Although this anecdote could be read as being about one buzzkill, or even the entire HR discipline being a party nonstarter, it’s much bigger than that.
Employees and company leaders alike have very strong feelings about HR—and not much of it is positive. In a series of Fast Company LinkedIn polls, more than 1,500 respondents expressed negative views about HR.
- 51% say HR is not very responsive when they bring it a concern.
- 75% say HR is ineffective/nonfactor in helping them achieve professional goals.
- 56% say HR is adding very little (33%) or no significant (23%) value to the organization.
These results reinforce a March 2024 survey of nearly 1,000 workers that revealed 86% of them were afraid of their Human Resources department.
In August 2005, Fast Company published a cover story that blared “Why We Hate HR.” Since then, the human resources discipline has seemingly been wholly transformed. Increasing investment in technology (currently estimated at more than $50 billion globally) has delivered cloud-based platforms that provide workers greater flexibility, more communication tools, and access to benefits and payroll information from anywhere on their mobile devices. It has created vast libraries of custom-made learning and development curricula. Applicant tracking systems have streamlined the talent acquisition process.
The HR tech boom has spawned tens of thousands of companies, with big winners such as Workday ($36 billion market cap) and Rippling ($17 billion valuation) becoming sector giants.
The function has also achieved rarified corporate stature, as new C-level titles such as chief human resources officer (CHRO) and chief people officer (CPO) have proliferated. If a top complaint two decades ago was that HR didn’t have a seat at the strategic table, increasingly it does.
Some HR leaders have even become business celebrities! Patty McCord, chief talent officer at Netflix, created a 120-plus page “culture deck” that promoted “the keeper test” and other strategies to increase “talent density” for the overall good of the team. Sheryl Sandberg, then Facebook’s chief operating officer, described it as “the most important document ever to come out of Silicon Valley.” Google’s senior vice president of people operations, the ex-McKinsey consultant Laszlo Bock, turned his advocacy of “high-freedom” companies (those that granted autonomy to employees) into a best-selling book. And Google’s focus on people analytics further fueled the proliferation of HR tech.
These days, it’s hard to imagine a book entitled Work Rules!, Bock’s bestseller, resonating with so many readers. Whatever progress HR made in the twenty-first century—via technology, greater responsibility, and worker-friendly policies such as expanded benefits and remote-work policies (facilitated by new tech tools and accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic)—has waned. It likely hasn’t helped, either, that HR is having to unwind flexible work policies for return-to-office mandates and serving as a key collaborator in rolling out AI tools that have workers fearing for their jobs.
The problem of why so many people still hate HR runs deep. Can HR be saved? In a word, yes, and the answer doesn’t lie in its wholesale elimination (sorry, Bolt CEO Ryan Breslow) or trying to turn it into something it’s not (like Amazon’s people, experience, and technology team).
We reached out to 100 business leaders—HR practitioners, recruiters, founders, and 66 CEOs—to develop some answers. They’re not only for HR pros but for all leaders thinking about how to create the companies they want.
In this Fast Company exclusive, you’ll learn:
- the key flashpoints in HR’s never-ending negotiation between workers and management
- how HR practitioners are trying to improve the function internally
- what leaders can do to go beyond mere cosmetics to fix the fundamental problems, and
- ideas from 91 executives—including 66 CEOs—on how to fix HR.
‘It’s called talent acquisition—until you get hired’
Resentment toward HR has often already reached full pitch even before anyone gets a job offer. The sham job descriptions. The black-hole career portals. The clueless recruiter reaching out about a post-anesthesia care unit nursing opportunity even though you’re a medtech product manager whose only brush with nursing was the broken wrist you suffered sophomore year in college.
Automation has transformed the talent acquisition part of HR from its former white-glove ideal into a Rube Goldberg contraption that seems designed primarily to drive job seekers bonkers. Monster’s Application Black Box Report for May does not paint a pretty picture of the current applicant tracking system (ATS) experience. What other conclusion can you draw from 54% of the 1,000 U.S. worker respondents supporting heavy regulation or an outright ban of ATS?
Even those lucky enough to be actively pursued by a company’s internal recruiters may be in for a shock once they join the firm. “It’s called talent acquisition before you get hired,” says Janet Sherlock, a former Ralph Lauren executive who now heads the organizational design consultancy Org.works. “When you get hired, you become a ‘resource.’”
As the writer Scott Raab once quipped: “The only thing worse than looking for work is finding it.” He made that remark long before the internet, bots, and AI turned job seeking into the soul-crushing hellscape it’s now become.
A huge part of the problem is that talent acquisition is the chunk of HR most ripe to get the AI treatment itself. “Business leaders are trying to figure out how to get the highest efficiency and productivity at the lowest cost,” says Johnny Taylor, CEO of SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management). Bots are cheaper than humans—at least initially, before factoring in the exorbitant costs of burnout, attrition, and replacement. (The employee training platform Techclass attaches a global price tag of $8.8 trillion to attrition and lost productivity.)
Which means, of course, that HR itself is exposed to the AI axe, especially entry-level roles or those focused on processing. SHRM’s State of AI in HR report classifies 9.3% of HR roles as “high risk” for AI replacement. “The recruiting and talent side, that’s who’s losing their jobs first,” says Shana Pederson, a longtime recruiter and a fellow at ForHumanity, which independently audits AI systems to mitigate risk and build trust. “I’ve noticed [a disproportionate number] of out-of-work talent recruiters.”
Overreliance on bots to screen applicants may also create conflicts with state, federal, and international regulations. In Mobley v. Workday, a class-action lawsuit pending in federal court in California, plaintiffs allege that Workday’s AI-powered ATS resulted in discrimination by rejecting qualified candidates based on protected characteristics.
SHRM’s Taylor sees obvious problems with AI screening tools but believes the technology will improve. “The recruitment process is by definition exclusionary,” he says. “We have one job and 500 people applied for it, so we’re excluding 499 people. If you believe that human beings can screen each one of those applications and give it a fair look, we just can’t. It’s not sustainable as there’s no business model to support it. So we need that HR technology.”
Taylor is confident that we can engineer bias out of machines more easily than we can remove it from humans, but For Humanity’s Pederson disagrees. “We can’t eliminate bias,” she says. “It is absolutely impossible, nor is it wise, to eliminate bias completely . . . . Part of what’s important about humans still remaining in the loop is that humans are the ones who are going to recognize where bias needs to be mitigated and why.”
Of the 66 CEOs who responded to our simple prompt—If you could recommend one meaningful change that would make any organization’s HR function more effective, what would it be?—40 shared recommendations that would reorient HR to refocus less on organizational processes and more on talent acquisition, development, and retention.
