is usually your employee experience and maybe your total rewards. Team. Re skill is usually done in more traditional HR organizations by L and D, and redesign is usually done by hardly anybody, honestly, but the org development maybe, or change people, org design people that that work on that usually not, usually not done very well in most organizations. But what we looked at is, what are the underlying skills of all of these different groups? And these four are framework, and in the middle we put basically the comma and the overlapping skills that people in each of these groups have, so lots of overlap, lots of commonality already, and we can certainly do more of like bringing these different functions together from a skills and capability and roles perspective. And we also see, and this is a little bit funny chart, but this basically shows how the skill sets are overlapping or not, how they are moving closer together in these different domains, basically the distance or the proximity is related to skill similarities. So we see there’s already a lot of overlap in roles, in skills in these different groups, and it’s getting more and more so. By the way, we also did a chart five years ago where there were further apart, and now they’re moving closer and closer together in these in these different areas, last, last area that I wanted to talk about, and then we want to, we want to open it up, maybe for for the questions, for our conversation is We also surveyed all of our the people that have done our capability assessment in the Josh Burson Academy of what development they feel is most impactful or most important to them, what, how do they want to develop, be developed? And you see here, and I think we’ll hear from you in a minute too, what you think. But we see that coaching and mentoring is the most relevant and seen as the most relevant and the most needed. Totally makes sense, right? You want to find a mentor. You want to, of course, learn through courses as well. And we have a whole Academy in Josh Bruce and Academy for HR. Uh, we have 28 different courses, basically. But then you also want to have more responsibility. Maybe you just want to take on maybe more of a broader scope in your organization. Maybe you want rotations. And we hardly saw anybody doing rotations, going to networking events, conferences. Of course, it is relevant too. So, and you see, obviously these don’t add up to 100% because people say, I don’t want to just develop in one way. I want to develop in all of these ways, right? I want to basically work in like, build my skill set and become this full stack HR professional through all of these development opportunities. I’ll finish with a case study or an example of the LEGO Group, and we have many other examples, but I just want you to basically call the LEGO Group out, because I know you’re always looking for examples on who is doing this. Well, well, Lego they’re first moving into the direction of systemic HR, but they are also really thinking about the capabilities and how they are so important in terms of doing this transformation and becoming more consultative. So they defined what are our most important capabilities that we need? They assess where people are at in terms of their capabilities, and then they’re putting development rotations and learning, of course, all of these development opportunities basically towards closing those gaps, and they also move people around into other business functions. When I talked with the theater of Lego Lawrence Schuster, he said he moves people also into business areas from HR. So he moves, for example, recruiters into sales, and he moves like people analytics, people maybe into it, and vice versa, right? And that really shows you, then also the power of kind of getting it people maybe going into the HR organization as well, or sales people going into recruiting, or anything like that really brings HR together, also in a much more powerful way across the entire organization. Okay, I think I’ve talked enough. I’ll land on this last slide, and I think this is going to be the slide that we have up, because we talked about how we can’t actually take a slide off. So you’ll see this slide all the time. Here’s just some recommendations on what you could do to get started. And we have called out, and I know we’ll have this in the resources, a really exciting thing that’s for you, and it’s free. It’s our HR career navigator that we built eight fold and the Josh Burson company, we built this together. It’s totally free. You can just go in there basically, and upload your resume and see what skills you have. Add other skills that you think you have or that you feel maybe well, left out you can enter what career aspirations you have. But the dance system is also going to suggest to you, both which career steps you could take, and also mentors. And we have, I think, over 3000 people already in this that many people said, I’m ready to mentor people too, ready for mentoring assignments. And we have very senior people there, but all the way, basically, in all levels of the organizational hierarchies, CHROs, VPS, all the way to individual contributors in HR. So it’s really powerful. So check it out, if you would. And I think it’s going to be great. But then all the other things, of course, focus on rotations, projects, networking, connecting, shadowing, people, all of those may be no cost things that you could do as well. Just check them out and think about how you can further your career. Okay, I’ll stop here. And I know we have tons of questions already, too. Rebecca, so I don’t know, which is great. I think because I told you, I want to see as many questions as Alastair, which is amazing. So I love it. Nobody’s shy. Nobody’s shy. I love that.
