Over the last couple of decades, I’ve had the opportunity to witness—and be part of—seismic shifts in how organizations think about people, technology, and work itself. From the early days of ERP systems to today’s cloud-based HCM platforms, the journey has been fascinating. But what strikes me the most is how expectations have changed.
From Systems to People: The Shift in Focus
When I began working with HR technology, systems were designed with the buyer in mind—usually the finance or HR departments. Today, the user is finally at the center. Employees expect the same intuitive, seamless experience at work that they enjoy with consumer apps. They don’t want long manuals or training sessions. If technology isn’t easy to use, they simply won’t adopt it.
This user-first mindset is reshaping HCM. Legacy systems with years of accumulated data have the advantage of scale, but they often struggle to pivot quickly. In contrast, nimble startups are building tools for continuous performance management, coaching, and teamwork—reflecting how organizations really operate today.
COVID-19: Accelerating Digital Transformation
The pandemic was a turning point. I remember a joke circulating online: “Who’s leading digital transformation in your company—the CEO, the CIO, or COVID-19?” For many organizations, the answer was COVID.
Companies that were hesitant about digital adoption suddenly had no choice but to enable remote work, rethink processes, and reimagine employee experience. Entire industries had to address gaps overnight—whether it was providing secure laptops to employees, ensuring cybersecurity, or finding new ways to maintain productivity.
This shift wasn’t just technological—it was cultural. Work and life merged. Leaders had to think not only about performance but also about employee wellbeing, emotional resilience, and connection.
The Challenge of Gig Work
Another area that fascinates me is the gig economy. Not all gig workers are the same—delivery personnel, drivers, freelance consultants, trainers—each faces different challenges. COVID-19 exposed the vulnerabilities of these workers, from lack of protective equipment to absence of sick leave. At the same time, skilled freelancers faced uncertainty as projects dried up.
The volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity we once discussed in conferences as “VUCA” became real. Every day brought new information and new challenges. Navigating this was like steering a boat through unpredictable rapids—no playbook, just constant adjustment.
HR at the Center of the Storm
If 2008–09 was the year of the CFO, I believe 2020 was the year of the CHRO. How organizations treated their people during this crisis left lasting impressions. Were layoffs done with dignity? Were employees treated as resources—or as people with anxieties, families, and emotions?
This period highlighted that HR isn’t just a support function—it’s the fulcrum around which organizations can either survive or stumble. Empathy, communication, and trust became non-negotiables. Many companies even brought in counselors and therapists to support employees, acknowledging that wellness is as important as performance.
Recruitment and the HR Community
Recruitment also transformed. Some industries froze hiring, while others—like tech and collaboration platforms—grew rapidly. What I found heartening was HR leaders coming together to share lists of who was hiring, freezing, or laying off, helping displaced employees find opportunities elsewhere. This spirit of community is something we need to preserve.
Technology, Trust, and the Employee Experience
One important lesson I’ve learned: technology is only as good as the culture in which it operates. Employees will resist tools if they feel they’re being monitored or mistrusted. Surveillance-driven approaches—like screenshotting workers every five minutes—destroy trust and morale.
On the other hand, when technology anticipates employee needs and makes their lives easier, it becomes a source of delight. The real foundation of employee experience isn’t the software—it’s trust, belonging, and respect.
Putting Employees First
Ultimately, the core of HR hasn’t changed: it has always been about people. What has changed is the context. Today, we must think differently about trust, culture, and employee experience. We must move from “human resources” to seeing employees as whole people who bring their entire selves to work.
For HR professionals, this is a moment of reflection and reinvention. Are we truly adding value to our organizations and employees in this new reality? Are we building trust, supporting growth, and creating cultures where people thrive?
That’s the challenge—and the opportunity—that lies before us.
A couple of days ago I was talking to a HR regional manager who works in the non-alcoholic beverage industry. He was bemoaning the fact that finding great salespeople was becoming more and more difficult at the fronline level. It was tough to imagine that, as most sales organizations had been on an expansion spree. It seemed like he would have more of a talent pool to hire people from. He disagreed, saying “Sales folks who have worked in the consumer-facing industry, which is cyclical, is what I am looking for. These kinds of people are tough to find!”. Talk about specialization.
