HR Pros poised to help lead through future change

Human resources has always been an important spoke on the business wheel. But helping employees during the pandemic adjust to working remotely – supporting them with physical and mental well-being resources – and/or creating policies and procedures to keep onsite workers safe, pushed HR Pros out into
the spotlight.

Now, a full year into the pandemic, when most firms seem to have a handle on things, HR pros have the opportunity to adopt a new mindset and extend their influence to include business issues, says the 2020 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends report.

This past year has proved HR Pros can do much more than standardize and enforce workforce issues. You can help “orchestrate work” across an organization.

Due to this, executives now have added confidence in HR Pros’ ability to help lead firms through future change.

Biggest influence

The report showed HR had the biggest impact on:

• protecting workers’ health and safety
• increasing communication with the workforce, and
• promoting worker well-being

Wait. Isn’t that what HR Pros have always done?

Yes, but now that they have this new found confidence from Executives, they have to keep it and ask where do we go from here?

The answer is to change your mindset, according to the report. Move from a “functional mindset” to an “impact mindset” that expands their influence from:

• process to mission
• the worker to the human, and
• managing workers to re-imagine work-related challenges.

Unlock potential

COVID-19 has made leaders more aware of the fact they need to focus more on work transformation and re-imagining how work is accomplished. HR Pros were a big part in that.

Now it’s time to change how HR and businesses look at work, teams and capabilities.

One way to do this is partner with employees to pinpoint opportunities in their roles and new ways of tackling their tasks. This can only be done if HR is aligned with the business agenda.

Lead through example

It’s a partnership where HR works closely with leaders throughout the organization, asking for help and guidance in the revamping of work and employee roles.

By doing this, HR Pros can act as models for “integrative thinking” and not just someone employees go to for answers about their benefit and compensation issues.

It’s important, however, to do this while keeping executives focused on the well-being of their employees. Even if we get back to “business as usual” in some form, executives can’t forget how intricately well-being is tied to employees’ work and lives.

Some executives are already forgetting. Case in point, when asked what the top factors are to make remote work sustainable, offering new well-being resources was eighth on the list, according to the report. The top factor was introducing digital collaboration platforms.

In our new COVID-19 world, everyone is stepping up and taking on new roles in their firms. This is HR’s time to embrace their new role. Not just for expanding business practices, but to help guide firms toward broader economic and human goals.

Info: Diving deeperFive workforce trends to watch in 2021