HR departments need to change to stay relevant in the future. Traditional HR tasks like recruiting and talent management will increasingly be handled by line managers and new roles like scrum masters. Technologies are also automating many HR processes. To adapt, HR should focus on driving business transformation, enabling decentralized work practices, helping define organizational architecture, improving competency sourcing, and digitizing/automating standard processes.

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Banking is necessary,
banks are not
Bill Gates (1994)
People & Organizations are
necessary, HR is not
Joël Krapf (2021)
What HR-Departments can do to stay relevant!

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Rise of People Developer
More capacity within line organization for traditional HR-tasks such
as Recruiting, Workforce planning, L&D, Talent Mgmt, HR BP
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Rise of lean-agile Leaders
More capacity and ownership to develop people & organization
within the agile systems by roles such as Scrum Master, Agile
Coaches etc.
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Automation and Self-Service
Automation of processes gets easier and easier – eliminating many
tasks that are still performed by individuals
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Technology drives the future state of organizations
Conway’s law says that IT Architecture determines organizational
structure (and vice-versa). The more importance technology gets the
more is an organizational design by the technology department
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Agile Practices are diametrically to todays HR-Processes
Self-organized teams, OKR, Scrum and other feedback-loop driven
practices undermine traditional HR-processes such as performance
reviews, L&D programs, recruiting processes etc.
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Trends that fundamentally undermine everything HR does today

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Business Transformation
Be the driver of business transformation. Understand what business
wants to achieve and help them getting there
Enabling & scaling
Since most HR-task are more and more done decentralized, HR needs
to help enable and scale good practices within the organization
Organisation architecture
Emergence of Agile Ways of Working leaves a lot of open questions. HR
needs to help balancing local WoW with the standardization of practices.
Competency sourcing
Improve the way skills and competencies are sourced. Not only internal
employees but also externals and sourcing of skill & knowledge
Digitalization & Automation
In order to be a true driver of business transformation, HR needs to invest
in digitalization & automation of all their standard processes.
Business
Transformation
How HR can retain its relevance in the future