Rebecca Warren 34:04
Well, we had thought about maybe putting up a poll asking what area of development folks would like to see for HR professionals. Not sure if we want to pop that up. Now, let’s take a look at.
Kathi Enderes 34:21
Okay, yeah, let’s do it.
Rebecca Warren 34:22
I don’t have control, so let’s see. Hopefully, the polls have been loaded.
Kathi Enderes 34:28
If not, I don’t know how to.
Rebecca Warren 34:31
Thank you. So we would love to get your feedback. And these are things that we have heard from folks, things that we’ve seen. So we would love to get your feedback. Um, I think Kathi, once we get these answers back, I would love to actually go off script before we’ve even started. And the question, let’s do it, the question that came in from, I hope I’m. Your name, right? Angelica, I thought, was excellent for us to start this conversation, so we’ll get these results. But the question that she had asked us is, why do you think it is so hard to pass from the theory to the practice in terms of leadership and development? And I’m assuming she meant in HR, so I would love for us just to think about that. Why is it so hard for us to think about that, the practice, as opposed to just the high level idea of HR, pie in the sky, everybody’s happy, you know, take care of all the people. So interesting things for us to think about. Let’s see what our results look like in the poll. You want to advance the slide, and we’ll see what we hear. So is it a strategic priority? Development dollars, tuition reimbursement? Have courses, you know? And I added this to the poll Kathi based on our pre webinar conversation. It had never, I had never really thought about it this way or this one where it says we hire HR people so we don’t have to do much development. And look at that, a little under 10% of folks selected that. When you said that, and I was like, come on, people don’t really do that. You’re like, oh yes, they do it. Blows my mind. Yeah. I mean, it’s really just higher, so we don’t have to do the development that just blew my mind.
Kathi Enderes 36:28
And it’s so funny, because we always say, how quickly skills change, right? And it’s the same in HR, of course, too, right? It doesn’t stand still. So if you hired somebody five years ago, the skill set that they need today is, of course, different, right? Because things move all the time, and what you know in HR is usually changing all the time as well. So hiring and then not having to develop it blew my mind, too. And people said, well, we just hire these experienced people, so we don’t really have to develop that. I mean, we all have to learn all the time, right? And I think it’s fun. It’s fun.
Rebecca Warren 37:06
So is that feeding into that question that was asked in the chat? And yes, we know we only allowed you to choose one. I know it was hard for folks to pinpoint and say which one’s the most. But I think adding to that question, you know, of, why is it so hard for us to move to the theory of HR, to the practice of HR? And I think it comes into play. Do you think people just feel like we should just know how to do this? We should just know how to be people managers, people leaders. We should just know how to treat people, right? Do you think that’s part of it? Or what do you think?
Kathi Enderes 37:44
Well, I think that plays into that. I’m also trying to understand the question, is it about HR development, or is it about leadership development? I wasn’t exactly sure which direction that question was going. So, I mean, I could, I could talk about simple leadership and development. It’s about leadership development. Okay, if it’s about leadership development, and you saw that developing leaders and managers is the most impactful thing that we can do in HR, I think it’s we are approaching leadership development, specifically in a very old fashioned way we are thinking about leadership development happening in classrooms only. We have to go to Harvard for like a week and go away, and then magically, leadership development leaders are going to be transformed. And of course, they go in. I’ve been to these programs too, right? And they’re great. You go to this one week long program, and it’s awesome. And you meet all these other leaders from your organization. When I was like, in house, in organizations, especially large companies, you go in there, and it’s fantastic. And then you think, oh, you know, I’m gonna apply for all this interview, because you never do right? So leadership development actually has to be a little bit more modernized too. I think that’s one of the areas that we’re still thinking about. It’s all just about big conferences, and then leaders are magically going to know, like, lead better. But we need, I mean, it’s not going to happen like that, right? And we need little nudges. We need, like, coaching, we need feedback. We need constantly, basically, to be listening to employers if we’re leaving them the right way. All of those things have to play into that too. So I think the spectrum of leadership development is kind of mostly still stuck in this 1980s big conference kind of thing. Once a year some leaders are selected to go to this beautiful off site, which is amazing, of course, and it creates a lot of excitement. But does it really change how leaders lead? Probably not, right? No, yeah.