“Give HR a P&L stake in the workforce it supports,” says Shawn Galloway, CEO of the Houston-based workplace safety consultancy ProAct Safety. “HR is still measured by process compliance and cost containment rather than by whether the business got better people, which insures it behaves like a rule keeper rather than a talent engine. Tie the function’s own scorecard to the performance of the people it hires, keeps, and develops, and the henchman-for-the-CFO reflex disappears on its own.”
But many of the CEO suggestions are more directional, if not outright philosophical. The gist, as you’ll see below, is that HR will become more effective when it deploys AI to handle the laborious, tedious process stuff so that practitioners can focus on their invaluable human judgment to actual human beings.
“We don’t need HR built for the industrial era,” says Kristy Kim, CEO of TomoCredit, which uses AI to help people be more literate about their credit score and get help improving it. “When AI handles documentation, onboarding, training, recruiting, and performance insights, the competitive advantage shifts to culture, judgment, incentives, and exceptional talent density.” The future of people teams, she says, lies in designing high-performance organizations built for humans and AI working in concert and “getting out of the way for them to thrive.”
Kim’s vision is provocative and compelling, but here’s the thing: Many tasks are both exhaustingly tedious and strategic. Prospective employees may represent the most actively engaged consumer segment your company ever encounters, and it doesn’t exactly burnish your brand to alienate 99.9% of them. You don’t have to hire them to retain their respect. You don’t even have to interview them.
Just don’t treat them as merely an agglomeration of keywords whose only job is to tickle your hiring algo.
‘HR works for the business’
Nobody has to collect too many paychecks before realizing, warm and fuzzy rhetoric aside, HR works for the enterprise. Though people frequently forget. “People assume that HR has all this power and that they are controlling lots of things,” says Colleen McCreary, chief people officer and head of internal systems at Confluent, the real-time data streaming platform IBM acquired earlier this year for $11 billion. “If only HR did X, Y, and Z, my work life would be better, I would have more money, I would have everything I want. The misconception still exists that HR works for the employee.”
But business, of course, depends on its workforce to succeed, and in occupying the middle ground between management and labor, HR has the tricky task of negotiating that back and forth. “HR is the balancing point between management and employees,” says Liz Petersen, SHRM’s HR knowledge center manager. “We are not in charge of communication and culture, but we are the facilitators of that.”
Taylor, the SHRM CEO, believes companies have exacerbated employee confusion on this point by adopting the chief people officer title, which signals to employees that their org represents them. “Part of the frustration is that both sides believe you represent them,” he says. “I’m a lawyer by training, and it’s very clear who my client is, and I owe that client my full loyalty. Everyone knows that’s my job. Our frustration comes from having to serve both of these client groups.”
Employees see this, and they resent it. What their negative attitudes toward HR reflect, ultimately, is a crisis of confidence and trust in their employer. Unicorn talents may be immune from the fundamental power imbalance that favors the party who signs their paychecks, but the vast majority of rank-and-file workers know how vulnerable they are to whatever adjustments a CEO decides to make—which last year included nearly 1.2 million layoffs in the U.S.
“There are only two things that represent an existential threat to human beings,” says Taylor. “One is the threat to their lives, and the second is a threat to their livelihood.”
Top executives know their employees are stressed. Many also appear to feel the HR pendulum has swung too far towards management. As previously mentioned, 61% of the CEOs who responded to our query believe that HR needs to focus more strategically on acquiring, developing, and retaining talent.
“HR will never fully earn employee trust if it is also seen as the department that manages risk, discipline, and layoffs,” says Philip Samuelraj, CEO of the AI software company Techjays. To address HR’s divided loyalties, he advocates for “creating a separate Culture Team whose only job is to care for employees, build trust, strengthen belonging, and help people thrive.”
Below, note how many of our leaders’ ideas harken back to the brief period of corporate social enlightenment that gathered momentum during the first Trump administration; prompted the Business Roundtable to issue its 2019 statement redefining the purpose of a corporation as one serving all stakeholders, not just shareholders; and further accelerated during the early days of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Then came the backlash, with HR often the messenger sent to silence the empowered employee.
With some CEOs still emphasizing employee mental health, highly flexible workplaces, and tailoring company offices (if there are any) to support disabled and neurodivergent employees, it’s worth considering whether the retrenchment from that proworker moment has created a strategic opportunity for those who still see value in many of its ideas.
Or, perhaps there’s a more straightforward solution to management getting the control it wants, employees being okay with it, and HR not being stuck in the middle. “You can’t just tell people they’re appreciated. You have to show them,” says Charles Stanton, CEO of the Animal Rights Foundation, who earned his HR certification during the pandemic. “We had to take a hard look at our compensation structure and our benefits package, since no amount of coffee and snacks makes up for substandard wages.”
‘Give people useful feedback closer to real time’
Once upon a time, organizations had an entire class of employees responsible for nurturing talent and sharing best practices. They were called managers. But the Great Flattening has decimated the ranks of middle management. According to a survey conducted by Gartner, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, the median number of direct reports per corporate manager rose from five in 2017 to 15 by 2023, a year when middle managers accounted for 31% of corporate layoffs. AI, of course, is accelerating this trend, as my colleague Shalene Gupta recently reported.
SHRM’s Petersen, the HR knowledge center manager, believes the hollowing out of middle management has made it much harder for employees to get clarity and direction. She compares the challenges of effective middle management to those of the sandwich generation, caring simultaneously for kids and parents. “A middle manager has to be responsible for getting their work up to the executive team but also make sure that every employee reporting to them is doing their job. That’s a difficult place to be.” While executives focus exclusively on strategy, she says, middle managers have to align day-to-day tactical operations with broader corporate directives.
Many of the CEOs we queried view talent development as a key area where HR should be offering strategic value to the organization. “The best HR teams can help grow leaders, make meaningful connections, and create an environment where people can do their best work,” says Jarrod Lopiccolo, CEO of Noble Studios, an integrated marketing agency that has worked with the likes of Adobe, Autodesk, and the University of California system.
But that suggestion should not be interpreted as an endorsement for HR to spend more time on its primary tool for talent development: the dreaded (by employees) performance review.
A very healthy majority of executives (66%, according to the Acorn 2025 Corporate Performance and Learning Survey) believe their performance review process is great, while only 19% of workers agree. Workers view these reviews as time-consuming, inaccurate, and biased.
“HR should own the performance management process, but not the bureaucratic, once-a-year version most companies run,” says Sherlock, the organizational strategist. “The job is to give people useful feedback closer to real time.” Which means partnering with front-line managers to allow some latitude for how different teams function.
