Trish McFarlane, CEO and principal analyst at H3 HR Advisors is a self-confessed dreamer. Moving on from HR’s biggest current concerns naturally we find the space to really dream as we look to the future of HR, the workplace and the workforce. Together Trish and host Rhonda Taylor rub the crystal ball and ponder where HR is going and envision what it’s going to look like on the other side.
How can we move people into jobs that aren’t yet created? How might AI adapt to meet our future lifestyles and work environment? How do you plan ahead when the future is so uncertain? They touch on these questions and more in this future-focused episode.
Rhonda Taylor: Trish, you and I are going to dream but first of all we’re going to benchmark. What do you see as HR’s biggest concerns right now?
Trish McFarlane: It’s still about meeting the needs of some of the core HR capabilities around compliance, making sure people are getting paid, getting the benefits they need, and getting the support they need – that’s still top of mind. Because of the world situation with a pandemic, that’s where HR heads have to be first and foremost, making sure that at that base level that employees are feeling cared for and supported. When you start talking about the next level in, I think that HR people are starting to really spend time thinking about the way that we look at jobs and the way that we move people into jobs that may be not yet created.
Lastly, I would say they’re really focused on how do you plan for a year ahead, like we normally would at this time of year, when you have so much uncertainty. It’s challenging. I think this, more than any year, they’re having to get out the crystal ball and try and make some recommendations with maybe very little information or incomplete information.
Rhonda Taylor: This is where we’re going to take and rub our crystal ball and we’re going to start thinking about where is HR going. Today we’re witnessing a lot of transitioning that’s going on and it’s interesting to see how every company is dealing with it. Let’s talk about HR on the other side. What’s your vision Trish?
Trish McFarlane: First of all, can we coin that term HR on the other side? Because I think we haven’t heard enough about that. Everyone is so focused on where they are right this minute and like anything that happens, any disaster, anything that’s thrown at us that’s very disruptive, there is another side. I think that they need to start looking at what are the things that make their organization most stable. Look at that as your foundation, and then start thinking about from a business perspective. Again, it’s sometimes hard to do when you’re in the middle of all of this yourself but from a business perspective, what are the accomplishments that we want to look back in a year, two years, five years, 10 years, and say we were able to achieve with our people? I think it’s going to be more around ability to look at jobs that have not yet been created, and be super creative about finding the people with the right skills to fill those roles. That’s a tall order to fill.
Rhonda Taylor: Will there be such a such a term as job descriptions in the future?
Trish McFarlane: I hope not. In one way Human Resources moves fairly slow, because typically we are at the mercy of the other parts of the organization who keep us along a certain path. However, there are a number of innovative HR leaders out there who are really thinking about the idea of employees owning all their data and employees having more control over their mobility. To me, if I’m thinking along those lines, I can absolutely see that if I’m the employee, I would own my skills, I would own my capabilities, I would own my competencies and I would use all of those things to bring to bear upon many different organizations, potentially.
When I was in college I recall one of my professors telling me that in my lifetime we would have, on average, seven different employers. I came from a family where my dad worked at the same employer his entire career and told me and taught me that’s what you do: you find a job and you stick with it. Sure enough, fast forward almost 25/30 years later and he was right. If you just extrapolate that people are going to have so many different employers, but the benefit is you work with so many different creative minds that it really enhances your own learning and your own satisfaction over time. That’s what I would hope.
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Rhonda Taylor: We may also be looking into the future of the mega employer, you may be working for the same company but doing a series of different roles throughout the company globally.
Trish McFarlane: Wouldn’t that be amazing? Truly. They have the capabilities right now to make that true today and some do. Back when I worked in healthcare there wasn’t technology that I’m aware of that helped us do this but what we were doing is we were looking at people and saying if we have roles to fill, maybe in accounting and finance and whatnot, instead of just going out and looking for people with those degrees or job experiences, let’s look internally. For example, you might have someone who works in groundskeeping who happens to do the books at their church. We all have these skills, abilities and capabilities we have outside of our job but we don’t bring them to bear within our job within our organization. Maybe these mega organizations will get smart and actually start truly tapping into what people know how to do without having to always look externally for it.
Rhonda Taylor: And not only what they can do, but what they love to do and what they want to do.
