How HR and tech professionals can ‘live in the future now’

The need to operate with agility is nothing new for successful HR and tech professionals today. After all, many jobs in these industries did not exist a few decades ago—or even a few years ago, said panellists at the opening keynote for the Women in HR Technology Summit at the HR Tech Conference in Las Vegas.

Preparing for the unknown was a cornerstone of her own upbringing, said Opal Wagnac, Senior Vice-President of Market and Product Strategy at isolved. From a young age, Wagnac was curious about physics, electricity, magnetism—and earned an electrical engineering degree from Columbia University.

“What really excited me were the things you couldn’t see. There was something about electricity—it was the unseen and the art of the possible,” she told the audience at Mandalay Bay.

It is that curiosity about the unknown that today’s HR and tech leaders, she said, need to harness to not only keep up with the pace of change today but to stay ahead of it.

“You’ve got to be nimble,” Wagnac said.

Meeting the expectations of tomorrow

As technology changes at an exponential rate, employee expectations will continue to shift—and HR and tech professionals need to anticipate those and respond with tech-infused workplace experiences.

Wagnac pointed to her own kids: They are growing up in a world where they notice the absence of WiFi—and increasingly, they will recognise the absence of AI.

“Things we once considered a luxury,” she said, “they consider a necessity.”

Too often, however, people who are “living like the Jetsons” in their personal lives are being “plopped into a Flinstones world” when they come to work, Wagnac said.

It is up to HR and tech professionals to lead the change that bridges that gap, said panellist Chris Havrilla, Vice-President of Product Strategy at Oracle.

“Whether we’re building tech, using tech—it’s about how we absorb change and be nimble,” she said.

Today’s conditions—unpredictable markets, an accelerated speed of business, a volatile economy—can actually teach HR and tech professionals how to embrace the agility needed to become tech-first organisations, Havrilla added.

However, HR needs to get better at “coming with questions”, she said. HR leaders are often looked to as the ones “with the answers”—but truly driving tech-fuelled transformation requires a fair amount of humility.

“Please do not think you have the answers,” Havrilla told the audience. “Start with the questions; they’ll take you where you need to go.”

Curiosity: Key for HR and tech professionals

HR and tech leaders have an “opportunity to leave in the future now”, only if they can “become really curious”, noted panellist Meg Bear, Non-Executive Director at Heidrick & Struggles and longtime SAP executive.

Ask yourself, she said: How did we get to those processes? What is behind this type of operation? How did we arrive at these answers?

The signals are already there—from the business, from employees, from what is available in the tech market.

“What we need to do now with those signals is get really, really good at questioning and challenging what we know,” Bear said. “We have to ask ourselves how we can change and how we can be different.”

That is going to require a mindset shift. For instance, instead of focusing on the concept of job losses to AI, reinvent the story: How do we make the future of work one we want to be a part of?

“When we empower ourselves to do that,” Bear said, “it’s going to make a massive difference—not just in the industry, but in the business overall and in the world of work.”

Redefining success for the future

HR is in a place many people leaders have been anticipating “for a long time”, Bear said. Most business leaders are laser-focused on better engaging and serving employees, while the technology to do that is there—a “foundation” that she said will drive success in the future.

However, HR and tech leaders now need to broaden the aperture of their HR tech strategy—beyond how it can improve HR’s work to how it can truly help the organisation and its people thrive.

“This is the moment for all of us to elevate how we define success and how we executive on success,” Bear said.

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For vendors, the panellists agreed, that means drilling down into what customers—both the organisation and its employees—need, which is not always what they initially bring to the table. Be intentional about the questions you ask, and who you ask them of, Bear advised, and centre customer needs both today and into the future, as they change quickly.

AI is sure to be among the factors driving that change.

Wagnac said she envisions AI as the “new internet”. It took the internet vastly less time than electricity to mature—and AI will take even less time.

“In the next five to 10 years, we won’t be saying ‘AI’,” she said. “We’ll be more descriptive. We have to open our minds to think of AI as primitive, a baseline. Electricity was there, so the internet was there and now AI is there. So, what’s the next thing?”

About the Author: Jen Colletta is Managing Editor at Human Resource Executive, where this article was first published.