HR professionals are going to be the new sorcerers, with magic wands and tricky spells, bringing the right strategy and talent successions.

The Future Stimulus

The ultimate thirst for excellence has brought us to where we stand now, and, today, we are way more advanced than we were in the past. With a continuous and long sustainable evolution, we transformed from being "primitive" to being "prime." We have never stopped ourselves from being more human, and we have cultured ourselves by enlarging our periphery of information and knowledge. We took ourselves beyond the horizons and achieved many unimagined peaks of success. Undoubtedly, this has only been possible because we were future-ready.

While the entire world is targeting the next leap of transformation, being HR professionals, we ask ourselves: Are we ready for the future? Do we really need to transform into the next generation HR?

To be future-ready, we must understand the true demands of business and the importance of change. There is a huge shift in organizational focus, and it has surely created a wave of changes for every HR leader and professional. With the variety of new jobs being created and re-engineered, the new models are dealing with the new era of business. The future is expected to be a handshake of human intelligence with artificial intelligence. The journey has just begun.

The future is visible now. With smart home solutions inside and self- driven cars outside, our lives are going to be very much digitally influenced. As HR professionals, we must have the agility of being future-ready.  Over a few decades, organizations that are agile, flexible, and ready to change will survive a major evolution of business modeling. Those who are investing largely in the research, innovation, and development of an intelligent framework are going to be the leaders of the future.

Artificial intelligence is going to have major coverage, but the importance of human intelligence should not be ignored. Many successful HR leaders have triumphed due to their business alignment and strategic positioning of HR inside the board room, but I must add here that their focus on people was never blurry.

While the need of the situation is to adapt to technology and reframe business strategies, HR leaders must equally focus on 'design thinking' and 'innovation' to drive the organization towards expected outcomes.

Some areas to watch out for and prepare ourselves:

The New Paradigm of Business

We must anticipate and prepare for the challenges of the new paradigm of business. Human Resources play a pivotal role in enabling companies to undertake business changes. By setting contextually right culture components through major business processes, HR professionals can enable their companies to have a successful journey. We must apprehend how organizations and businesses work in parallel and contribute to the mission, vision, and financial growth of the business.

While targets are always the hitting areas for business driving leaders, HR leaders must adapt the financial and strategic directions to enable the stipulated strategy for the economic and social environments in which businesses operate and thrive to succeed. The future of HR is expected to shift from being an 'enabler' to being 'business strategists' and 'micro-enterprise owners'. Let us not forget that HR leaders share a contiguous picture of organizational values with internal as well as external stakeholders, and it must be clicked in wide-angle and presented as a panoramic display. With the vast impact of social media in our life and the accessibility to share more, we have started understanding the benefit of branding.

Shifting to the Talent Dimension

Shifting to 'talent' from 'people' is going to be the next-level game for HR in the future. While the current strategies focus on identifying and retaining talent, it will extend to restructuring talent management strategies to the next level. CEB Global's research indicates that high- potential employees (HIPOs) are around 90% more valuable than non- HIPOs. Conclusively, HR leaders should focus on process re-engineering of the overall 'Talent Management Strategy'.

Talents don't remain talents if they are not nurtured well in time, so HR professionals must be ready to do the forthcoming. Performance appraisals have been replaced with feedback- based evaluations, as feedback is a crucial part in the future of building a cultural change in performance measurements. Continuous feedback in a machine-learning environment might change the perspective and create a new phenomenon of talent assessments. HR platforms are being developed by taking into consideration a self- evaluation method as a base parameter, which will create a new outlook on one's developmental journey. Future demand is based on self-assessment and self-evaluation, which is spotlighted for the brand-new L&D systems. Self- learning with a reflective result will help HR professionals to institute organizational success.
 

Reskilling for the New Age

We are a skilled force, with lots of aggressive strategies at hand. We want to be the change agents for our organization, but have we re-evaluated ourselves, in terms of acquiring the necessary skills for dealing with future change? If we have not started, we must do that now. The current age of instinctive millennials and even younger cohorts in the workforce demands speedy growth and faster recognitions, and we must prepare ourselves to deliver. We must re-skill ourselves to face the next change. There are various techno-functional skills that we must adapt to our DNA of HR if we are to convert strategies into a dream success.

Digital Agility

While major transformation demands technological advancement, HR leaders must lay the foundation for digital transformation strategies now so that the next generation will be able to implement and sustain them. Leadership and transformational strategies will be the key to effective next-generation transformation. While HR leaders are going to strategize the future, HR professionals will have to play the role of change agents in the coming years, and their understanding of the right models and tools will be effective game-changers. Be change-ready and future-ready to increase the value that we have created so far. HR professionals are going to be the new sorcerers, with magic wands and tricky spells, bringing the right strategy and talent successions.