By Ashley Bennington, CHRP

HR is in a unique position in a business world that is both changed and changing. As fundaments of economy, demography, technology and motivation continue to shift, HR will also undergo big transitions, most likely by mixing with other disciplines in the business world.

The concept of disciplinary fusion allows us to put any two business departments or academic disciplines together and ask the question, “What could be produced by combining that knowledge, and how could the organization benefit?”

From what I’ve done in my career*, to what HR students are learning today, and what other young professionals are already doing in their careers, I am convinced the set of changes in HR over the next five years will be derived from what was learned up until today.  After all, consider that five years from now has already happened for those at the head of the learning curve.

Success in HR: 2011 to 2016

This article isn’t meant to suggest that the only success HR will realize will be through the fusion of its practices with other business disciplines. I do believe, however, that with so much change behind us, and so much more in front of us, that pooling expertise can only help HR do a better job for organizations.

It was William Gibson who said: “The future is already here. It is just unequally distributed.”

As those who keep current with the pages of PeopleTalk already know, this holds especially true for HR. What will change most about HR in the coming five years is our mindset. Empowered by technology, accredited by the CHRP designation and increasingly regarded as a core driver of business, the HR opportunity is only delimited by the scope of our knowledge partnering.

How might organizations benefit most from this fusion of human resources with other core functions?

HR Business Intelligence & Visual Analytics

With no small thanks to BC HRMA’s Knowledge and Research function, HR Metrics has been on the tip of the business world’s tongue for several years now. Moreover, Accenture research has shown an increase in hours and jobs created in metrics, even within smaller HR departments.

This is just one aspect of our technological evolution. While it has given us new tools of knowledge, it has also changed the toolkits of those in HR, as well as the skill sets of those entering the profession.  The collection of data, the use of reporting software, and the proficiency level of creating and leveraging strategic intelligence will likely increase as more HR business professionals with skills in spreadsheets, statistics, and reporting software enter the labour market. This is likely to provide a further spur to competitive economies as organizations become better enabled to mathematically optimize their core assets.

The next evolution of HR via technology, though, will occur in the field of visual analytics; the tools of learning and presentation can only be anticipated to evolve. What this brings to HR are key tools of instant information and dynamic presentation. The concept of the business ‘dashboard’ is evolving. What we can expect to see more of are active dashboards, those displaying key HR business metrics within live, visual or graphically enabled formats. The best ‘at-a-glance’ dashboards will contain the highest level of relevant information possible to empower strategy formulation and decision-making.

Contract Management: Outsourcing, Contractors, Alliances, and Consultants

Some organizations already make use of outsourcing entire aspects of their value chains and business processes to other companies on the criteria of ‘better, cheaper, faster, and greener.‘ Others bring on consultants and forge strategic alliances to optimize their value and supply chains. Some, such as Toyotatown in Japan, create symbiotic business communities that share utilities, infrastructure and fixed costs.

Managing this wide variety of functions often does not fall on HR, but it is most likely to benefit HR’s consideration.When it comes time for HR to assist in optimizing the labour budget for permanent employees, temporary employees, students, and overtime, contracts and consultants will also be included as part of the mix. Fusing with procurement, legal, real estate, and financial departments could mean that jobs be created in HR departments for contract managers, liaisons, lawyers, buyers, agents, and accountants in order to best handle new ways of completing more work.

Social Media/Search Engine Recruitment Marketing and Employer Branding

We have faced shortages of workers and skills in Canada before, but never before has HR been equipped to step to the frontline in the proverbial ‘war for talent’. While the metaphor might have lost its luster, the reality is that HR is already re-equipping itself for the frontline. Count on recruiting departments continuing to tap into the same cutting edge marketing practices and technologies that organizations are already using to sell their goods and services.

Controlling recruitment marketing budgets (a prime target in budget cuts) while increasing the number and quality of job applicants may seem like competing demands, but these priorities will further drive the fusion of marketing, HR, and information technology together. As these technologies become increasingly available and affordable, HR will more directly engage the talent pool on both community and global levels.