“AI has made real-time performance management possible, giving managers the ability to coach, align goals, and recognize great work as it happens—not months later,” says Doug Dennerline, who (full disclosure) is CEO of the performance management platform company Betterworks. If not done carefully, though, continuous performance assessment risks veering into workplace surveillance and transforming the semiannual or annual inconvenience into the workplace equivalent of a daily root canal.
For some business leaders, the question is not how—or how often—workers are evaluated but what companies are assessing. “We treat employees like machines that need optimization, ignoring that creativity requires emotional rest,” says Volen Vulkov, cofounder of the résumé-builder company Enhancv. “HR should aggressively audit organizational fatigue, tracking calendar bloat and digital noise. When HR protects a team’s collective peace as a sacred corporate asset, exceptional performance follows naturally.”
‘AI + Human Intelligence = the new ROI’
Many of us are experiencing sleepless nights worrying about how long it’ll be before AI consumes our jobs (or maybe worrying whether the agentic tools we’ve created are working or wreaking havoc). This anxiety is a variation on the age-old fear of tech displacing workers.
As AI permeates every aspect of our working lives, how do we adapt? Whether you call it human resources, people operations, or something else, how does the function retain some humanity?
SHRM’s Taylor proposes a new equation: Artificial Intelligence + Human Intelligence = the new ROI. “Artificial intelligence complementing and supplementing human intelligence,” he says. “When AI is making the hiring decision, that is very, very bad.” The formula sounds a little too cute, but isn’t that the way all of us are living every day right now?
“You need people looking at résumés again. You need people interviewing again. Prescreening needs to be more human,” adds ForHumanity’s Pederson, saying job candidates need “touchpoints that aren’t chatbots.”
Nifty mathematical-looking equations aside, the balancing of human intelligence and AI can be tricky, as my colleague Pavithra Mohan illustrated in her recent investigation into Amazon’s experiment of replacing HR practitioners with AI in one of its Ohio warehouses.
To truly retain an element of humanity, HR practitioners have to become more effective advocates of human workers. “So many HR teams fall down because they get into touchy-feely conversations,” says Confluent’s McCreary, “instead of saying these are the reasons why investing in employees is important . . . using that same business lens that any other operator at the table would be expected to use.”
Edgar Villanueva, founder and CEO of the Decolonizing Wealth Project, a global nonprofit, summarizes this view quite succinctly: “Care for your people like your business depends on it.”
Because it does.
91 leaders on how to fix HR
Organization / Talent / C-Suite / Culture / AI / Metrics / Performance Reviews / Productivity
We reached out to members of the Fast Company Executive Board and Fast Company Impact Council, asking them to respond to this question: If you could recommend one meaningful change that would make any organization’s HR function more effective, what would it be? Their 91 responses varied, but also revealed overlapping themes, suggesting particular areas where human resources teams could enhance their effectiveness. (If you want to jump ahead or choose your own adventure, click to jump to a section above.)
Redefine HR’s role in the organization
“Many HR functions have gotten better at measuring and attempting to improve organizational health, and that work matters. But the bigger opportunity is strategic readiness: helping leaders build the talent, leadership, culture, structure, and adaptability required for what comes next. The best HR teams should not only assess whether the organization is healthy today, but actively drive whether it is becoming more capable, resilient, and future-ready.”—R. Ethan Braden, chief marketing and communications officer, Texas A&M University
“The years went by, and HR’s overreaching interventionist style, often resonating less as policy than as social engineering, did not lose strength. The middle-management mindset still obstructs talent and creates models that make little sense for competing teams. Having spent time in sports, I believe it could offer HR a way out. Formula 1 builds around elite drivers, basketball around franchise players, and tennis around individualized teams for top performers. Sports understand selection, merit, training, hierarchy, discipline, and the brutal visibility of results. Unless middle management gets there first and kills its performance culture.—Rodrigo Magnago, director, RMagnago Critical Thinking
“Shift HR from managing people processes to building organizational clarity. As companies grow, performance challenges are often treated as hiring, engagement, or accountability issues when they’re really alignment issues. People do their best work when they understand where the company is going, how decisions are made, and how their work contributes to the bigger picture.
“HR is uniquely positioned to create that clarity. By partnering closely with leadership on organizational design, communication, and cross-functional alignment, HR can reduce friction, accelerate execution, and help teams move with confidence. In today’s environment, one of HR’s greatest responsibilities isn’t simply supporting the business. It’s helping the business stay aligned as it scales.”—Deniz Gezgin, CEO, Eightpoint
“Empower HR with the autonomy to lead organizational change management leveraging comprehensive people analytics that span not just turnover and engagement but also performance. This would be an amazing strategic driver.”—Doug Pace, CEO, Stonehill
“Divest as much of the transactional HR tasks as possible to external providers, AI or otherwise. Shift the C-Suite mindset from ‘HR as risk management’ to ‘HR as essential performance lever’ and engage around the question: How can we create the conditions that unleash the very best contribution of each of our employees?”—Shani Harmon, CEO, Stop Meeting Like This
“Separate talent well-being and company image, especially in mid-to-large companies. In my experience, HR departments are seen as ineffective and not trustworthy because they are typically understaffed and have to operate within the super conflict of supporting the employees while protecting the company and its executives. There’s no federal or state law dictating that a business must have an HR department. In fact, it’s more common than not for a small company not to have a dedicated HR person. Regardless of company size, decentralize HR responsibilities to managers or make them peer-to-peer. For compliance and operations, build a non-biased network of counsel/advisors and infrastructure of payroll/HR software, and spend more time coaching people in self-reliance, which elevates team spirit because members learn to rely on each other without dreaded micromanagement.”—Ly Tran, founder/CEO, Stiletto Collective
“Make people leadership a core responsibility of every executive, not just HR. HR should architect the systems, capabilities, and data that enable high-performing organizations, but CEOs and leaders must be equally accountable for developing talent, building culture, and creating organizational capability. That’s when people strategy truly becomes business strategy.”—Tami Rosen, board member, executive, and advisor, finance and technology companies
“HR is at its most valuable shaping headcount, structure, and capability around the business strategy, sitting at the leadership table rather than outside it. Too often the job is policy administration and the mechanics of performance management. Agents and co-pilots can take that work over, which frees HR for the strategic seat, but likely with a very different complement of people doing it.”—Todd James, founder/CEO, Aurora Insights
“More transparency. HR is exceptionally challenging today. Mass layoffs across a wide variety of industries over the last few years has produced anxiety and a lack of trust that HR can help rebuild. To do so requires new ways of thinking about when HR is there for the benefit of the employee and when it is there to protect the company.”—C-suite officer at a branding firm