Trish McFarlane: Yes absolutely.
Rhonda Taylor: You and I both watched our fathers go to work and they did not necessarily want to go to work, but they had to, and that mentality is not in the future.
Trish McFarlane: I agree, I just had this discussion with someone yesterday who’s been laid off during COVID and has a really good background when it comes to both his education and his general abilities as a leader, but he can’t see his way out of the industry he’s been in his entire life. It’s like people like that who I want to inject a little bit of spark into them and say, you can take those same things that you love to do and do them in a different industry. I feel like sometimes we get so shut down and we don’t even think outside the box when it comes to what we know how to do and what we love to do.
Rhonda Taylor: What everyone needs to keep in mind is that, change is good, it’s always a positive step forward with change. You brought up the transparency of owning your own competencies and owning your own skill sets. Talking about the future, I heard about a company that was coming up with an app, like a GPS, your career GPS, and it’s like Uber, this is where I am today and I want to become the CMO of some company someday, the platform will say this is where your weaknesses are, here’s your strengths and here’s where you need to do some reskilling. It’s marvellous that we all could own an app like that down the road.
Trish McFarlane: That would be amazing. You bring up a great point too about the idea of an employee owning everything about our employee experience, our data and about everything that pertains to us. There are so many times where we give up authority, whether it be to an employer, or if you think about even like more of a like a medical record, it all belongs to someone else. The more that you give people the ability to own their own information and make that portable the more they’re going to want to be invested in making it better. But if I feel like my employer is really the one that benefits from my skills, my learning and my performance in general, I don’t necessarily have a good understanding of how do I benefit other than a paycheck? With a GPS career app, maybe the employee would finally start feeling like this is mine to own, mine to have, mine to nurture in taking your own leadership and responsibility for yourself.
Rhonda Taylor: In the future a lot of companies need to understand that there’s going to have to be transparency with their employees and just the nature of the political world, it’s so important for employers to be totally transparent with their employees about their careers, because there’s nothing more important to an employee than their career.
Trish McFarlane: I agree. There is always such a political atmosphere within an organization that even when you’re doing well, sometimes you’re not because you don’t even understand the politics that are going around your organization. It’s not transparent. When I think back to many of the employers I worked for, which were great employers, it was always hidden. There was this underlying agenda that you didn’t quite have a handle on and sometimes by the time you’re astute enough to identify that or maybe start making the right connections, sometimes it’s too late or sometimes you figure out you don’t fit with that.
I think the more you can be transparent the better it is. As an example, when I spent 10 years with Price Waterhouse Coopers, which is how I was raised up in human resources, we were very transparent with people. If someone just wasn’t a fit we had a frank discussion and talked to them. It wasn’t meant to be harmful to them, it was meant to help them and then we would help them find maybe work at one of our clients where they were a better culture fit. Again, this is back before that was even a big discussion. Right now we talk about employee culture and employer culture all the time, but we were always transparent about compensation, we were always transparent about performance, we were always transparent about our goals and I felt like that was the way it was.
Fast forward to taking my next couple jobs after that, and it wasn’t transparent at all. I think if you’re raised up without transparency, it feels scary to suddenly be open about things. If you’re raised up with a great deal of transparency, you feel like the rest of the world is a little bit crazy, because they’re not.
Rhonda Taylor: Transparency is the new currency in the world. People have complete trust in what they see and we’re seeing that more and more now. Black Lives Matter and all the movements that have occurred in the past year are driving home some new behaviors. Whether you’re a white Anglosaxon and working in a major corporation, the tap on the shoulder to say, you’re going to be promoted because I like you. We have to thank Black Lives Matter because they’ve taught us that we all need to treat people fairly and that’s going to be part of the future.
Trish McFarlane: I think that anytime you have social injustice against anyone, when people are brave enough to stand up, you can’t help but take notice. To your point about changing behavior, I think that’s the critical step, when I think back to when I was a practitioner just 7 years ago it was still an initiative, it was still something like check the box when you talked about diversity or inclusion. I think it’s come so far, but it may feel like it’s moving slow if you’re someone who’s impacted.
These things take time, I hope in 20 years when we’re looking back on this time and we look at what progress we’ve made, I hope that it’s faster than the previous 20 years. We can hope that some of these really vocal people are actually pushing behavior change.
