What Is the Future of HR?

        Robert Browning’s poem “Andrea del Sarto” describes the 16th-century painter’s love for his wife but laments that del Sarto is limited by the mundane duties of earning money and supporting her, while his more famous (and unmarried) contemporaries Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael live for their work with greater passion and spirit.

Despite being published in 1855, the Victorian Age poet’s work is relevant to the challenges facing human resources leaders today. The demands of day-to-day HR may be crowding out the focus, passion and spirit that are necessary if practitioners are to take a leading role in helping organizations capitalize on opportunities offered by emerging trends such as big data and gamification. This could hinder an organization’s quest to maximize productivity and be competitive.

Is the HR profession moving fast enough to capture the opportunities in emerging trends? Much of the work addressing this issue has defined the future of HR in terms of competencies, workforce demographics, or professional techniques or practices.

Here we take a different departure point by starting with prominent emerging general trends and examining their potential effect on HR, now and in the future, and HR’s desired and actual role in addressing them. What we found was that while HR leaders generally feel their ideal role is one of broad leadership, their assessment of the current role often is far less than that.

Our research at the Center for Effective Organizations was conducted with a consortium of 11 large companies: Citrix Systems Inc.; Electronic Arts Inc.; Gap Inc.; Lockheed Martin Corp.; Mattel Inc.; Rockwell Automation; Royal Bank of Canada; Sony Pictures Entertainment; Unilever; UPS Inc.; and The Walt Disney Co. Twenty to 30 HR professionals within each company participated in the consortium. We examined the trends of globalization, generational diversity, sustainability, social media, personal technology, mass customization, open innovation, big data and gamification.