HR professionals have to m
anage their day-to-day responsibilities and prepare for global trends that will affect how they do business – five of which were shared by HR guru Gary B. Kushner, president/CEO of Kushner & Company in Portage, Mich., at the 63rd annual conference of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM).
It was standing room only at Kushner’s June 27 session, “The Changing Nature of Work: Five Global Trends Affecting Strategic Human Resources,” where he discussed the trends of: (1) technological advancement; (2) outsourcing; (3) changes in demographics and diversity; (4) changing employee values and attitudes; and (5) globalization.
Kushner is very illustrative; for example, explaining how we’ve evolved from a cycle where it took about two weeks to turn around information via snail mail, to where we are today, getting instant responses via e-mail and IM. But I only sat through trends one and two, because his presentation seemed to be more an overview, albeit an engaging one, and there were other sessions I could check out.
I got a little more “meat” about trends later that day during “Emerging Trends, Anticipating the Future of Work,” led by John Greer, chief human capital and strategy officer at Smart Financial Credit Union. His tack was a little different; he started with a discussion of the impact that population trends worldwide will have on HR. For example, the United States is the only developed country that is expected to have a population increase over the next 50 years. China, on the other hand, is expected to have a 12-percent decline. Furthermore, 1.5 billion consumers will be emerging in the developing world over the next five years – expected to bring the largest consumption boom in history. This is all good news for the HR professional in terms of staffing. However, the bad news is this will also exacerbate the already existing need for skilled labor. Even now, a major hiring problem for the HR professional is not finding the bodies to fill the jobs – it is finding the bodies with the appropriate skill sets. To that end, Greer says the need to provide employee training will be crucial for HR.
And because of the tech boom, Greer noted the need for the HR professional to think outside of the traditional box. He talked about an increase in “crowdsourcing,” which is a variation of outsourcing. Under crowdsourcing, tasks traditionally performed by employees or contractors are outsourced to an undefined, large group of people or community (a “crowd”), through an open call. It’s kind of a Wikipedia-like concept — there a community of people builds information; in crowdsourcing, such a community performs tasks. And speaking of Wikis, having one in an organization is a good idea, says Greer. Data show that they increase productivity, as individuals have a centralized information resource to go to get their questions answered – rather than seeking those answers from others in the organization.
Greer also made an interesting point about the future of computer software in the HR world. Regarding the Microsoft Office suite, for example, he asked everyone to raise their hands if they used, in this order, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access. When you got to Access, few people had their hands raised. So the question will become, he says: Why pay for expensive software that is not fully used? Greer says for this, and other reasons, HR professionals will see an increase in the use of on-demand software, which is not maintained in-house, but on a server (maintained by a third-party vendor), and accordingly he says the widespread use of cloud computing is inevitable.