What happens to HR

Nothing in this series should be read as an argument that human resources is finished. The opposite is true. The profession is being handed the most consequential question an organisation can ask, and the only risk is that it declines to take it.

Consider what HR has been allowed to decide. It designs roles, but within headcount set elsewhere. It recruits, but to requisitions it did not originate. It develops people, evaluates them, pays them and, when it comes to it, lets them go. What it has never been allowed to decide is the composition of the workforce itself: how much of the organisation's work should be done by people at all. That question did not need asking, because the answer was all of it. Machines did machine work and people did the rest, and HR's job began where the people began.

Agents end that arrangement. For the first time, the question of how much of the knowledge work should be done by people is a live, continuous, task-by-task decision, and it is being made, as earlier essays in this series describe, by whoever buys the software. HR is not in the room. It finds out afterwards, and it finds out in the form of a hiring freeze or a reorganisation it did not request.

The profession has two possible responses. One is to treat the agents as technology, outside its remit, and to go on managing the people who remain, with less and less to manage. This is the path of least resistance and it leads to a function that administers a shrinking population while the decisions that determine its size are made elsewhere. The other is to claim the whole workforce question: to say that the allocation of work between people and agents is a human-resources decision in the oldest sense, because it decides what human beings in the organisation will do, and that it belongs to the function whose expertise is in work, roles, capability and the design of jobs.

That second response is what the Chief Workforce Officer is: not a new function competing with HR but HR with the mandate it never had, held by someone willing to hold it. The skills are continuous with what good HR already does. Role design becomes the design of human roles around agents. Workforce planning becomes composition planning across both kinds of capacity. Performance management extends to the four measures by which an agent is evaluated. Succession planning becomes the protection of the entry layer and the apprenticeship in verification. Governance of conduct becomes the lifecycle of selection, deployment, update and retirement.

What changes is the authority and the arithmetic. The authority: a seat beside the chief information officer and the chief financial officer with the power to say that a working, affordable agent should not be deployed where nobody can check it. The arithmetic: fluency with the numbers that have historically belonged to other functions, verification hours against hours saved, incident rates, the net productive capacity of a task family. An HR leader who cannot do the two-hours calculation will not be given the composition decision, and the decision will go on being made by people who do not think about the humans at all.

I say this as someone who has spent a career in the human side of organisations, and who watches the profession being offered this with some anxiety that it will not reach for it. The chief human resources officer who takes the mandate becomes the executive responsible for what the organisation's work is done by. The one who does not becomes the administrator of whatever is left. The title may say Chief Workforce Officer or it may still say CHRO. The difference is not the name. It is whether the person in the chair has decided that the agents are their business.