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 Hiii y’all, It’s the end of Q2 which means… Q3 is basically upon us!!!! Q3/Q4 tend to be my wildest quarters but Q1/Q2 were already intense so idk what that means for the rest of my year... Basically I should continue to sage my community at every opportunity. So while that’s a terrifying thought, here are some happy thoughts about things we have going on!!! 📚 Wanna hang out tomorrow? I’m reading submissions to the LVE and off the record. And there’s still time to submit your wildest HR story or something you need to get off your chest to The Burn Book. This will not be recorded so it's your ONLY chance to hear the stories live! 📺 HR Therapy: How will AI shape your workforce planning? Yes, you’re tired of hearing about AI but there are REAL impacts to your workforce so why not have a plan for how to address that?? Next month’s HR Therapy will tackle this topic with REAL data + stories you can learn from. Together, we’ll figure it out! And the next time your CEO asks about a plan, you'll be ready. Now, onto today… I’m rounding out the “this is fine” quarter where I’ve discussed alllll the things that complicate HR’s role and today I’m covering what the future could look like via a choose your own adventure. Sponsored by EasyLlama Quick question...do you know if your company is compliant right now, or are you just hoping nobody checks? EasyLlama's free Compliance Grader gives you a full risk assessment in only two minutes. Two minutes is less time than your last all-hands ran over, so it's worth checking! 😇 HR'S ROLE Choose your own adventure: HR edition It's the last Monday of the quarter, which means two things: I'm slightly baffled we’re halfway through the year and we've officially made it through three full months of me naming every way this job is on fire. 🔥 I started this quarter with the “this is fine” meme of a dog sitting at a table with a coffee in hand and everything around them on fire and said that was basically HR. I broke down why it’s HR with 3 major buckets:
Before we get into it: this quarter exhausted the hell out of me. Writing it, living it, all of it. But somewhere around May, I started getting itchy. I got curious about how to fix this for everyone. Lofty goal, I know. But if HR’s scope alone keeps expanding the way it's been expanding, this job becomes genuinely untenable. There's a version of the near future where the role we have today just… doesn't work anymore. So this could be the perfect moment you get to reimagine the thing.The thing being our job. I want to try something a little ridiculous but maybe fun??? I've got three paths I think HR could actually go down in the next 5–10 years. You may think they’re unhinged, too far away or simply impossible. But, hey isn’t that the fun in reimaging things? I get to think about a future that could exist?? To make this even more entertaining, I’m doing this Choose Your Own Adventure style. If you grew up holding your thumb on another page so you could flip back when you died, you already know how this goes! If not, you’re in for a treat. To note: these are just ideas of what the future HR could look like, they’re not all fully scoped out or set in stone. But I wanted to end this quarter by thinking about how the future COULD be different. And I encourage you to do the same! 3 paths HR could go down: 🎯 Path One: HR becomes the performance machine You walk in Monday. Every offer letter, every benefits ticket, every "can you check the handbook" question has been automated overnight. You now have 30 free hours a week. Do you: (A) finally build the thing that actually moves the business, or (B) refresh your inbox in a panic because you've never been allowed to think before? → If you chose A, please read on. Picture Wendy Rhoades from Billions. If you haven’t watched the show the TLDR is Wendy is a performance coach at a hedge fund. Wendy doesn't run open enrollment. Wendy doesn't reset anyone's Workday password. Wendy has exactly one job: make the highest-stakes humans in the building perform at the top of their ceiling. That's it. That's the whole role. So here's the path I’m envisioning: what if AI eats enough of the administrative load that HR's center of gravity shifts entirely to be focused on the performance lever? Not performance reviews-as-paperwork!! No, performance as in the deepest possible focus on managers and what makes their teams actually good. Coaching. Capability. The unglamorous science of why one team produces amazing work and the identical team next to it falls apart. We already know that manager quality is potentially the highest-leverage problem we have. We've also learned that your manager affects your mental health as much as your partner does. 🤯 In this future scenario, that stops being a sad stat we know and instead becomes the focus of our work. The catch: this path narrows HR. On purpose. And narrowing is terrifying when your whole identity has been "the person who does everything." But there's a freedom in it, what if doing less is how we finally do something REALLY well??? 