Make talent your top priority
“Stop hiring for the next event and start hiring for the next surge. If your team is running 150% allocated hours, that’s not ‘hustle culture,’ that’s your HR system quietly falling apart. The agencies still standing in five years aren’t the ones squeezing every last drop out of their people between activations. They’re the ones who built the bench before they needed it, so the next load-in doesn’t feel like a five-alarm fire.”—Diana Sabb, founder and executive producer, Create Something Amazing
“HR is most effective when it stays focused on its core mission: helping organizations attract, develop, and retain great people. That means equipping managers to own people development and treating employees as customers, continuously designing and improving the employee experience with the same care and attention organizations devote to their customers.”—Ben Wintner, CEO, Michael Graves Design
“Look beyond resumes and read people’s stories. A resume captures qualifications and hard skills, while it rarely reveals one’s character, potential, or motivation. The experiences people have lived, the decisions they’ve made, and the impact they’ve created often tell us way more how they can contribute than a list of credentials ever can. Hire people for who they are. Skills can be learned. Character, mindset, and motivation are what fuel long-term success.”—Yingrui (Jessie) He, founder, Unbox
“The most meaningful change HR can make is to stop operating as a compliance-and-benefits department and become the company’s talent intelligence function. HR should own the data on why people join, stay, grow, disengage, and leave, then turn those insights into practical decisions for leadership on hiring, culture, management quality, and retention. When HR is measured by business outcomes, not only administrative efficiency, it becomes a strategic asset instead of a support function.”—Boris Dzhingarov, CEO, ESBO Ltd
“Research shows that people leave managers, not jobs. Large organizations with HR functions should invest in professionalizing management positions and decoupling these from technical experts, in order to reduce high turnover and low engagement among staff. SMEs with smaller budgets can still support improved retention and morale by focusing founder/director-level leaders on active listening training.”—Felicity Heathcote-Márcz, founder and director, Bare Analysis
“I earned my HR certification during the pandemic trying to figure out how to lead through the unknown, and it reshaped how I think about the HR function entirely. You can’t just tell people they’re appreciated. You have to show them. We had to take a hard look at our compensation structure and our benefits package, since no amount of coffee and snacks makes up for substandard wages. Only then could we shift my HR energy toward investing in our best talent so they wanted to stay and advance with us.”—Charles Stanton, CEO, Animal Rights Foundation
“Winning starts with defining the game, and the game starts with the players. The advantage compounds at the level of the team. Our edge is not simply extraordinary people. It is what they become capable of together, here, that they could not be anywhere else.”—Michelle Longmire, CEO, Medable
“Don’t wait for exit interviews to fix retention: Most HR departments operate reactively, waiting for employees to voice concerns only after they’ve reached a breaking point. To truly stay ’employee obsessed,’ companies must prioritize their own internal talent just as they do their clients. Implement an unignorable check-in process—a proactive, consistent rhythm of engagement designed to uncover opportunities or challenges early. By creating psychological safety and asking for feedback, you can eliminate surprises, address frustrations in real-time, and ensure your people feel heard while they are still invested in the organization.”—Andrew Graff, CEO, Allen & Gerritsen
“First, I far prefer ‘Talent’ or ‘People’ to ‘Human Resources’—it underscores what this role is all about. The leader of that function should report straight to the president or CEO of the organization, and they should be at the table for every conversation having to do with the org’s business, strategy, and mission. They need to understand deeply everything about their unique value proposition and what makes the difference between winning or losing. Then they can be charged with ensuring that the org has the talent—and all the things it takes to attract, retain, and grow that talent—so that the organization can achieve its mission.”—Auditi Chakravarty, CEO, Advanced Education Research and Development Fund (AERDF)
“HR could be advocates for the integration of new modalities of flexible work that bring out the best in talent, whether that’s remote, hybrid, asynchronous, part-time, etc. I’m especially sensitive to the struggles of working mothers, and it’s high time to normalize flexible systems that don’t push women out of the workforce.”—Bo Zhao, founder/CEO, Baby Gear Group
“Separate out HR admin/operations (payroll, 401K & other benefit administration) from talent attraction, growth, and retention. They are radically different roles with different skill sets, compulsions, etc. CEOs should be obsessed with attracting and retaining top talent, and to unlock all the talent in the org, and they need a killer HR business partner to help them do that.”—Christina Sass, president/CEO, International Youth Foundation
“For small and medium-sized businesses, HR looks very different than it does in large organizations. As a 20-person architecture firm, we don’t have a dedicated HR department, and most HR responsibilities are handled by staff whose primary focus is elsewhere. If I could recommend one change, it would be making talent acquisition a dedicated function, even if it’s shared, fractional, or outsourced. For small firms, the biggest barrier to growth isn’t compliance or benefits; it’s finding the right people when opportunities arise. Building a continuous pipeline of future talent creates far more value than recruiting only when a position opens.”—Dwayne MacEwen, founder and principal, DMAC Architecture & Interiors
“HR should stop treating employer brand as an HR function and start treating it as a partnership with marketing. Every candidate is now a consumer with an audience of their own, so recruitment should be designed as an experience, not just a process. Employees are your most credible marketers: Their advocacy and word of mouth shape your reputation far more than any careers campaign ever will.”—Emily Kortlang, CMO, Yerba Madre
“Care for your people like your business depends on them. Leaders fear that prioritizing team wellbeing will create entitlement or invite people to take advantage. That can happen, but it’s usually a hiring issue. The right people want to contribute, be paid fairly, and be respected. This approach requires shifting from a defensive HR mindset to one built on clear boundaries and openness. When HR prioritizes the person, not just their output, teams become stronger, more resilient, and stay longer. What if we cared abundantly for our people? What’s the worst that could happen?”—Edgar Villanueva, founder/CEO, Decolonizing Wealth Project
“The issue is trust. HR works for the company but supposedly has the individual employee’s interests at heart. Anything the employee says to HR is contextualized in the frame of what is good for the company—or not. Rather than position the HR department as a trusted advisor and supporter of employees, focus their attention on finding, hiring, training, and keeping the best talent they can find to fill the company’s needs as well as the administrative basics.”—Larraine Segil, founder/chair/CEO, Exceptional Women Alliance Foundation
“Make HR/people ops/talent dev a desirable career track for actual practitioners who can more ably identify talent across diverse pools and experiences instead of box-checking those whose resume has been a linear trajectory always doing the same functions in the same industries. The world today demands companies embrace talent who bring broad exposure, unique skillsets and perspectives, and greater adaptability.”—Lisa Gralnek, U.S. managing director, iF Design
