HR expert envisions the future of work

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This year forced individuals and organizations to rethink the meaning of work-life balance and the role of HR. Josh Bersin, a world-renowned HR leader and educator, has always believed that HR plays a critical role, but he explains that the key to improving the work-life connection starts with understanding how technology and design can help workplaces evolve.

By Russ Banham , Contributor

Years before HR leaders joined the C-suite and became strategic resources for workforce productivity, Josh Bersin, the respected HR analyst, professor and thought leader, believed they needed a seat at the table. “Today’s business requirement calls for a complete rethinking of HR and the critical role of the HR leader,” he wrote in 2012 when few others thought the same way.

In 2019, Bersin left the consulting world to pursue his altruistic dream of preparing HR leaders for unprecedented changes in workforce structures. He founded the Josh Bersin Academy, a global HR professional development school how to get vietnam number for whatsapp The Academy’s curriculum is designed to empower HR executives to address the digital transformation of business operations as companies move from bureaucratic, command-and-control forms of management to highly collaborative teams built to respond to business opportunities and risks.

This transformation entered a new phase in 2020, following the mass migration of employees from physical to virtual workspaces. While many HR consultants have been calling remote work the “new normal,” Bersin prefers to use a more dynamic phrase, which he coined as the “never normal.”

Life and work are intertwined
"Where we're headed — technologically speaking — when it comes to how people work, someone has to make sure the workforce keeps up with technological invention, especially as we move toward a more dynamic and flexible work environment," he says.

That someone is the HR leader, Bersin believes. HR executives must address questions like: Will employees be better off in a hybrid physical-remote workspace? And what role will technology play in ensuring their well-being?

“The pandemic, by promoting the massification of remote work, highlighted the need for work and life to be more connected,” says Bersin. “Digital tools can help provide this connection, but they have historically been designed to manage production and productivity, hindering the integration of life and work.”

““The pandemic, which promoted the massification of remote work, highlighted the need for work and life to be more connected,” says Bersin.

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For example, technologies such as natural language processing and machine learning algorithms can be used in combination to analyze employee emails, texts, and comments on a video conferencing platform to understand how the individual might be feeling about both their work performance and their home-related anxieties. However, current workforce management tools focus on work efficiency and employee productivity and do not capture and analyze data that suggests employee feelings about their work and life.

That’s likely to change, Bersin says. As people began working from home, relying on video conferencing platforms and other technologies to connect, communicate and collaborate, typical life events like dogs barking, kids interrupting and the doorbell ringing became commonplace and surprisingly humanizing, he says. “Themes of family, well-being and health were suddenly connected to the workplace in ways we hadn’t seen for a long time — not since the agricultural societies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries,” Bersin says.

The concept of work-life balance no longer makes sense, he continues. School teachers working remotely, for example, faced students struggling to transition to distance learning and anxious parents emailing at all hours of the day. But, Bersin says, “As employers create hybrid physical-remote workspaces and work becomes more dynamic, these issues can be managed, with technology as the critical enabler.”

Technologies like virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and video conferencing platforms, he explains, not only ease the stresses of remote working conditions but allow for shared work-life experiences, “blurring the distinctions between the office and a remote workspace, while bringing more of an employee’s home life into their work life,” Bersin says.

“It is now up to HR leaders to keep a close eye on these developments and push for them to be used and valued by their peers in IT, finance, law and operations. HR has long been pushing to have its voice heard in the C-suite; now that they have this voice, they must not waste the opportunity to create a dynamic workplace and a highly engaged workforce.”