🃏 Path Two: HR goes full-cycle (everyone does everything, again) You open your team's org chart. The boxes labeled "Talent," "HRBP," and "L&D" have dissolved into one box that just says "you." Do you: (A) scream, or (B) realize this might actually be the dream? → Honestly, both. Keep reading. Okay this one's a little wacky and I know it so stay with me. Right now we divide our function into specialists, recruiting over here, HRBPs over there, L&D in the corner, comp doing comp things. We built those walls for a good reason: no single human could do all of it. The job was too big. So we sliced it. But here's the wacky thought. What if AI absorbs so much of the task load that the walls stop making sense? I keep watching AI shrink teams across every function, engineering, marketing, ops. Smaller, leaner, more generalist. And I couldn’t help but wonder what happens when that hits us? What if the future HR person isn't a recruiter OR an HRBP OR an L&D lead, what if they're a full-cycle People person who runs the entire employee lifecycle for their part of the org, end to end? Now, and this is the part I want to be honest about, at first glance this path makes the SCOPE problem worse, right? Everyone owning everything? That sounds like hell. EXCEPT!!! The only reason full-cycle becomes possible is the thing that's scaring everyone: AI eating the administrative scope. You're not a full-cycle admin doing nine jobs by hand. You're a full-cycle strategist whose admin work got automated, so you can finally see one population of humans whole, from the day you recruit them to the day they leave! Instead of handing them off down an assembly line where context gets lost on the person. Maybe our walls didn't exist because specialization was key. Potentially, they existed because we were buried. Unbury us, and maybe we don't need them. This future looks like a team of people specialized within their org’s functions and departments. ♟️ Path Three: HR becomes the architect You're handed a blank floor plan. Not a person to onboard, the actual blueprint of HOW work gets done. What's a robot, what's a human, who reports to what, where the decisions live. Do you: (A) hand it back because "that's not really HR," or (B) pick up the pen? → If you picked B, keep reading. This is the path I can't stop thinking about!! In Paths 1 and 2, HR changes its focus and its shape. In this one, HR changes its altitude. We stop being the team that runs people-processes and become the team that designs how work itself happens. Think about what's genuinely up for grabs right now in every company:
Right now, who in your org owns those questions? Potentially, they're floating between IT, ops, the C-suite, and a rando AI Slack channel where nobody makes a decision. I think that ownership is ours to take!! Org design as the core skill. Workforce architecture as the job. Less Wendy, more chess master, the person who sees the whole board and designs the system everyone else plays inside. And this one isn't even that far away, which is why it's my bet! We’re seeing more Chief People Officer and AI Transformation officer roles which is incredible! And the seeds are already here: workforce planning, people analytics, the entire "how do we build a workforce that's actually ready for AI" conversation. Not so subtle plug: this is literally what we're getting into at the HR Therapy session I'm hosting in July!!! Come for the answers you need to make this path successful. This is the path that solves scope not by redistributing the pile or shrinking it, but by climbing above it. You don't escape the task list by working faster but you escape it by becoming the person who decides what the tasks even are… Sooo, where does HR actually go? Here's where you expect me to tell you which path is it. TBH: I don't have a crystal ball. Shocking, I know, given how confidently I've been talking about the future. But our path forward is not guaranteed. We’re all in different orgs, in different industries, with different challenges. We also happen to be standing in the messiest, most undecided moment our profession has ever had. Everyone keeps announcing that work is about to be transformed by AI and then we all log on Monday and try to figure out what that actually means in real time, with no manual, while the transformation is happening TO us. 📣 And who knows, things might not even change?? There’s a real assumption that AI disrupts work enough that our role also shifts but what if it doesn’t? What if it’s all noise?! BRB existential spiral incoming. If I was a betting woman, of all the paths outlined above, I'd put my money on the architect. I think the function that survives is the one that climbs altitude and designs the work instead of cleaning up after it. But honestly? The specific ending matters less than this: Things are changing whether we lead the change or get dragged through it. And we are the only people in the building whose entire job is the human cost of that change!! If HR isn't at the forefront of the workforce changes, tough problems an org is facing, or AI transformation then it all gets decided about our people, without the one team that was hired to consider them. That's not a future I'm willing to choose-your-own-adventure my way out of. ❤️ Take a deep breath and know, we’re all figuring this out together! Next quarter I’ll be digging into more on this topic of how we figure things out and architect our futures together. P.S. reply and tell me which path you'd bet on. I'm genuinely taking a tally! Sponsored by Adobe Acrobat Studio POV: You spent like three weeks building the perfect onboarding doc. Adobe Acrobat PDF Spaces is changing the HR onboarding game with one interactive link for every document from policies to benefits. Plus, a custom AI Assistant answers their questions, and built-in engagement tracking proves who actually read what! (HUMAN) RESOURCES
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SONG OF THE WEEK 🎧 Soup, Remi Wolf I looooved the Remi Wolf camo in Off Campus! THIS SONG IS FIRE. And you knowwww I love me some pop. If you need me, I'm dancing around my kitchen to this. I hope you enjoyed this, please let me know what you think and what other topics you'd love for me to cover. I'm allll ears. Reminder: Take care of yourself and know that I support you. | |||||||||||
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