As the HR and Recruiting function evolves and complexity creeps in, HR professionals struggle to make sense of this new age, and though they welcome it , find themselves awfully short. The old assumptions hold true and yet, the contexts seem to have changed. The skills that they have built up over the last few decades as Personnel became HR , seem to have lost their potency.
HR will need to open up its silos and soak in skills from other functions, especially those skills of the Sales and Marketing functions. This will be a natural corollary of viewing employees and senior management. This will also mean that to succeed, Recruiters and other HR people will need to change their mindset. An “internal service provider” mindset will only reinforce the current perspective of the function. A “partner” approach however, also needs internal strength to sometimes say “no” to a client, or to specify what one wants from them, to be successful. A lot of us have made successful transitions to that state, however, more as individuals than by any process.
Why is there such a need and challenge for HR and recruitment?
The people who are their raison d'etre, prospective employees as well as hiring managers, are getting more demanding. They demand more in less time. They demand better service and without the frills. Faster turnaround times.
Organizations and senior management want them to contain costs, track metrics regarding employee productivity, morale and come to conclusions as to what they need to change/ do better so that they can control not just the bottom line but also increase the top-line. They want better people to do the jobs recruited at less 'total cost of hiring', they want their best people to stay put and the bottom ones to leave with a minimum of fuss.
And increasingly, the organization's customers want to know about HR policies and how they impact quality of work, because it is becoming increasingly difficult to choose vendors.
What does HR in such a scenario [and these are getting more and more complex and demanding everyday] do? What path must it tread, what roles must it play, what skills must it gather to excel all these demands and satisfy them?
HR needs to structure itself differently, to move from the current functional silos of recruitment, compensation and performance management, training, employee and employee relations to a new paradigm of focusing on projects which are purposes. HR people no longer can make choices about whether they will be 'generalists' or 'specialists' in organizations. They have to be both.
HR's learning curve has to take into account not just today but tomorrow while keeping an eye on what yesterday has left behind. It has to focus on processes, customers, employees and discontinuous change. The question they constantly need to ask themselves is "what if all the knowledge and skills I hold becomes redundant tomorrow? What then?" and build a mindset in their organization where everybody asks this question about themselves.
HR has already been an reluctant adopter of technology and now it has to show how to leverage that technology, not just save time and money.
HR careers will soon become specialized and super specialized. HR vendors will need to offer services like "How to make an FMCG company which is focused on female products a learning organization"
Internally also Recruiting and HR will keep on specializing according to industry based knowledge.
Specialized HR people will work within organizations and yet will be part-free agents advising competition too, as they find a balance between what the job demands and what satisfies their inner strengths.
HR departments will lose many of the administrative work, as employees will take it into their hands and the corporate intranet rids them of standardized processes. They will soon be able to draft their own salary heads, leave structure and keep abreast of legal trends [all the work that HR does today!]
It's going to be an age of change and lots of HR professionals would themselves find the chasm a difficult one to cross.
I try to attend a couple of HR Technology conferences every year:n SHRM's TechConference, and People Matters' TechHR Conference.
These conferences are unlike the more traditional HR Conferences. There's a different energy, with international speakers, a dedicated venue for HR Tech startups, Angel Investors hearing pitches, in addition to the traditional sponsors.
Every speaker and participant is gung-ho about the amazing difference technology can make to employees and the workplace. How it will free us of boring repetitive tasks to focus on truly creative and strategic tasks.
Some of the things that HR leaders often say in such conferences are (and I paraphrase):
"We need to reskill our employees to get them ready for the coming future of work"
"We need to embrace an agile mindset and prioritise digital transformation for putting employee experience at the centre of everything we do"
"We need to deploy tools like AI and ML and chatbots to better hire, engage and service our employees and leaders"
"Technology will free us from the shackles of a physical workspace, enabling all of us to be masters of our time and destiny creating a rising gig economy"
I agree, all these are correct, but once in a while I wish, people would focus on the inevitable disappointments inflated expectations will bring. There is a "law" attributed to American researcher Roy Amara, commonly known as Amara's Law which says: "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run."