“First, let’s burn the damned title, and the passive mission it implies. The term HR was coined in 1893, when abused, unappreciated workers needed safety and recognition. That world is gone, but the label and connotation linger: HR as a kind-hearted shepherd to keep bad things from happening. Today, with AI coming after every job in sight, this function needs a far more active and ambitious mission—to unlock human potential by mastering the interplay of psychology, behavioral science, human motivation, and the emerging fluid relationship between people and AI. What to call it? Human Futures isn’t wrong.”—Mark Payne, CEO, Electric Innovation
“HR leaders should spend less time measuring process efficiency and more time helping the business improve leadership effectiveness, accelerate productivity, retain top talent, and reduce new hires’ time-to-productivity. [To do so, they should create] clear, consistent, tech-enabled processes that empower managers to make better decisions and nurture talent. Combined with AI and predictive workforce analytics, HR can move beyond reporting on the past to anticipating future talent needs, giving organizations greater agility to stay ahead of changing markets, and evolving workforce expectations to lessen the drag on scaling.”—Marne Martin, CEO, Emburse
“Spend less time owning processes and more time owning the employee experience. The best HR leaders I’ve worked with don’t just administer policies; they shape how people feel on their best days, their hardest days, and everything in between. When employees feel supported, trusted, and able to do their best work, business performance follows.”—Melanie Goldey, CEO, Tally Health
“Focus more on finding ways to make employees feel seen by their managers. Today’s leaders are pulled in so many different directions that they rarely have time to stop and acknowledge high performers experiencing burnout, or those with potential who might just need a bit more coaching. Trust in the leaders to do the job you hired them for; failing to do so compromises their psychological safety. Make sure competent leaders have the right resources as the curse of competency is real. HR departments need to communicate that they care about employees, not just be the ‘front’ for management as they are currently perceived to be.”—Rakia Reynolds, partner, Actum
“Spend less time grouping people by demographics or job titles and more time understanding what actually motivates them. Two employees can have the same role, experience, and performance, yet respond completely differently to recognition, feedback, change, or opportunity. When organizations understand those underlying drivers, they build stronger teams, better leaders, and cultures where people are more likely to stay and thrive. —Ran Mullins, cofounder/CEO, Psympl
“HR spends too much of their time and energy creating policies and procedures for the 2% of employees who don’t come to work to do their best by the company and their colleagues instead of the 98% who do. If I could change one thing, it would be to align HR’s activities to the experience of the 98%. That means enabling cultures of trust, accountability, fair pay, and more.— Randi Lee, founder and managing director, Lucas Advisory
“Stop chasing ‘unicorn’ hires. They’re rare, expensive, and the wrong target. HR must work directly with business leaders to redesign roles and build internal reskilling pipelines that treat employees as institutional assets in the AI era. HR also has to get into the weeds of how work actually happens day-to-day. That means mapping how tasks move across teams, fixing broken handoffs, and figuring out exactly how humans and AI share the workload. Tackling these operational details is how HR earns a real strategic seat at the table before major disruptions hit. It’s also where company culture and trust are either protected or quietly eroded.”—Thomas Scott, CEO, Wrike
“Build a real partnership between TA [talent acquisition] and L&D [learning and development], and ground it in shared, transparent skills data that sets clear expectations on what competencies are needed, at what level, to help the business grow. Every era has a scarce skill, but what makes AI different is that AI skills are too new and changing too fast across almost every function. TA and L&D working from the same data will make it much clearer what you already have, what you need, and how to close the gap. This will help HR make better hire-versus-develop calls for every team in their organization.”—Tigran Sloyan, cofounder/CEO, CodeSignal
Plug HR directly into your business
“Be sure your Chief HR Officer is part of your executive team, reporting into the CEO, so she/he/they are part of strategic conversations and can be a thought partner and internal coach for you and the rest of your team around how best to optimize one’s human capital. I speak from experience, bringing to bear both perspectives—as a current CEO and having served for eight years as the Chief People Officer of AARP.”—Ellie Hollander, president/CEO, Meals on Wheels America
“The single biggest unlock for any organization is treating HR as a force multiplier, not a support function. Embed it at the heart of strategy with real authority over leadership development, culture, and your biggest talent bets. That’s when it stops being overhead and starts being the thing that makes you nearly impossible to compete against.”—Parise Hunter, SVP, Human Resources, Medable
“Get HR out of the office and onto the floor where the work actually happens. Too many teams hire off a checklist for jobs they’ve never done themselves. I can spot a great camera operator because I’ve done the job myself. Sit with your crew for one hard week, and you’ll learn more about who to hire and who to keep than any engagement survey will ever tell you.”—Tavares Beverly, founder/CEO, Beverly Boy Productions
“The 2005 article [“Why we hate HR”] said HR couldn’t connect its work to business results. Twenty years later, most HR teams still can’t, and it’s no longer the tooling’s fault. The signals of good and bad management sit in plain sight, in how people run meetings, give feedback, and make decisions. The one change I’d make: measure that, with managers’ consent, and hold HR to the same evidentiary standard as finance. HR doesn’t need a seat at the table. It needs something to say that nobody else in the room can prove.”—Ben Perreau, founder/CEO, Parafoil
“Give HR a P&L stake in the workforce it supports. [Keith] Hammonds’ complaint [in “Why we hate HR”] remains relevant because HR is still measured by process compliance and cost containment rather than by whether the business got better people, which ensures it behaves like a rule-keeper rather than a talent engine. Tie the function’s own scorecard to the performance of the people it hires, keeps, and develops, and the henchman-for-the-CFO reflex disappears on its own.”—Shawn M. Galloway, CEO, ProAct Safety, Inc
“Include HR in the strategic meetings where operational business decisions are made. This allows HR to have a voice and become a proactive strategic partner rather than a reactive problem solver. This allows HR to determine which roles add value, if people/roles fit within the organization, and explain the value and ROI of each one of our employees.”—Richard Ross, CEO, Quinn Residences
“Stop treating HR as an island and tie it directly to the CEO’s philosophy and the company’s internal communications engine. Most HR functions fail not because of bad people or weak processes, but because of a vacuum at the top. When a CEO has no explicit philosophy about people, HR defaults to compliance and paperwork, and the Chief People Officer ends up managing transactions instead of shaping culture.
“But here’s where it actually breaks: We often see CMOs build the CEO’s messaging and run a polished town hall, and then the everyday employee communications underneath it are completely disconnected. The vision at the top doesn’t ladder down. Employees hear one story from the stage and experience another in their inbox and their team meetings. When the engagement survey comes back with mediocre scores, it lands on HR’s desk to fix, but HR can’t fix a problem that lives in the gap between marketing, the CEO, and the org itself.
