There are three key changes in store for the HR function of the future, according to the London Business School’s Lynda Gratton, who said HR leaders will require a new set of specialised skills in order to meet increasingly complex demands in business.
The first significant area of change is around the design of jobs, and Gratton said HR has “focused far too much” on design of remuneration systems in the past.
“The real intangible asset for a person is the job that they do, not the amount of money they get paid,” she said.
“I think we need to think about jobs with as much sophistication as we used to think about salaries.”
Companies often lag behind when it comes to initiatives such as phased retirement, job share schemes and, on- and off-boarding ramps, and Gratton has estimated that such companies have a period of three years at most to introduce these elements of job design before the lack of them starts to have a serious impact.
“This is becoming an urgent issue. As things stand, when people want to customise their careers they do so by leaving the company,” she said.
“The most valuable people are building their career elsewhere because companies are not providing what they need.”
The second most important skills change for HR is in the area of big data, Gratton said, who was recently in Sydney for the World Business Forum.
“Big data is really important. It’s a very specialised job, so I don’t think every HR person needs to understand about statistics and big data, but they certainly need to have a point of view about how big data is changing work,” she said.
The future of HR lies in anticipating demographic trends and modelling the impact they will have on the workforce, according to Gratton, who pointed out that the data and tools are already available, and it is now simply a case of using them.
The third most important shift in skills for HR is in understanding the network theory and how to apply it in a commercial environment.
Network theory is the study of complex interacting systems that can be represented as graphs equipped with extra structure, and in an organisational context, network theory can be used to understand who knows whom.
People in the centre of a network theory graph have the largest number of ties and those at the periphery have the smallest number, and Gratton has observed that “hot spots” form as the result of an igniting purpose across networks of relationship ties.
These relationships can have a significant impact on knowledge flows throughout the hot spot, and on the capacity of a hot spot to create value, she added.
“HR usually isn’t very well connected,” said Gratton, who suggested HR could apply network theory to help understand communication, influence and where to have the most impact in an organisation.