We have already witnessed the move from big newsprint readership to online readership, and the corresponding shift from employment classified ads to online job boards. More shifts are coming and in some cases,  are already here. The spectacular growth of social media such as LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Foursquare and blogging has HR changing tactics. As recruiters, we will continue to change and adapt to leveral online endeavours. To drive maximum web traffic to online job postings, recruiters will leverage skills in search engine optimization, media production, online recruitment marketing, and various forms of social media.
With many organizations exploring the affordability and impact of such technologies in our competitive labour market, online employer branding will no longer be a ‘cutting edge’ practice. Instead it will become a basic hygiene factor for successful recruitment.

Similarly, just as the Web 2.0 has enabled companies large and small to communicate and connect as never before, we now have access to affordable applications that bring powerful metrics with automated and customized HRIS. Couple this with five years of further optimization in web analytics, recruitment metrics and interface design, and HR will be working with a vastly expanded field of information and influence. Websites, search engines, and social media will be mapped visually and mathematically.

Expect specialists in marketing, web analysis, visual analytics and information technology finding more habitable homes in HR departments.

Work/Life Design

Most new hires over the next five years will hail from Generation X and Y. Despite countless papers and books published on generational differences, including Don Tapscott’s, the reality that HR will have to be manage is that these two generations are either now raising children, or will shortly do so.

In the five years, at the exact same time the Baby Boomers are retiring, repeated studies have expressed the same finding: a ‘shortage’ of workers may ensue. If this is the case, then it will become a ‘buyer’s market’ of job seekers making demands of organizations for certain working conditions, and not the other way around. We may see a sharp decline in the traditional ‘Monday to Friday, 9-5’ mentality as employees discover that the benefits of such flexibility.

If the research on what different generations want from employers holds true (pick any source, from Towers Perrin to the Conference Board of Canada, 1999 – 2011), Generation X and Y will actively pursue jobs not with best offerings on base salary, bonuses, benefits, and pensions (that may come later, when they’re older). Instead, their early focus will be with jobs that offer flexible hours, telecommuting, virtual work, child care, elder care, transit passes, compressed work weeks, personal days, and more vacation than a province’s legislated minimum requirement. In short, these generations will largely chase what Timothy Ferris (The 4 Hour Work Week, 2009) calls, “Lifestyle Design,” because they value their personal and family time more than an extra $10,000 in salary.

Recent Princeton research, picked up on by Daniel Pink (and spread on TED.com and Youtube) has now shown that happiness doesn’t go up past $70,000 per year in salary. More people are noticing, and I believe it was in this recent great recession the term “fun-employment” was born.

Even the status of being an ‘employee’ will become a greater bone of contention for people, as they seek greater autonomy and flexibility in their lives, and want complete control over the limited number of hours in their busy days.

The other contingency of workers to experience big changes in the next five years will be the people who have already retired. From my time at Fraser Health and BC Hydro, the data indicated that an increasing percentage of employees who retired from full-time positions are returning as part-time and casual workers or consultants to work on projects they had had always wanted to explore. HR will be busy on both ends of the generational spectrum and the benefit of such ‘return-workers’ is immediate. They work as mentors to their own replacements, and project managers, and they know everything about the job, company, and industry. The “new retirement” is shaping up to be healthy and financially secure people who want to work part time hours, or full time hours for a few months of the year, and then vacation whenever they want, do what they want when they want, and simply shy away from stress or anxiety. The lesson of “lifestyle design” seems to apply here as well.

The social sciences, including psychology, sociology, and anthropology examine how people live their lives, and have much to offer the HR profession; count on their impacting the employment landscape with solutions that achieve maximum productivity for organizations while simultaneously giving employees complete control over their time, effort, and well being. The workplace culture essentially shifts from employees being distrustfully held at work for long hours to ensure all the work was done, to employees being at work just long enough to complete the work the company needs, well before deadlines, 100% of the time (or the amount of work and compensation is renegotiated).

Labour Finance

Count on HR getting increasingly comfortable with the language of finance moving forward. Managing  labour costs can mean profit or loss, or success and failure, for any organization. A leading organization in the next five years will be able to avoid the costs of layoffs and severance packages, but also burst out of the gate faster than competitors to seize the labour market when it rebounds. These organizations won’t just do well when the economy booms,  or survive  a recession. They will mimic what winning basketball teams do: take full advantage of the few extra points gained ‘in transition’ between defense and offense.