“The fix is structural. HR and the CMO should operate as partners, not strangers, and the CEO has to own the throughline. Marketing knows how to build a narrative and ladder messaging down. HR knows the workforce. When those two functions are mapped together and the CEO sets the philosophy, internal communications become deliberate all the way down, not just at the town hall. Every employee can connect their daily work to what the company is trying to accomplish.
“That connection is the whole game. Employees who understand how their work advances the mission stay longer, perform better, and carry the culture themselves. No benefits package or engagement survey fixes what a disconnected story breaks.”—Kathleen Lucente, CEO, Red Fan Communications
“Prioritize supporting the CEO as the organization’s primary culture leader. Culture drives performance, and CEOs who stay actively engaged in shaping it tend to bring out the best in their teams. HR can enable this by creating consistent communication, surfacing cultural insights from across the organization, and keeping culture on the CEO’s agenda . . . not as a soft priority, but as a strategic one.”—Michael Alexander, CEO, Jaanuu
“From my perspective, HR should operate as a strategic partner, not a reactive function, anticipating talent needs through a deep understanding of the business and culture. By proactively building and maintaining strong talent pipelines, HR can quickly fill critical roles with the right people with minimal disruption. HR should be a competitive advantage!”—Chris Bailey, president/CEO, Bailey Brand Consulting
“Give HR a real seat at the leadership table. At Oxylabs, our HR business partners help managers navigate rapid growth, shape retention strategies, and develop leadership capabilities. Meanwhile, our Talent Acquisition team ensures we hire the right skills through smart workforce planning. Together with other HR initiatives, they foster a culture of accountability, resilience, and strong employee experience—driving real results across the organization.”—Denas Grybauskas, Chief Governance and Strategy Officer, Oxylabs
“As a founder, I’ve learned that people don’t fit neatly into job descriptions—they grow, adapt, and take on new challenges as the business evolves. The most effective HR leaders stay close to that reality. They spend time understanding how work actually gets done, what motivates people, and where teams need support. That proximity transforms HR from an administrative function into a strategic partner that helps organizations scale without losing their culture.”—Dr. Salvatore Viscomi, CEO, Carna Health
“People are one of an organization’s most valuable resources, and effective HR teams need to understand the strategy, participate in material business discussions, and help ensure that talent, culture, leadership, and incentives are aligned with where the organization is trying to go.”—Gail Zauder, cofounder/CEO, AbleFly
“Make culture, talent, and organizational effectiveness a shared leadership responsibility rather than assigning them solely to HR. HR should be a strategic partner that builds the systems, accountability, and conditions for success, but leaders at every level must own how work gets done, how people are developed, and how the organization delivers on its mission.” —Joe Scantlebury, president/CEO, Living Cities [Drafted with Samanta Mahon, Chief People Officer, Living Cities]
“If people are an organization’s most important asset, then CEOs should treat HR as the most strategic function within the organization. That, in itself, will create a differentiated level of empowerment, thinking, and execution.”—Karthik Ganesh, CEO, OnMed
“The biggest opportunity for HR partners is to truly understand how the business makes money in order to offer proactive suggestions on human capital and support making faster decisions to deliver on P&L objectives.”—Leslie Gillin, chief commercial officer, Newrez
“Think of your People function in the same way you’ve come to think of your Tech function: a strategic pillar of the business, essential for future success. Traditional HR (pay, benefits, compliance) is to the People org as IT is to the Tech org—an essential ingredient, but far from full potential. Hire and cultivate a Chief People Officer as essential to the long-term strategy, enterprise, and value creation as the CTO. When lacking imagination as to how they might contribute, use the role of the CTO as your north star.—Meghan Verena Joyce, founder/CEO, Duckbill
“Marketing and HR have a lot in common: Both shape enterprise value, attract strong opinions, and fight for an influential seat at the leadership table. Marketing has strengthened its position by drawing clearer links between investment and growth, collaborating across the C-suite, and sharing best practices. HR could do the same by linking talent investment—resources and money—more directly to commercial outcomes. More media coverage of great people strategy would also help raise the discipline’s influence.—Neil Barrie, cofounder/CEO, 21st Century Brand
“Change your perspective about your role in the company: from being about growing and supporting the people to being about growing the business and the bottom line, the same objective as the other C-suite leaders. The growth of the people is critical, but that is an input to achieving growth in the business. It’s a means to an end, not an end in and of itself.—Oscar Yuan, chief strategy and growth officer, Material
“For a high-growth startup, have the head of people report into a top executive (CEO, COO, etc.), but have a dotted line into business development/sales. Have them sit in on sales planning meetings and even attend staff meetings to develop a deep sense of business drivers and how improving talent could support top line.”—Serenity Carr, cofounder/CEO, Serenity Kids
“Stop screening people for skills. Skills are a search away and cheaper every month, and the same AI amplifies a person’s best and their worst in equal measure, which turns a skilled but undisciplined hire from a bargain into a chaos multiplier. Hire instead for judgment and taste—for people who can decide where to go, who to trust, and why.”—Xiaodi Hou, CEO, Bot Auto
Lean into culture
“Start with changing the function’s name! Humans are not a resource. Call it “People and Culture” or more radical yet, ‘Department of Human Flourishing.’”—Hala Hanna, executive director, MIT Solve
“HR will never fully earn employee trust if it is also seen as the department that manages risk, discipline, and layoffs. The change I would recommend is creating a separate Culture Team whose only job is to care for employees, build trust, strengthen belonging, and help people thrive. At Techjays, we are experimenting with this because we believe the future of work requires more than better HR processes. It requires a real human function inside the company.”—Philip Samuelraj, CEO, Techjays
“Provide accessibility features for neurodivergent and disabled employees and transform [workplace] cultures so that neurodivergent and disabled employees feel like they belong. Be intentional about creating accessible workplaces: remote-first work policies, [turning] conference rooms and open spaces into sensory rooms, designing your website to be WCAG compliant.”—Dr. Jennifer Camota Luebke, CEO, Chief Disability Inclusion Officer & President, Relay Resources
“Change the culture around how your team stays up to date and makes decisions. We stopped holding status meetings. The endless Slack pings went next. Everyone’s working sessions live in writing now, and when I need to know where something stands, I go read them, in more depth than any meeting ever gave me. Nobody waits on a report. The recovered hours became long stretches of unbroken work. We book a meeting only when there is a decision to make, so everyone in the room came to settle something. Status can wait. Decisions are the only thing that still needs a room.”—Michael Quoc, founder/CEO, Product.ai
“First, drop the name. HR has a bad rap, and People Ops better reflects what the function can and should be: a resource for employee growth and development, not the admin enforcement arm of the company. Give the team ownership of culture along with praise for the programs people love, and they’ll be able to handle the hard parts of the job from a position of trust rather than fear.”—Kurt Donnell, CEO and President, Freestar
