CHRO Leadership Roundtable

The ‘future of work’ model will foster human-machine collaboration, enable new skills and worker experiences, and support a reimagined physical workplace and borderless digital workspace. The workforce strategies of organizations are thus rapidly changing to adapt to hybrid and distributed work, the rapid automation of human tasks, and the need to enable an inclusive, diverse, and multi-generational workforce. Enabling employee development and leveraging advanced technologies such as AI, analytics, cloud, advanced apps, and digital workspaces to meet the changing needs of the workforce have become more important than ever before. This session examines the digital-first approaches progressive CHROs and their teams are developing to address challenges, differentiate, and take advantage of new opportunities.

People are an organization's most important asset – they are responsible for driving innovation, transformation, and growth. However, people must be able to set a vision and partner with each other to get the work done. Navigating the complexity of an organization is challenging, especially in a cost-constrained environment. As such, leaders must often choose between two business-critical objectives — empowering employees or protecting margins/lowering costs. This session reveals that elevated experiences and operational efficiency are not mutually exclusive but are two sides of the same coin.

Hiring talented IT workers with specialized skills has always been a challenge for CIOs. But the intersection of the Great Resignation, aging workforces, new IT disciplines and technologies, and burgeoning amounts of data needing deep analytics to unlock value has introduced new complications. CIOs must view the talent challenge from several intersecting angles. Skills shortages, coupled with rising demands for expertise in digital technologies, AI/ML, and data analytics, mean that CIOs must adopt a blended approach of leveraging technology to automate routine lower-level tasks while using training and development along with machine augmentation to move IT workers up the food chain of work value.

We are coming out of an unprecedented period of investment in the technologies and tools that supported pandemic responses as well as ecommerce and hybrid work. For most organizations, now is the time to start reaping the benefits of their hyper-accelerated digital implementations. Given that CIOs and CHROs have had ample time to transform the human resource function, organizations should be looking to quantify the impact of digitalization on employee experience and set strategic plans to further build on that impact.

Many CIOs have, in a two-year window, transformed almost every aspect of day-to-day tasks, particularly by enabling secure commerce and remote work. Unfortunately, the transformation of the work experience may have been less than satisfying for the employees. CIOs can champion strategies that will make employee experience the next big step in organizational transformation. For example, they can enable responsive pathways to partnership between the CHRO, CFO, and COO for significant improvements in contextualized decision making among human resource, finance, and operations.