Rebecca Warren 39:50
So, yeah, to add on to that, so excited to talk that I talked over you. Sorry. It’s. Right? But to add on to what you’re saying, I think that’s so Right, right? You go to a conference, you get excited, you bring all this stuff back. A lot of times, your HR department is small, and there’s nobody to help you do it, right? You come back and you’re like, all the things, and they’re like, We don’t have time for any of the things. Get back to work, right? Right? So there’s no way for you to build that momentum inside your company. Understand what other leaders are doing. It’s like you come back and all of the people like you said, you said you’re going to stay connected to you don’t. And so that feels very exciting and then very demotivating, all at the same time. And then the other thing to add to that, which I thought was so interesting, it kind of feels like the Wild Wild West, still with knowing what training, what development, what area should you go in? Right? There’s almost 30% of folks, and we have development money or tuition reimbursement for all areas of the business. But how do I know what the right class is? Do I want to spend my 500 to 5000 whatever it is, on taking a class at Harvard. Is it taking, you know, joining a professional association and meeting monthly with folks in my neighborhood like there’s no there’s no guidance on what that looks like for yourself? And then how do you continue to drive that forward in the organization, when HR tends to run lean, as you said, looked as a cost center as opposed to a value added organism, you know, a department. There’s a lot of things that are really hard to figure out. Where to even start. Where
Kathi Enderes 41:30
Do you even start? Well, and I think where to even start with, what do you want to do? Right? It starts with, if you’re thinking now about HR development, what are your career aspirations? Do you want to stay on the path, wherever you are on that path to to basically go up in your HR career, which is great, or do you want to go into a different direction, or do you want to just be better at your job? All of these are great answers. But I think it starts with every person saying, what do I want to do? How do I want to grow? Where do I want to go? And then you can say, well, how do I develop that skill set? And where, how far away am I from this? And how can I find somebody I can think of mentoring and coaching. And you saw too in what people’s like, 7000 people said in our capability assessment, mentoring and coaching is one of the most impactful things, and usually it doesn’t even cost anything right finding a mentor. And I know we can find mentors in our HR career navigator now too, and it’s the one of the most impactful life changing things. Every time, when you ask people, How did you get where I mean, if you ask a leader, and if you’re interviewing leaders, how did you get, where did you get basically and what was most helpful? A lot of times, people will say it was the people that coached me, that helped me on the way, that mentored me, that sponsored me, all of those kinds of personal things really, really make a big difference. When you think about it, you ask people, What has been the most life changing in your career? It’s usually not. It was a course that I attended, right, or even an off site, great Harvard program that I attended, but it was usually I had this great conversation with this senior person that I really respected, who gave me some really hard feedback, or maybe some really helpful feedback, whatever it is, right? So I think those are really important ways to develop and grow in the HR career.
Rebecca Warren 43:24
Yeah. And so one of the other things that we’ve talked about is what’s coming, right? We’ve seen the list of titles that are declining. That doesn’t mean that the skills inside of those roles are declining, right? First of all, HR VP and a recruiter like that’s not going away. But what is that moving towards? So when we think about that, where do you see the biggest skills or capabilities that will become indispensable for HR over the next three to five years? And I’m guessing it’s not very small skills. These are broader, like adaptability, capability,
Kathi Enderes 44:05
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that’s the capability area, right? Some of these capability areas that we talked about, I think our, I mean, this the study there that we where we correlated what capability areas actually most impact business outcomes. I think they’re very good indicators. If you think about these top three that I had on the slide before.