“The single most important change any organization can make is to establish consistent internal conversations that align with the company’s values. When that happens, three things follow: Employees feel safe having honest conversations, leaders understand what their teams need, and everyone can do their best work for the clients you serve. When you nail those along with having the right leaders in the right seats, HR’s job shifts from firefighting to what it should be doing: ensuring those values and culture cascade through every department. That’s when everyone can do their part in building something excellent.”—Stephanie Scott-Bradshaw, founder/CEO, First and Last PR
“After more than 20 years of building a company, I’ve come to believe HR has one of the biggest opportunities to really shape the culture of the company. Truly, the best HR teams can help grow leaders, make meaningful connections, and create an environment where people can do their best work. When people can grow in a healthy work environment, the business grows with them, making it a win-win all around.”—Jarrod Lopiccolo, CEO, Noble Studios
“Build emotional resilience into the everyday rhythm of work rather than treating mental health as a benefit people access only after they’re already struggling. That means giving managers simple, regular ways to check in on how their teams are actually doing—and acting on what they hear—so strain gets caught early instead of surfacing as burnout, disengagement, or an exit interview. Same principle that drives prevention everywhere: People do better when they’re seen before they struggle, not after.—Sachin Chaudhry, cofounder/CEO, TrustCircle
“Imagine if HR departments weren’t ghettos of complaints and compliance but instead were given the best offices, VIP status, celebrated as North Stars of organizations they serve, and incentivized with big bonuses determined by staff ratings and retention? Imagine the innovation, customization, and satisfaction if HR was the safest and most sacred place employees could dance rather than be neatly contained under a corporate roof? When HR is elevated as the most important element of a business, companies and employees thrive. Talent comes and goes, they have winning and losing seasons, but environment and culture build enduring dynasties and ongoing legacy.”—Stephen Ritz, founder, Green Bronx Machine
“The most successful HR teams think holistically about what enables employees to succeed. Challenges like childcare, transportation, housing instability, and reentry barriers directly impact workforce participation and retention, and employers can’t solve those problems alone. These systemic challenges require systems solutions. In our experience, partnering with nonprofits and community organizations that have the expertise and on-the-ground experience to help remove those barriers and create pathways to long-term employment has made all the difference.”—Tony Bedard, CEO, Frontier Co-op
“Measure its success by the quality and retention of talent rather than by the efficiency of its processes. HR optimized for speed and compliance will always underinvest in the harder and more valuable work of creating the conditions where exceptional people choose to stay and grow. Most HR departments are still accountable to the systems they manage rather than to the people they serve. Until that accountability shifts, they will continue to fall short in the strategic work of building organizational culture and intellectual capital that drive competitive advantage.”—CEO of an AI company
Bet on AI transformation—including of HR itself
“We need People Operations built for the AI era. When AI handles documentation, onboarding, training, recruiting, and performance insights, the competitive advantage shifts to culture, judgment, incentives, and exceptional talent density. With AI-native talents, the way people work, communicate, and collaborate has fundamentally changed. The future of People teams isn’t about managing processes: It’s about designing high-performance organizations where humans and AI work together and getting out of the way for them to thrive.” —Kristy Kim, CEO, TomoCredit
“HR has been designed for processing employees’ needs, not developing employees for the future needs of the organization. AI can solve employees’ needs far more effectively. So why not get to automating your today and find your tomorrow?”—Mohan Nair, CEO, Emerge
“Stop asking HR teams to spend their days acting as compliance administrators. In too many organizations, HR professionals are buried under manual processes, paperwork, policy interpretation, and repetitive administrative tasks. That’s not where they create the most value. When organizations automate complex workflows, especially areas like leave management, accommodations, and employee compliance, HR can focus on developing talent and improving employee experiences.”—Pankaj “Romy” Malviya, CEO, Pulpstream
“Automate and use AI to support HR research, communication, and internal operations, while maintaining human skills and participation in both research and decision-making.”—Jimmy Lee, managing principal, JLEE
“HR should stop treating compliance and talent as paperwork and start treating them as living, continuously validated systems. In my industry, we’ve replaced periodic, snapshot-based validation with AI-driven continuous monitoring. HR needs the same shift: real-time signals on engagement, capability gaps, and risk, not annual reviews that are stale the day they’re filed. The function becomes strategic the moment it moves from documenting the past to predicting and shaping the future.”—Nagesh Nama, CEO, xLM Continuous Intelligence
“The highest-leverage move: Stop running HR as the team that processes people and rebuild it as the one that redesigns how work gets done. AI just made HR’s admin—screening, benefits Q&A, approvals—the cheapest work in the company. Put AI on your most painful repetitive task in 30 days, not next budget cycle. I’ve watched teams win back months and spend it developing people. One caution: Don’t let AI fully score or rank candidates. Scoring logic gets messy, and the law is closing in. AI assists, and a human makes every call that affects a job.” —Andra Vaduva, founder/CEO, SafeSpace
“The most important shift any organization can make is to reposition the people function as a strategic growth lever, not an administrative one. We’ve always known happy employees drive happy customers, but in the AI era, that’s table stakes. It’s our moral obligation as leaders to equip people to be experts in AI—not just comfortable, but capable and competitive because of it. If I could change one thing about HR broadly, it would be to redirect the investment in HR and its charter toward developing employees for this modern world. The companies that don’t will lose ground in the market and will lose their best people to the ones that do.”—Chris Ball, CEO, 6sense
“Start by asking: If I were building this from scratch, how would I design it? Many organizations struggle to get there. They deploy AI into existing structures and automate yesterday’s work instead of reinventing tomorrow’s. Leaders must think about whether the right work is being done by the right people in the right way. When we applied that thinking at ServiceNow, HR went from supporting around 400 employees to around 1,000, freeing our people to focus on strategy. Only 5% of organizations are actually redesigning work rather than optimizing what already exists. The ones that rewire their structures, workflows, and teams will pull ahead.”—Jacqui Canney, chief people and AI enablement officer, ServiceNow
“Institutional knowledge loss is one of the most expensive and painful parts of any organization’s growth and evolution. Leveraging advanced, AI-enabled tools to support knowledge retrieval is a pragmatic investment for any organization looking to maintain continuity during an exciting growth period.”—Leah Qusba, CEO, GoodPower
“Employee-friendly tech brands have turned against employees, urging them to work harder; work with AI; get on leaderboards; and track finger, hand, and eye movements (not bowel movements, thankfully). It’s unclear whether HR had any say.