As HR department develops further skills within business intelligence and visual analytics, it can make better decisions, and do so collaboratively with other parts of the organization, such as procurement, accounting, contract managers, marketers, researchers, and lifestyle designers. HR will then be able to efficiently and effectively manage not only the size and cost of the “permanent workforce” of employees, but optimize the total work requiring completion at the company using its “core” employees, temporary employees, students, contractors, consultants, allies, volunteers, and overtime.

To execute rapid workforce size and composition changes, people with skills in macroeconomics, microeconomics, risk management, and calculus can create extraordinary value for an organization. They are also the same people who then combine these disciplines together to create something called “managerial economics,” which is the bane of all business students’ grade point averages (also Masters of Health Administration, and even Executive MBAs).

However, HR people good at mathematics, economics, and budgeting can safely calculate what it would cost to maintain an “officer’s corp” of employees who they would never lay off  and always be assured of the total compensation offering (life/work designs, compensation, benefits, pension, transportation, child care, elder care, etc). They can then use calculus to determine the highest revenues and profits possible given the company’s ability to manage a varied labour mix of a certain size, without further investment of very expensive (and potentially risky) fixed assets.

From here, the company would do everything possible to employ as many people as capable, provide overtime, promote skilled and loyal temporary employees to permanent positions, hire high potential temporary employees pursuing educations or designations, like the CHRP, and contract out processes or jobs to partner companies.

HR Strategy and Corporate Storytelling

Labour finance can optimize dollars within a particular ‘matter state’ of an organization, but clear corporate and HR strategies are needed to transition to higher levels of commercial activity.

Strategy is the plan that takes us from today’s reality to tomorrow’s vision, and dictates not only what we will do to get from Point A to Point B, but also what we won’t do. Limited financial resources, the external environment, corporate culture, and the capabilities of the HR department and the organization’s workforce will tell us what is possible and what isn’t.
21st century organizations can no longer count on just managing the money to succeed. Greater levels of societal awareness are now placing accountability on companies to create better outcomes in sustainability, social charity, education, health, and infrastructure.

In short, your ‘strategy’ must now become a good story, one that satisfies multiple outcomes simultaneously, but also has good public relations value. Henry Ford’s policy of paying $5 per day to all employees, even if they swept the floors, created a valuable story for his organization, made his employees happy, and encouraged them to buy his cars with their newfound wealth. Corporate storytelling has emerged from the understanding that numbers don’t stir up emotions and move people to action, but stories do.

Five Years On

Five years is not a lot of time when you consider that a great many of the things touched upon above are already happening within some organizations. Other variables will inevitably impact us in the interim, but HR has definitely stepped onto the fast track of business. As our roles and responsibilities continue to grow, so too do the tools at our disposal, as well as our perception of HR’s future.

To find the new skills we need, HR may have to start hiring people with no HR experience, but with good teamwork and mentoring skills to facilitate an effective fusion of disciplines. Intense skills developments of current HR employees will likely become more important.

Pursuing the CHRP designation will always be valuable, but other designations could greatly benefit HR as well. Pursuing professional designation in project management (PMP), procurement (PMAC), market research (CMRP), accounting/finance (CA, CGA, CMA, CFA), and management consulting (CMC). HR employees may have educational goals that include completing graduate and doctoral degrees, and yes, even an MBA.

* All future prognostications are heavily influenced by personal and professional experience.  For a fuller exploration of the author’s own career path, visit: http://www.hrvoice.org/ashleybennington/.

Ashley Bennington, CHRP is a Professor in the School of Business at Sheridan College, teaching human resources at campuses in Oakville, Brampton, and Mississauga, Ontario. He is also consulting in the areas of HR metrics, recruitment and selection, and HR research in the Greater Toronto Area. Ashley has been a CHRP since 2006, and holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Business Administration from Simon Fraser University. He was the recipient of the BC HRMA Rising Star Award (2007) and Award of Excellence – Innovation (2010), and prior to moving to Ontario, worked for the Fraser Health Authority, BC Hydro, Canada Revenue Agency, and was an Adjunct Professor of Business at Simon Fraser University.

PeopleTalk: Summer 2011