Kathi Enderes 44:31
So developing leaders and managers, change management and communication, applying the principles of work design, all of these are not they’re not actually AI skills in themselves at all. And by the way, we do have the AI capabilities in there too, but they are not things, also not things that your AI tool will ever do for you. I don’t think so. I mean, it can help develop leaders and manage certainly, right? But is it going to be your leadership development strategy? Energy, of course, not. The strategy has to come from us in HR to say, how do we develop leaders and managers? What is our new leadership model? What are the leadership capabilities that we have to develop change management and communication? Of course, critically important, right, with all the change that we see in the environment. I mean, we talked about, organizations are changing. Labor market is getting really tight. Ai being here, employee expectations are changing. That change was at the bottom of all of the themes that I shared in the first slide. So being able to help the organization with change management and communication, of course, is critically important and applying the principles of work design, which is a very underutilized skill right now in most of HR, a very scary topic a lot of times. But what it comes down to is actually consulting. It really comes down to consulting skills, being good at understanding what does the organization need to accomplish, and then bringing the organization design and and thinking about who’s accountable for what and what drives real outcomes. So at the heart of these even maybe, and you call it out too, maybe more fundamental skills or capabilities, however you want to call them, of maybe consulting skills, empathy, like questioning, making sure that you’re listening well, adaptability, all of these even more fundamental things that I think are getting more and more important for every discipline, honestly and for everybody, not just us in HR as AI, is coming into play.
Rebecca Warren 46:39
Yeah, absolutely. And I think all of those things, if we do them in a bubble, are ineffective, right? All of those things have to be tied to what your organization is trying to achieve. If we just continue down the path of HR as a cost center, we’re going to continue to be marginalized, right? So if we, if we tie everything we do back to that organizational goal to become that value added, here’s where we can show our value because we tied to this organizational goal, we did this. And I don’t know about you, Kathi, my opinion, and this is what I’ve done in some of my former roles, which has helped me as I tend to ask for forgiveness instead of permission. Now, I don’t mean that I go out and just break all the rules, but if I see something that needs to be done that doesn’t necessarily fall into my wheelhouse, that’s one way for me to learn more, add more value, drive into something different. Somebody may not come to me and say, Hey, Rebecca, can you create a competency model so that we can be better at interviewing? But, you know, at a former company, I saw that we had a gap, and I just jumped in. Of course, I asked questions like, hey, but I’m going to go ahead and expand my role if I see that there are areas that I can add value. I mean, maybe that’s the start of, how do you broaden your role? How do you add value? How do you think beyond just a job description? I don’t know what you think about that, and I’m not trying to say, like everybody goes out and breaks the rules, but maybe we think bigger than what the job description is. Or where else could I add value? Or where do I see gaps that maybe I could create a project or partner with other people on? I think there’s ways to do that without a formal guide.
Kathi Enderes 48:23
What a great example, right? Because I think sometimes it might be you’re sitting back and waiting for the opportunity to come to you, but sometimes it’s like, oh, can I find the opportunity to add value? Right? If you see a gap there, then, of course, you don’t go out alone and just create it in a vacuum. But you ask the people that might be related to that, that might have it in their area. I was like, Hey, can we work on this together? How can I add value? Because I guarantee you again, if you’re adding value to the business, nobody’s going to say, well, you added value, but I’m sorry, it wasn’t your job, right? And nobody’s going to say, Oh, you don’t hear that. Sorry. I didn’t want all this value, I mean, and of course, you have to do it. I mean, nobody’s gonna say, Well, you added all this great value, but I’m sorry. We’re not gonna take any of this because it wasn’t your job. So I think that’s like thinking beyond kind of where your job is creating projects, but then, of course, collaborating too. So it’s not to say that you want to alienate, of course, the people whose job it might be or whose area might fall, of course, you’re going to, as you did to Rebecca, right? You’re going to walk across together with them and say, Hey, this, I see this need. What do you think? And then they might maybe say, Well, yeah, but we don’t have the bandwidth, or we don’t have everybody that can do this or something. And then you can stand up this project, or shadow project, or maybe be part of something and create, creating something useful. I think that’s a really good way to get started as well. And I know there were some questions about creating business acumen. And I think creating business and acumen, i. Start with actually doing the right, like just learning about reading about your business, or reading how finances work, or P and L works. That’s all good and nice, and I think that gives you some of the basics. But really, like creating business acumen comes from working with the business, educating yourself, and basically understanding what their problems are, and how does the organization make money? How do we satisfy our customers, who are customers? Sometimes in HR, we can be a little bit remote, move on that, especially if you’re working in, like, in a COE area, right in the center of excellence area, then you can be, like, twice removed from that, almost right? You say, Well, I don’t really understand how the organization makes money. I don’t really understand who our customers are, what our pain points are. So getting into a project or into an experience like working with an HR business partner, interviewing HR business partners, for example, who are closest to the business for the areas that you want to understand is, I think, one of the best ways to do this too. So most of these things, of course and the courses can give you some foundation, but the courses are not everything, right? So you can attend courses, how to think about it. I mean, all the courses, for example, that we have in the Josh Bucha Academy, they’re great, and they’re giving you some great foundation, I think, to then apply this in your own organization, so that the thought is always, it’s not an either or it’s not a course or your experience. It has to be built together, right? It can’t be like one thing. It has to be.