Technology does not move in linearly. Every technology adopted by humans (from cooking food in fire to agriculture down to industrial and now to the interconnected digital world) has also profoundly changed our society for the better and for the worse. You can't really have one without the other.
Before I go any further, it would be a good point to remember that while we collectively have changed beyond recognition over the last couple of millennia, our brains haven't evolved at a neurological level much beyond our hunter gatherer days.
When faced with perceived danger of any kind, our amygdala, takes over with a "fight or flight" response. We still can't form more than 150 meaningful relationships (irrespective of the number of friends you have on Facebook or WhatsApp or LinkedIn). That number is called Dunbar's number, you can read about why that is the case here.
In my opinion we should have more conversations about the following in the context of the future of work:
Digital Transformation is hard to get right. According to consulting firm McKinsey the average success rate across industries is about 30%. That is because digital transformation requires a concerted effort from every part of the organization, which might be at varying degrees of digital fluency. HR people are aware how a process or structural change initiative can falter, now imagine changing processes, technology and culture all at the same time.
Let's address the elephant in the room: Job losses, changes in work due to automation and reskilling. Depending on which report you read, the numbers are widely different. But here's an example. At a panel on HR for Industry 4.0, a person who was in HR at a paints company shared this example: The company selected a location in a North Indian state to set up a new plant. The state government was overjoyed when they heard the proposed output of the plant. However when the plant came up, it was so automated that it required just 200 people to manage it than what the policy makers expected would be 1000-1200 people. The skills to run such a plant were not available locally too, and the only direct local employment were in areas like building security, cooks and gardening. So yes, automation and AI will create new jobs, but most often than not the workers they displace will not be able to reskill fast enough. And it will not be a one time reskilling either. As the rate of pace keeps accelerating people will need to keep adding skills and reinventing themselves again and again. The impact that will have on the mental health of such people and the larger impact and stress it will put on the communities and social fabric is a topic that is brushed under the carpet. It has happened before too: Clay Shirky called it "Cognitive Surplus". Read a detailed summary here.
It's also worth remembering that global companies with very deep pockets and a relatively higher skilled workforce would be able to carry out the reskilling with much less pain, if their stocks are not hammered in the stock markets, that is. It is also a fact that most employed people are in the Micro, Small and Medium sectors, which may or may not be able to afford it, even if they want to.
Let's face it, in my personal opinion, most HR people are not very comfortable with technology or digitally savvy. Most are risk averse and simply implement the HR module of the ERP solution they are already deploying. That's because the speakers at the HR Tech conferences are outliers, the innovators, and believing that some HR leaders are representative of the larger community, would be a mistake. HR Tech vendors should therefore stop thinking of these innovators as the normal and get their hands on Geoffrey Moore's classic book "Crossing the Chasm"
After which we come to the vendors, and some blame should be shared by the HR buyers also for falling to the "new shiny object" syndrome. The big issue with vendors, specially those working on point solutions, is that they don't have anyone in the founders who have worked in HR. Therefore they think they have a solution which meets their needs (primarily arising out of the pain points they have themselves felt as candidates or employees) without really understanding the dependencies and processes that need to be addressed before either Candidate Experience/Employee Experience can be improved solely on the basis of technology. Finding a client who is willing to experiment with a new, unproven solution is being very lucky. Vendors need to be open to customising their product and not say "take it or leave it". Another reason many CHROs hesitate to try a new HR Tech startup is they do not want to be investing time, people, data and significant resources to a startup only to find 18 months later that it has shut down because it burned cash and couldn't raise additional funding or has been acquired by a larger player who might turn the tech for other uses, or just been acqui-hired. Vendors need to be open about their product roadmap and funding situation. Those who don't do that impact the others in the ecosystem. In the case of Artificial Intelligence in HR enough has been said about relying on past data leading to reinforcing existing biases.
This is not a rant. At least I didn't mean it to be :)
These are some aspects I think that we as a HR and HR Tech community need to be having conversations about so that we don't rush in where angels fear to tread :)
What do you think? Where would you disagree with me?
