I remember when artificial intelligence was the stuff of fiction and great blockbusters: the product of storytellers’ imaginations run wild. Today, the once-fantastical is reality, and AI is reshaping the experience of being human, the nature of jobs across every sector and the skills needed for those jobs.

Coupled with present anxiety-inducing market dynamics, steep talent cliffs and a widespread need to reinvigorate employee engagement, many of us in the global HR profession are now facing fundamental identity questions. We have started to ask ourselves: Where do these dramatic upheavals leave us as HR executives and teams? With so many competing priorities, where do we focus to enable our people’s and organizations’ success?

I believe that as global industry professionals, we are at a critical juncture. We can choose to keep doubling down on the familiar practices of support function administrators, achieve our standard operating metrics and wait and see whether we are displaced out of our responsibilities sooner as opposed to later. Or we can engage in transforming ourselves into the owner-minded leaders, cross-skilled strategic partners and outcome-focused champions who support better employee experiences and heightened business performance.

After all, the best way to stay ahead of change is to be the driver for it—and keep learning, unlearning and learning anew, just as AI does.

The case for HR transformation

When we consider the role of HR in today’s organization, serving foundational needs like hiring, talent management and development, compensation and benefits may first come to mind. But the landscape of the industry has changed significantly since the advent of COVID-19 four years ago. We are now a far cry from the days of “hiring and firing.”

Technological advances—including that of AI and the growth of 5G networks—have meant that organizations of all sizes are increasingly able to leverage smart technologies, automation tools and always-on connectivity to broaden how and where work gets done with the utmost efficiency, efficacy and data-backed insight. With this has come a mandate for every HR professional: to be able to meaningfully drive business performance. This takes a commitment to personal and organizational transformation and developing new competencies, skills and focus areas.

Investing in transformation is not just about “seeing around corners” to enhance organizational outcomes but also about having a sought-after strategic voice in C-suite decisions. When the perception shifts from HR being a cost center to HR being a value generator, and the chief human resources officer progresses from having a seat at the table to having a voice in the conversation, the ROI of transformation becomes evident.

3 transformation best practices

Applying concept to practice is almost always the hardest step. But even targeted practices can drive significant results. Here are three transformation best practices to move your career, function and organization forward.

Train yourself to cultivate an ownership culture

The highest-performing talent usually shares two qualities: passion and commitment. We all know individuals who are the first to volunteer a new way of approaching a challenge, who think collectively and laterally and those who are driven to learn when they encounter personal knowledge gaps in pursuit of helping their organizations are those who thrive.

These individuals are who we call “owners,” and while some of them are born that way, many are made at the intersection of working on robust challenges and having the freedom and opportunity to apply their skills. It’s no surprise that the more owners are cultivated within an organization, the more successful that organization becomes. A survey by Gallup found that organizations with high employee ownership experience 17% higher productivity, 21% greater profitability and suitably higher engagement. Owners are insulators in a rapidly changing world.

Every HR leader and professional has an opportunity to model ownership and cultivate it. Introducing questions into the hiring process about passion areas, achievements that supported team and organizational outcomes and the orientation toward problem-solving can help spotlight new talent that has a bias toward ownership.

Promoting a culture of empowerment and cross-functional, cross-regional and cross-divisional collaboration can skyrocket innovation. Moving from managing to modeling and coaching teams can help employees pioneer quality solutions, steer change, improve processes and add value. Your greatest challenge will then become how you keep your owners involved—at every level of your organization—in solving for your highest-impact business challenges.

Add hard skills to your soft skills foundation

We often talk about the HR function being the organizational arbiter of soft skills and the “human interface.” While that may be true—and may have historically been true—increasingly, there’s a need for leaders and professionals alike to develop their expertise in hard skill areas to complement a soft skill foundation. In short, developing new skill sets means enhanced ability to move quickly on problems, seize opportunities and eliminate the siloed thinking that so often impedes business performance.

Digital skill sets—like those spanning AI-driven process automation, predictive analytics and user experience design—can be developed through discrete learning, in-situ assignments and simply by bringing technologies into the function to automate manual workflows, surface information quickly and support data-backed solutions for everything from employee acquisition to performance planning to internal talent marketplaces.

Complementary skill sets—like those of content experts specializing in change management, communications and user or audience research—can be in-housed on the HR team to close the gaps on the full employee lifecycle and experience. As McKinsey research with 100 CHROs indicates, the HR operating model of the future is much more likely to look like a cross-trained pool of professionals who can be quickly deployed as strategic partners on high-priority assignments (and much less like the Ulrich model of the past).

Design work standards to support outcomes

At the heart of the remote versus hybrid versus on-site war that many leadership teams are waging with their employees today is the very notion of what productivity at work is. Recent Microsoft research points to a vast disparity: While 87% of employees think they are productive, only 12% of executives feel the same.

And while that data could point executive teams to putting the pressure on and requiring on-site work for all employees, the reality is that employee trust has already been eroding, burnout has been climbing and top talent has been demanding flexibility in how and where they work. Traditional gauges of productivity focus on input, presenteeism and output, and have been deeply embedded into organizational cultures.

But many—if not all—executives today want to see outcomes as the true representation of progress and “deep work.” The first step to design—or redesign—work standards to support outcomes is in establishing organizational priorities around what success looks like. Communicating these priorities, designing performance metrics for them and modeling them as HR leaders, professionals and partners is the next step.

A multitude of external influences will continue to shape the HR practice, but knowing what to pay attention to and when is a mastery skill that all of us in the HR practice need to be comfortable with—the “what” is continuous transformation; the when is “right now.” We can continue to evolve the HR industry, with more and more focus on driving value for the business. There will always be the pressure to do more with less, which is the forcing function for change. But change will—I believe—keep us sharp and competitive.

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