Nobel Biocare

My passion for HR began at university and grew as I began my professional career in the late 1990s. During this time, HR departments began to evolve from transactional departments to an HR operating model combining HR business partners, centres of excellence and shared service centres, a model introduced by Dave Ulrich in the 1990s.

The increasingly uncertainty, unstable, and often ambiguous business environment is forcing companies to transform at an unprecedented pace. Today, multinational companies are innovating in ways that are collectively transforming the HR function from the classic Ulrich model:

1. Implement agile & lean principles to ensure both strict prioritisation of existing HR capacity and rapid reallocation of resources when needed, enabling a fundamentally faster pace of change in the business and with people and how they work cross-functional teams to act quickly, exhaust fewer resources, working collaboratively and deliver a result that packs a greater punch.

2. Deliver personalised HR services to meet increasingly diverse expectations of personalisation. 'Productize' HR services to build fit-for-purpose offerings with the needs of the business in mind and enable end-to-end ownership of these services by cross-functional product owner teams in HR.

3. Move from process excellence to data excellence to unlock new sources of decision-making through artificial intelligence and machine learning.

 4. Harness the power of digitalisation in HR by automating HR solutions to increase efficiency.

All these changes are having an impact on HR professionals who are driving the shift to the future:

1. The HR leadership brings insights from outside and inside the organisation to inform solutions- fostering innovation, experimentation and learning through experience across HR.

2. The HR business partner has a deep understanding of the organisation's priorities, competition and capability needs to guide leaders and help shape solutions to access, curate and engage the workforce.

 3. Centre of Excellence develops innovative, holistic, and business-relevant solutions that are people-centric, agile, and focused on enabling the business to win in its markets.

4. HR operational services deliver the workforce experience, creating the foundation for effectiveness and scalability through consultative, transactional and specialist services.

5. Technology partners provide a unified engagement platform that integrates administration, automation and analytics with consumer-like ease and simplicity.

Harness the power of digitalisation in HR by automating HR solutions to increase efficiency.

It also calls on us all to embrace technology (become proficient in using HR technology platforms, AI tools and data analytics), focus on remote working (develop strategies to effectively manage remote teams and manage productivity), increase diversity, equity and inclusion efforts (address biases to create a fairer work environment), upskill and re-skill ourselves and our workforces to remain competitive, and employee well-being (pay attention to mental health support and work-life balance initiatives to attract and retain top talent and foster a positive workplace culture).

Overall, as HR professionals will need to evolve and stay ahead of emerging trends to effectively navigate the future of work and drive organisational success, are you prepared?