Rebecca Warren 51:34
And something that you mentioned earlier, that is continually in my brain. And it has been in my brain for probably the last six to 12 months and somebody had mentioned it in the questions of, where are the analytics right? Where is the role for analytics? That wasn’t in the top rising was accounting, not analytics, and it wasn’t declining. And the thing that keeps swirling in my head is, if we keep doing analytics instead of insights, right, if we keep thinking about reactive instead of proactive, we’re always going to get what we get right? We’re not getting anything new. We’re analyzing stuff that’s happened and then trying to adjust. But when we think about AI, we think about talent intelligence. We think about how tech can help us predict, as opposed to react. You know, in thinking about changing the metrics and how we’re measured in HR, I think we have become, especially in TA, very, very specific and very like, hey, we reduced our time to fill but none of that moves the business exponentially, right? It might move something incrementally. But how do we think about new ways of measuring hrs success, hrs criteria, right? If, if, what, what thing is going to impress the board. What kind of goals can we put together to say, hey, we’re gonna do this to change the industry, not just to report up that we got better by shaving seven days of our time to fill.
Kathi Enderes 53:12
It’s such a great point, and I didn’t include it in this overview, because I know we didn’t have that much time. I said we could talk and hire out about systemic HR and one of the key points that we saw also these systemic HR organizations, they don’t just measure their success of the HR function by efficiency metrics or engagement metrics, or just time to fill like butts in seats for learning or something like that. Or how happy the candidates were, where the people were learning how engaged people are. These are all good metrics, of course, and nothing to say against them. But if they are thinking about the number one, the most important metrics that they are measuring, they are actually measuring business success measures. So they say, did we open that site? If that was our aim, our goal was to open up a new location, for example, to push out a new product to our customers. Did we actually accomplish that? Did we accomplish what the business had to accomplish? And if we didn’t, then there’s a part of that has to do with what we did in HR. So they’re really measuring their success in HR by the success of the business, not just by how we’re doing internally. So just a different way to think about it. Obviously, we need all these controls, of course, to be more efficient. Of that, not to say compliant. Of course, you need to do that well. And it’s not to say that you don’t have to be compliant when you’re systemic, right? Absolutely, you have to be, you have to be efficient. You have to use technology and all those kinds of things. But you’re really thinking about, did we accomplish as a business, what we wanted to accomplish? And we didn’t. Then we at NHR, have a part of that too. We have a stake in that too.
Rebecca Warren 54:52
Yes, it’s that bigger partnership. I love that. It can’t just be a silo. We’re over here planning events and putting together the company. Picnic, right? It has to be, what are we doing to drive the company forward? And that slide that you showed with all of those intersections, right? Like, that’s how work gets done. That’s how overall the business succeeds, is when all of those pieces interact.
Kathi Enderes 55:15
Well, exactly.
Rebecca Warren 55:16
I have, like, we had, like, seven more questions that we were going to talk about, we didn’t get to that. We’ve got four minutes left. So what do you want to make sure that in the next two minutes that our audience hears or understands we’ll certainly take these questions back and see if we can develop some more answers, maybe put out some blog posts or or answer those in different ways. But what do you want to make sure that we leave our audience with,
Kathi Enderes 55:44
Well, I would love to answer a few more of these questions honestly and because it clearly resonates with people, but I mean, I think we talked about this too, as if the role of HR is more important than ever. So we see that with AI coming into play in a big way, we in HR have this huge opportunity to actually play the biggest role that we’ve ever played in the history, I think, of any kind of business and HR, which is super exciting. So I think knowing how important your everybody’s capabilities are, just taking advantage of the tools you have, taking advantage of the opportunities that you already have, just moving into the direction of becoming these full stack HR professionals and moving your career into the right direction. I think that that’s kind of a very positive call to action that I wanted to make for everybody.
