Disruption is opportunity until it becomes a liability.

HR is on the hook to help their organizations figure out how to get humans to resource their business objectives. And unfortunately, so many HR functions have not figured out how to leverage yesterday's disruptors, let alone have a plan for the future of work.  

Here are some disruptors that you should be leveraging today, not just responding to. If you're not, you better get a plan because they are here!

Consumerism: Candidates have access to not only more job openings than ever before but also cultural testimonials within your organization before they even consider a job there. The more cumbersome your talent management processes are for users from hiring, to performance feedback, to payroll, and even termination processing, the more users feel under-valued and compelled to share the negative details of their journey. All of this can have a dramatic impact on your talent brand. If you're not considering end-to-end user experience, employee value proposition, and talent branding investments in the form of experience (not advertisements), you're not thinking about the big picture.

Data-Driven Talent Strategies: Business strategies will continue to shift and change at an incredible pace. And each shift will require a talent strategy to support it. To quickly understand where you need to upskill or reskill because of automation, obsolescence, or change, you need talent data that is available and clean. The only path to this is simple processes that translate into intuitive technology. If you're not thinking of operationalization, you're compromising the integrity of your data and the speed with which you can leverage it.

Changing Definition of "Team": We, as HR professionals, compromise the core services we deliver if we haven’t learned how to support team dynamics, leaders, productivity, and talent strategies for new and different ways of working.  What value do we add if we aren’t learning and practically applying the latest trends and research inclusive, but not limited to Agile teams and frameworks? Do you have an expert in-house that can lead the way?

Return on Personnel Investment: As we look at personnel cost, we can be confident it is either the most significant expense or close to it. How is it possible that some organizations are still not finding ways to measure and demonstrate a return on this investment? It's at about this point in the conversation that many HR professionals start to get a little squeamish. They either don't know how to do this, or they are afraid that this insinuates we only care about the numbers. But here's why I love HR - doing the right thing by employees so very often aligns with the right thing for the company! It doesn't eliminate the need for us to continue driving culture, development, and engagement, it only ensures we do it well or have protocol in place to cut our losses a program isn't working. But the future of work is more complicated. As the organizations we support implement more automation and AI, business leaders will and should look to us to understand not only how to redefine jobs, but also to partner with other functions to demonstrate operational gain.

Access to Niche Talent: Some of the most talented people in the world no longer want to be directly employed by you, no matter how amazing your reputation or how compelling your employee value proposition. They are incredible at something unbelievably niche or offer particular services on talent platforms like UpWork. Ensuring your employee/non-employee relationships include newly forming types of workers will drive flexibility in your organization and ensure you’re able to take advantage of the best talent the world has to offer. In fact, in many cases, it is cost-effective and truly risk-mitigating to leverage these people for what they are best at and only temporarily. This opens up a whole new talent pool across the globe.

All of these “disruptors” exist today. Given enough time, they’ll change and evolve into a new talent-related opportunities for your organization to leverage. But change now or the risk is that your organization never gets to see them for the opportunities they are, but rather the challenges you must overcome.

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