The human resource function is undergoing a dramatic shift. Years ago, human resource teams were often behind the scenes—with the focus on record keeping, filling open roles, and ensuring compliance with labor regulations. Now, the HR function has evolved to not only become a talent advocate that supports the needs of the workforce, but a strategic partner that keeps the enterprise agile and ready with the right skills in the right place at the right time to support profitable growth, resilience, and sustainable success.
As your role expands, so too do your objectives. From our conversations with HR leaders, we see three main imperatives driving the HR function forward:
- Aligning workforce decisions with business goals amid changing market dynamics and skills shortages.
- Ensuring an engaged and productive workforce as competition intensifies and expectations evolve.
- Enabling agile and compliant HR in an increasingly complex legal and regulatory landscape.
Each of these objectives requires seamless collaboration among all parts of the HR organization—so you can collectively act on real-time insights. The days of siloed analysis are behind us; success now depends on everyone working in concert.
While HR leaders’ objectives are clear, external forces and internal barriers can make it difficult to achieve these objectives.
External forces:
- Skills shortages and shifting requirements
- High cost of external hiring
- Evolving employee expectations
- Complex legal and regulatory mandates
- Business model disruptions
Internal barriers:
- Lack of visibility into the total workforce
- Limited insights for decision making and workforce planning
- Functional silos and poor data quality
- Multiple disparate legacy systems
- Manual, error-prone processes
These challenges create an environment where human resource teams must simultaneously deliver timely reporting for informed decision making, ensure compliance to legal and regulatory mandates, and optimize internal talent—often while working with incomplete or disconnected data. This tension underscores the need for new approaches to human resources, with real-time insights and cross-functional collaboration at the core of future success.
Let's summarize what you've learned:
- The HR function has evolved from a record keeper to a talent advocate and now as a strategic partner.
- There are three main imperatives driving the HR function forward: aligning workforce decisions with business goals, ensuring an engaged and productive workforce, and enabling agile and compliant HR.
- External forces such as skills shortages and shifting requirements, and internal barriers such as limited insights and manual processes, make it difficult to achieve these objectives.
- Human resource teams must deliver timely reporting, ensure compliance, and optimize internal talent with real-time insights and cross-functional collaboration.
- The future success of HR depends on new approaches and the use of real-time insights and cross-functional collaboration.