Rebecca Warren 56:44
I think that’s great. This HR cannot be a passive department. It has to be proactive. It has to be driving. We talked about it. It can’t be the cleanup crew, right? You have to be driving the things, not fixing all the things that went wrong when somebody else caused some issues. And I think the one of the things I wanted to make sure that folks think about this too, is we talk about what a career path looks like. And I will say that there is no linear career path in HR anymore. I think it used to be, you start as a specialist, maybe you move into TA, or you move into a business partner role, and then you move into, you know, a director VP, into the CHRO role. I don’t think it happens that way anymore. And as you showed, there’s so many intersections between L and D and dei and organizational development. And roles are becoming more, I think, expansive and a little squidgy, which is great, because I think that encourages us to continue to learn and to grow. And I think what you said is so critical to evaluate what you want to do. I always say a resume is a list of things I never want to do again. I want to continue to do more things. I never go back to the same, you know, vacation spot twice, if, if I you know, if I can see something new, I have that FOMO to the mth degree, I want to learn new things. Do new things. Well, what do I want to do right? Evaluating your passions, evaluating the things that interest you, and then figure out how to get that done. Is it connecting with a mentor? Is it with the coach? Is it talking to your manager? Is it looking externally, what does that look like to drive the things that you’re passionate about? Because that’s when your career is really going to take off. Thoughts on that
Kathi Enderes 58:27
Absolutely, absolutely no. I totally agree. And with all these new rules, we saw it, right? There’s so many new roles, 50 new rules in the last five years, 100 more skills, right? It’s changing all the time, too. So it’s not a once and done, right? It’s not no longer, well, I said I wanted to be x, and now I have to stick with it, because new roles are constantly coming along, new skills, new capabilities are constantly being important. So I think it’s the sky’s the limit, honestly, which direction you want to go, including HR and including non HR, by the way, because there’s also areas outside of HR that you could go to. So I think
Rebecca Warren 59:06
Am I right?
SHRM Moderator 59:08
Exactly. That’s right. That’s right.
Rebecca Warren 59:11
Well, hey, we’re out of time. I’m going to flip it back to our sure moderator to wrap us up and walk us out.
SHRM Moderator 59:25
Thank you both so much. I speak for everyone. This was a fantastic program, but before we go, I have a couple of announcements. First, this webcast is proudly sponsored by Eightfold AI. Eightfold AI’s market leading talent intelligence platform helps organizations retain top performers and reskill their workforce. Recruit talent efficiently and reach diversity goals. A full patent and deep learning artificial intelligence platform is available in more than 155 countries and 24 languages, enabling cutting edge enterprises to transform their talent into competitive advantage. For more information, visit www.eightfold.ai. I’m also going to share the information on the PDC that you’ve earned today for viewing today’s program. That number is on your screen, but it is 25 dash, P, P, 6h, f, so we have about a minute before the program window closes if you haven’t downloaded your certificate for viewing today’s program. I also encourage you to also check out the additional resources that are in your pre recorded program resource area. The number is on your certificate, which if you have and you can download now. You do not need certificates to claim a recertification credit. Those Tiffany come in handy in the unlikely event that you’re audited. If you’re missing some of all your certificates from SHRM webcasts, don’t worry. We can get you documentation. Just let our customer care team know these SHRM webcast certificates you’re missing. You can contact them at the address of shrm@shrm.org, now when the program window closes, in just a moment, an evaluation form will pop up. We hope that you take it from moments to fill that out. It’ll help us assess this program and to plan future events before we start off like thanking our speakers for the information you provided today, and I want to thank everyone for tuning in and for being with us if we’re Choosing SHRM for HR webcasts. This concludes today’s program.