“HR needs to have a reason to exist or be replaced by AI agents. At least employees will not be misled into believing that HR represents their interests. The one thing HR can do is have a voice. Stand for something. Right now, it is very unclear why they need to exist.”—Senior leader at a tech company
Identify new success metrics—and measure them
“Ban traditional productivity tracking and replace it with a ‘Return on Human Energy’ index. We treat employees like machines that need optimization, ignoring that creativity requires emotional rest. HR should aggressively audit organizational fatigue, tracking calendar bloat and digital noise. When HR protects a team’s collective peace as a sacred corporate asset, exceptional performance follows naturally.”—Volen Vulkov, cofounder, Enhancv
“Stop measuring effectiveness by how much gets documented and start measuring how much context actually reaches the people who need it—without requiring their presence to get it. Most onboarding and culture efforts still assume people have to sit in the room to be in the loop. The organizations that solve that end up feeling small even as they scale.”—Richard White, founder/CEO, Fathom
“HR should be measured by outcomes rather than activity. Are people growing? Are great people staying? Is the work getting better? When these questions become the scorecard, HR becomes a true business partner instead of an administrative task.”—Eric Rojas, founder/CCO, Six+One
“The next frontier of leadership is recognizing that healthy organizations are built by healthy people in healthy communities. Every board should make human capital a standing agenda item by reviewing a Human & Community Vitality Dashboard that tracks leadership, well-being, psychological safety, learning, productivity, and community impact alongside financial results. In the AI era, the organizations that thrive will be those that invest in people as their most renewable source of innovation, resilience, and long-term value.”—Jean Accius, PhD, president/CEO, CHC: Creating Healthier Communities
“Measure HR on outcomes the business actually cares about—internal mobility, manager quality, retention of high performers—rather than cost-and-process metrics like time-to-hire or benefits spend. But new metrics only stick if the people behind them are business-fluent, so pair that shift with cross-pollination: rotate HR leaders through revenue-generating roles and bring high-potential operators into HR for a tour of duty. The deepest critique [of the 2005 story] was that HR optimizes for efficiency because that’s all it’s rewarded for. Fix the incentives and the ‘seat at the table’ takes care of itself.”—Lindsey Witmer Collins, founder/CEO, WLCM Software Studio and Scribbly Inc
“As a CEO, the persistent challenge of hiring is finding team members that fit the organizational culture and predicting their successful integration into that culture. If I could make one meaningful change in HR function, it would be predictive modeling, qualitative and quantitative, to determine an individual’s probability of succeeding within a defined culture. Skills, experience, and track record can de-risk an individual’s propensity to succeed within a company; however, the ability to predict success within a set company culture remains elusive.—Michael Hund, CEO, EB Research Partnership
“Stop measuring HR’s success by compliance and start being the department that designs for human potential. We often see HR departments viewed as reactionary administrative backstops, not as an organization’s talent infrastructure team. We’ve found that organizations which invest in their people’s sense of purpose and community see dramatically lower turnover and higher engagement. What are usually considered ‘soft metrics’ should be valued as hard metrics resulting in treating human capacity as a critical strategic asset.”—CEO of an education company
Please fix the performance review process (again)
“Get rid of formal performance reviews and build a culture around continuous feedback so people always know where they stand. It feels a lot healthier than having someone wonder how they’re doing until some scheduled sit-down finally arrives. If feedback is constant, there are no surprises, and people can course-correct in real time instead of months after the fact. It’s a massive productivity unlock for your company, and a career and development unlock for employees.” —Zander Cook, cofounder, Lease End
“HR needs to spend its energy on things like training managers to run real performance conversations, giving them frameworks and air cover for hard calls, designing systems (compensation, promotion, hiring) that are clear enough that managers can operate them without a HR chaperone, and coaching rather than rescuing. The test of a good HR function becomes whether managers are getting better at leading people over time, not how many tickets HR closed.”—Ed Mitzen, founder, The Business for Good Foundation
“HR becomes much more effective when it stops owning people problems on behalf of managers and instead makes management accountability measurable. The manager should own hiring quality, performance, retention, and development; HR should provide the data, systems, coaching, and escalation paths that make those outcomes visible. The shift is from policy administration to clear ownership and better leadership.”—Neil Cawse, CEO, Geotab
“Annual performance reviews have outlived their usefulness. AI has made real-time performance management possible, giving managers the ability to coach, align goals, and recognize great work as it happens—not months later. HR should be brave enough to move beyond legacy processes instead of continuing to refine them.”—Doug Dennerline, CEO, Betterworks
“More innovation and analysis around current standard practices for performance reviews (annual reviews, 360s, etc). Do these actually lead to better employee productivity, morale, and growth? Which employees respond best to which kinds of reviews? How do we tailor them?”—CEO of a biotech company
Put the people team in charge of performance and productivity
“If you ask any smart Chief Human Resource Officer, they already know the answer. Most HR functions are built for compliance. Compliance is necessary, but not transformative. The HR teams that create real value build capabilities, shape culture, and expand capacity.
“I’d shift HR from policing policies to improving performance. HR should be accountable for strengthening manager effectiveness, increasing leadership capacity, and improving the conditions that allow people to do their best work. Compliance keeps a company safe. Capabilities, culture, and capacity help it win. It’s time to unleash HR to focus on the latter.”—Tony Loyd, CEO, Culture Shift Advisors
“Shift HR’s primary role from managing people to understanding people. HR can identify what truly drives trust, motivation, collaboration, and performance, enabling better hiring, stronger teams, and more effective leadership. When organizations understand why people choose, engage, and stay, they create cultures that consistently outperform those built on policies and metrics alone.” —Ravi Sawhney, CEO, RKS Design Inc
“Preparing the workforce to adapt quickly to the increased pace of changes happening, especially in technology.”—EZ Bala, CEO, Alphind Healthcare
“Productivity is critical, but in most companies, there is no clear organizational owner for it. It usually falls to individual line managers, which means it gets managed inconsistently across the business. HR already owns employee engagement, recruiting, and retention, but productivity is often treated as someone else’s job. That is a missed opportunity for both the company and HR. The next evolution of the Chief People Officer should be to become the organization’s Chief Productivity Officer—responsible for measuring, monitoring, and improving how effectively employees can do their best work.”—Jon Cooper, CEO, Overalls
“We should always remember that ego is our greatest enemy and none of us is perfect. What truly drives success is precisely our imperfections, and how we work to overcome them and become productive contributors to our organizations. For HR professionals, the focus should be on strengthening the work itself, not the titles attached to it. It is hunger and perseverance that enable growth and ultimately lead us to achieve our highest potential.”—Manuel Freire-Garabal, Special Advisor-Charter Member, Gioya Higher Education Institution