On 19th, I moderated a panel discussion on implications for HR in the era of the gig economy. The panelists were author and thought leader Abhijit Bhaduri, Shamita Chatterjee of Infosys, Suresh Tripathi of Tata Steel, Raj Narayan of Titan, Amitav Mukerji of ITC and Arvind Subramanian
Some views shared by the panelists were:
Gig Economy is a reality, and India is among the top three countries with gig workers
Gig workers were always a reality, but now with certain platforms they can offer their skills across geographies (these are the knowledge based gig workers)
Gig workers come in all varieties: from semi-skilled (like drivers, delivery boys) to master "karigars" (example of master jewellery makers was shared by Mr. Raj Narayan ). Abhijit called these high end gig workers as "gig artists)
Suresh of Tata Steel shared an interesting experiment they were doing, where workers can use 20% of their work time to do an external gig, thereby building additional skills and supplementing their incomes
Gig economy does give rise to a power law, specially in the high skills market, where a few players can corner a high gains than the rest
Abhijit said that maybe we were looking in the wrong place for inspiration. He said that we should be looking at the Indian movie industry where 80% of the workforce is comprised of gig workers. (I had posted something on the same lines 16 years ago)
Shamita of Infosys shared that thanks to fears about cybersecuity and data security, hiring gig workers on IT projects is actually going down.
Amitav of ITC opined that for low skilled gig workers, there will be a new kind of collectivism that will rise. He gave the example of loaders in Maharashtra, known as "mathadis" who are organised under a welfare board, set up in compliance to the Maharashtra Hamal, Mathadi and other unprotected workers (Regulation of Employment and Welfare) Act 1969.
On a question about the Labour Laws lagging behind the reality of the gig workforce, the members of the panel agreed that the law will evolve and HR leaders have to have a constant dialogue with policy makers and educate them about the new reality
There were concerns from the audience about the lack of a safety net for gig workers and the psychological aspect of not being part of a workforce, as well as the need for constant reskilling to remain relevant. Amitav said there was a business opportunity for companies who could make products like a pension scheme and insurance schemes for gig workers. Support networks for identity and mental health of gig workers were also pointed out as a necessity, especially those gig workers who are subject to the tyranny of algorithms
I might be missing out on some points, but I guess I've covered the big points in this post.
Was an interesting Twitter chat today on HR and value creation and how it is different from value addition and what competencies HR people need to exhibit to create value.
Here are some tweets (in reverse chronological order) on the discussion.
It's a great honor for me to host 2012's final Carnival of HR (this being my 4th time, first was in 2007, the second in 2008, third in 2009 ) - with some thought provoking as well as practical blog posts submitted by HR bloggers from across the world. I've arranged the various blog posts by theme and have also picked my top blog post :)
Here goes (drumroll!!)
My top pick of the blog posts: Rawn Shah has a very thought provoking post on whether companies' employment models are "too stateful" and whether rise of crowdsourcing and collective intelligence will make companies more flexible and agile
Holidays and HR
Susan from About.com reminds us that in the party season, here are the gaffes during office parties to keep away from, while Stuart Rudner tells us the legal ramifications and how to avoid the risk of office parties. Julie tells us the top 3 gifts employees want (not just in the holiday season!)
Social Media and HR
Christopher differentiates between Talent Communities (which I have blogged about earlier) and Talent Networks. Julie focuses on social media and business as well as recruiting benefits for B2B companies. Nisha suggests that companies make their employees their social brand ambassadors
Leadership & Performance
Mark has a very helpful post for leaders who come up against a different idea and don't want to compromise. Linda blogs about how our thinking is an ethical driver for leadership. And Alex tells leaders that creating meaningful company goals means more to employees, and examples of such goals. Karin tells us who actually writes the performance appraisal when a great leader is leading. Your Boss tells you what to ask him/her to prepare for your performance appraisal.
On a different note, John Hunter brings lessons from a video about traffic jams to share how to use incentives rather than prescriptive solutions to change social systemic behavior.
Amit blogs about how mentoring helps in developing leaders.
And that's all, folks! I had a great time hosting the Carnival! If you want to keep track of the carnival as it travels across the HR Blogosphere - here's where you need to go!
