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HR leaders are being called to reimagine their strategic role to become critical integrators of human potential and artificial intelligence. By aligning closely with business objectives, leveraging data-driven insights and championing employee experience, business-driven HR leaders can drive organizational effectiveness and innovation.
To succeed on that path, however, leaders must be clearly aligned with their organization’s business objectives, ensuring that every HR initiative directly supports core business goals and key performance indicators.
“This is easy to say and hard to do,” said David Millner, futurist and founder of @HRCurator. A business-driven HR leader translates the organization’s strategy into clear action-orientated plans and activities, sometimes at the detriment of other less important initiatives, he said.
Here are four ways business-driven HR leaders can take a holistic, technology-forward and employee-centric approach to organizational leadership.
1. Focus on Stakeholder Management
Determine which stakeholder relationships are critical to strategic versus operational priorities, Millner said. For every stakeholder, map out their business challenges and pain points.
Every company has a range of stakeholders including investors, customers and employees, and they often have conflicting interests. “We always assume that in one company everyone wants the same, and in my experience that's not the case at all,” said Mia Gren-Sørensen, vice president, head of global talent at Danfoss, a Copenhagen-based engineering firm focused on energy efficiency.
The first step to balancing competing stakeholder interests is to acknowledge there are different priorities. “You're never going to make everybody 100% happy but just having the wherewithal and being present with the stakeholders to understand their needs is a big step,” Sørensen said.
2. Embrace HR’s Role Integrating Employees and AI
Business-driven HR leaders will be critical to the technological transition that is required to integrate new technology such as AI across organizations, Millner said. For instance, HR can advocate for the company to use AI as an employee empowerment tool, not as a means to replace workers.
HR leaders should position themselves as the integrators of human and AI productivity resources, said Max Blumberg, PhD, an affiliate research scientist at USC Marshall Center for Effective Organizations. By ensuring that humans remain an essential part of any AI strategy, HR can harness the augmented power of humans and AI working together to improve both effectiveness and employee experience. “By focusing on effectiveness, we're not replacing humans but empowering them to do more,” he said.
This will require HR to advocate for effectiveness over efficiency and to push for AI to support employees in their work. By proactively managing the integration of employees and AI, HR ensures that AI adoption benefits both employees and the organization, Blumberg said.
Related Article: Tactical HR: The Missing Link in Execution
3. Maintain the Employee Experience
Employee experience isn’t waning, it’s evolving, Millner said. Engagement, retention and scarcity of talent remain underlying challenges across businesses as they face ever-changing external competitive markets.
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HR leaders can maintain a balance between business operations and employee experience by using data and analytics to identify operational inefficiencies, track employee engagement metrics and demonstrate connections between people outcomes and business performance, Millner said.
4. Engage the Board
Business-driven HR leaders translate employee-experience metrics into business impact stories that the board can understand, Millner said. Everything should be about demonstrating the financial implications of the workforce experience related outcomes, showcasing specific improvements that illustrate the link between employee-experience investments and organizational performance.
“Boards respond to data that ties employee experience directly to organizational outcomes,” Blumberg said. By presenting employee experience as a driver of tangible business results, HR can influence board decisions and secure buy-in for employee-focused initiatives.
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