Q As an HR Futurist for a $500b Futurist-City, NEOM in Saudi Arabia, a 2030 mega-project and an Advisor to the UAE Government, could you share with us, what is the role of HR in the future of your company?
HR plays a highly strategic advisory role. The Leaders are seeking confidence & security in their future and they look to HR for advise on how to stay competitive & minimise risk through innovative HR strategies designed for digital workforce transformations, leadership skills in a new multigenerational digital era, human-centric organizational cultures that support inclusive behaviours and an organisational purpose that supports a sustainable future. So, the role of HR is to really bring to life the most relevant industry trends and innovative best practices impacting the organisation to create the vision for the future to enable the Leaders to steer the organisation with confidence into new ways of working.
With a one-of-a-kind agenda, HR Vision Events provides the perfect opportunity for senior level executives to network and collaborate with peers from all over the world.
Q What are the strategies that you would advise modern organizations to prepare themselves for?
It is all about effectively leading human-centric digital transformation. What we are seeing now in HR Transformation is only the beginning, so it’s critically important organizations become digital-savvy now so they are well-equipped with the skills, knowledge and mindsets to embrace the rapid rise of technology around the corner that will fundamentally shift everything we know about ways of working now.
Q What are the critical areas of focus of HR teams of the future?
Increasingly yearly, CEO’s globally (PWCs CEO Annual Survey 2019) are most concerned about the lack of employees skills and the threat to business growth and performance.
So firstly, focusing on a clear re-skilling and upskilling strategy is a must.
Secondly, the rapid rise of data and people analytics now means HR needs to skilfully interpret this data into meaningful business insights quickly and communicate in common-sense business language for leaders to make timely and informed decisions. The volume of data is about to wildly increase with 5G so HR Teams need to get ahead if it, before data becomes too overwhelming and overly complex.
Thirdly, increased globalisation means we have an increasing shift to a larger contingent workforce. Even in today’s job market, there is a shortage of workers with critical skill sets. This has resulted in a steady, year-over-year growth in the size and cost of the contingent workforce. We also have 6 generations and millennials projected to make up 75% of the workforce by 2025 (Gallup 2018), so designing attraction & retention strategies that effectively leverage the best talent at the right time with an organisational culture that develops & rewards the right behaviours across the entire contingent workforce.
Q How do HR Futurists come to realize what will work in the future and what won’t? Where do you get your inspiration from?
One of the key things to understand about being a futurist is – we do not predict the future, we help create it!
I develop a holistic list of future-relevant trends and drivers that have the potential to affect the Company & and its people and develop a picture of what the coming decade is going to look like drawing on expert interviews, AI language algorisms, research studies and economic reports. These identified drivers are then clustered into social, technological, economic, environmental, and political factors and rated by subject-matter experts as to their degree of uncertainty and their impact on Human Resources. The resulting list of prioritized drivers formed the basis of our scenario analysis. These scenarios are based on a hyper-connected alternative workforce of humans, gig-workers and personalised-imaged robots, super-jobs that combine work and skill across multiple disciplines and use of mixed-reality workplaces all the context of managing employee wellness, the environment and relationships. We are seeing ever-increasing importance on a more human focus, more human connection and a more personalised employee experience.
I gain my inspiration from listening to industry experts & social disrupters, IT innovation labs, technology conferences, progressive Government Leaders, Futurism.com and my imagination.
Meet Kate Barker, HR Futurist, NEOM among other senior HR practitioners, talent acquisition experts, global executives, from large complex organizations with their valuable insights on HR trends and the future of work to learn how to manage human resources, at the TOP HR event of the year – Attend our upcoming HR Vision event – register now!