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Rhonda Taylor: In the future, AI is going to be a part of the old regime. What do you think is going to be replacing AI? Or is AI going to go to a new level?
Trish McFarlane: My hope is it is more of a phased approach. I think that right now, we use AI predominantly in our culture for giving us information. Whether you’re talking about your Alexa device, or Siri etc. people use it a lot, a lot more than even two or three years ago but it’s primarily just to get information. You’re asking a question, it’s regurgitating something. When I worked in product development, one of the things we were dreaming up was how do you really start making predictions based on that, and that’s what’s challenging, because people are sometimes quite predictable, and sometimes completely not, as we all know.
I hope that the future, if I’m thinking 10/20 years out, is able to predict how humans behave, so that we can be better as the organizational leaders in meeting their needs. I think right now we always think about how do you make the company more productive? How do you impact the bottom line? And that’s always going to be important but really, if we don’t start thinking about how do you truly make people feel valuable you’ll never retain the good ones.
Rhonda Taylor: I’m back dreaming again, there’s so many people working from home now. How are the builders going to be changing home designs? What do you envision there?
Trish McFarlane: You know what I would hope so. I would love, it’s sort of like the Jetsons view on steroids if I had my way of about dreaming of the future. It would be a home or work environment, whether that was in my home or somewhere else that’s very responsive to me so that I’m not having to think about all the million little details that clog my brain, and keep me away from being creative at work. Even now, I work from home always anyway and I have a very nice office setup, however, I’m thinking in the back of my head about kids and dogs and is my water conditioner filter needing to be changed and is the temperature right and all these other little things. I wish I had a smart work environment where things like temperature, were constantly adjusting to what my body temperature needed. I wish I didn’t have to think about lighting, I wish it would just be what I needed in the moment.
From a work perspective, I wish I had tools when I logged into whatever it is, maybe it’s not even a laptop anymore, maybe it’s some sort of a visual clear board that would be in front of me and it just knew by my thinking about it, what I needed to see next. We all struggle with things like prioritization of our work, because we’re so scattered, what if we had technology that would truly prioritize our work by the things that were most valuable to us in the organization? What if the technology just knew that inherently, that would be amazing I think.
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Rhonda Taylor: I was talking with a builder and they’re saying that they’re setting up workstations in homes now. That not only Mom and Dad can work out but so can the kids. Little nooks and crannies where a workstation can be built. Let’s face it, when I bought my first home, there were no docking stations in my home and today it is the norm, every home seems to have a docking station in it.
Trish McFarlane: I remember when computers came out, and my family couldn’t afford that, we didn’t grow up having that, so having to learn to use all these tools it’s interesting. Another thing I wish was really different in the future is that there would be a greater understanding that you don’t have to work 40/50/60 hours a week visible to your boss, in order to make an impact on your organization. What I’m seeing now I feel like we’re moving kind of the other direction of it. There’s so many people working more hours now that they are at home, because they’re getting on at all different hours. They have the full flexibility we’ve been craving but they’re working even more. I really hope that that stops and we start seeing that there is maybe this week, you only need to work 25 hours in order to achieve the goals of the organization and to be valuable, maybe next week it is 50.
I would also love to see more flexibility around the way that we quantify the amount of time that it takes to work. The last very large team that I led most of them worked from home but they would still stay in like some little office or like you’re saying a little workstation or a little nook in their own house. I would say no, I want you to literally go out, go find a lake, go find a pond, go find a stream, whatever, go sit by water, go sit in a field and just take a pad of paper and think. I wish the future of work was really just about thinking more to spark creativity somewhere other than in a room with four walls, whether that’s an office building or in your home. I feel like we need to get out.
Rhonda Taylor: You do your job so well Trish, you’re excellent at what you do. What drives Trish McFarlane every morning to get up and put her happy face on?
Trish McFarlane: For me I’m a true extrovert and I get my energy from other people. I’m driven by having a conversation with someone and you just feel a spark. Then it’s that feeling when I hang up that call or leave that person’s presence, that I think about them for the next day and the next day and the next day and then a week later I think about them again in the conversation and that’s what gets my creative juices flowing. That’s what drives me I’m addicted to sort of that spark of another person’s ideas that are different than mine. Crave it.
