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The Future of HR

January 28th, 2017 Posted by Capabilities, Human Resources, Strategy, Uncategorized 70 comments

Human Resources, as a function, has an image problem.  And a self-confidence problem.

As a function HR has an incredibly broad set of responsibilities – everything from compliance tasks (payroll, EEO, ACA, ADA, FMLA and all the other acronyms) to day-day blocking and tackling (hiring, firing, reorganizing and paying) to the more strategic work (advising and consulting around people, organization, workforce strategy, business execution, talent pipelines, engagement etc).

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What’s A Job?

September 6th, 2016 Posted by Capabilities, Career, Freelance, Human Resources, Strategy, Work, Workplace 63 comments

When you are looking for a pattern, you can see it all over the place. Just recently, a client asked me what I thought about job descriptions.   I could hear in her voice that she wasn’t sure what my answer would be and that it may have been a source of much discussion inside the company.

Here’s the rub … with the nature of work changing, with the speed at which technology is changing how we do our jobs and with the constant drumbeat of disruptive innovations in many industries it is just plain hard to keep a job description up to date and accurate.

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Technology & Information Overload

August 4th, 2016 Posted by Capabilities, Productivity, Technology, Workplace 71 comments

Technology is everywhere and is shaping how and when we interact. Workers everywhere are both enabled by and struggling with those implications, which is oddly (or expectedly depending on your perspective) driving the development of more tools and technologies at both ends of that spectrum – using technology to enable work as well as shut off technology to enable work.

Cisco did a research study, published as Workforce 2020, that states the challenge this way:

What all this new technology means for tomorrow‘s workforce can be summarized in [Marshall] McLuhan‘s dictum “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”

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