COVID-19 is driving a great realignment of priorities, goals and roles inside global corporations. Responsibilities for issues as important as corporate reputation, liability, employee retention, supply chains, wellness, real estate needs and labor relations are being revisited in the context of the pandemic, and lines of authority rewired. No role in this great reshuffling is more affected than that of the head of Human Resources – the Chief People Officer in the parlance of the day. Traditionally viewed as a support role, HR leaders finds themselves today at the nexus of virtually every challenge, change and realization spawned by the global pandemic.
And the changes set in motion amount to a profound evolution in corporate strategy and a rise to prominence for some previously sublimated roles, not just CPOs but also Chief Wellness Officers, sustainability teams and Facilities Managers, the latter particularly relevant in an age when the health of indoor environments is suddenly a life and death issue.
In hindsight, the pandemic has exposed the folly of top-down corporate org charts that claim to emphasize accountability, but in practice turned out to encourage “turf” and NIMBU (Not In My Budget Unit) over holistic problem solving. This led to some awful, sometimes disgraceful decision making early in the pandemic ranging from denial down to overly draconian lockdowns. In most cases, the worst of these reactions came from bosses who failed to tap into the expertise available in their own company, or by companies that failed to see that their own internal systems were not up to the challenge and, perhaps out of a misplaced worry about looking uncertain, failed to seek outside help.
The good news is that, after trying every other alternative, most corporations by now have settled on one that actually shows promise: cross-disciplinary task forces, almost always led by an HR professional. These groups are called by various names in various industries and geographies – crisis groups, COVID subcommittees, Return-to-Work study groups. But at their heart is a basic concession: COVID-19 is not a challenge that will be vanquished by a “hero CEO,” a magic technological or medical bullet, nor by the invisible hand of the market. In fact, all of these elements and more comprise the best practices that have emerged during the pandemic. The most successful companies during this unprecedented period have been those most willing to throw dogma aside, embrace new lines of authority and recognize that the pandemic will have an impact on business, the economy and society at least as profound as the global financial crisis or the 9/11 attacks.
Human Resources to the front
Front and center throughout the pandemic have been Human Resources leaders, who are generally hard wired to prefer cross-disciplinary, consultative decision making that can drive the Alpha male CEO nuts. Summoned in the frenetic early days of the crisis to rethink workplace practices, reassure worried staff and promulgate new policies that balance empathy for people’s health and wellbeing against the company’s need to continue producing revenue, HR basically saved many companies from themselves by acting as a governor on short-termism and panic about revenue loss.
With no template to follow and very little legal or regulatory precedent against which to gauge decisions, this required real creativity and a nose for issues like liability, regulatory and reputational risk that are the specific remit of other corporate departments. Can a company require people to report medical symptoms? Is it ethical to order someone to stay home if they’ll receive no pay as a result? Can someone be fired for not wearing a mask? What about refusing to be vaccinated? Many of these questions remain controversial and certainly are not subjects of “settled law.” But it’s easy to forget how far from a consensus on any one of them we were as the crisis began. By and large, with an assist from a Chief Counsel, Marketing and perhaps outside consultants, devising and promulgating answers fell to HR.
Perhaps it’s natural, then, that no executive function within the corporate structure has seen its profile rise so quickly through the pandemic as that of the Chief People Officer. This has not only put new pressure on the CPO and their departments; it has also required HR professionals to learn entirely new languages, from the messaging- and marketing-speak needed to protect corporate reputations, to the scientific jargon of viral epidemiology right down to the ins and outs of Smart Building technologies that help reassure and secure people inside a building.
Knowing the score
The CPO is, one presumes, well equipped for this task, if only because a penchant for diplomatic networking almost always comes along with the job. As tragic as the pandemic is, the old construct of “winners and losers” applies, and the various players inside a corporate organization are no exception.
For instance, CFOs, often judged by their ability to forecast revenue goals, have had a very rough two years. CEOs have fared less worse, on balance, though many will see compensation sag if their industry’s wings have been clipped by one or more of the pandemic’s many byproducts – supply chain disruption, for instance, or spiraling costs for labor and raw materials. Corporate real estate portfolio managers are another example: However well they dealt with the crisis, someone – quite possibly the global equities market – is bound to question all those 7-to-ten-year leases signed on downtown office space.
Human Resources is at the other end of this spectrum. What matters more right now to society in general than the health of human beings? What department – or budget unit, if you must – is likely to have primary responsibility for dealing with that issue in the corporate setting, whether the human involved is an employee, a tenant, a patient or a customer?
“One of the big lessons of this phase of the pandemic is how Human Resources leaders are the ones companies are turning to for answers,” says Michael T. Jackson, Employee Experience Manager at the Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM), which just wrapped up its annual conference in Las Vegas. (Full disclosure: I spoke at the conference on the need for HR professionals to engage with Facilities Managers on the technologies that can ensure the wellness of their indoor spaces, just one of many new expectations that will come hand-in-hand with HR’s expanded importance within the company). Says Jackson: “It’s no coincidence that HR leaders are leading most of the Return-to-Work task forces that companies have created.”
Up from the basement
Indeed, Facilities Managers are another professional cadre whose relevance and profile have shot upward during the pandemic. Before COVID-19, facilities management was primarily a property-focused, maintenance-centered role whose interaction with the C-suite was limited and probably most closely linked to the Chief Security Officers. Now, with the lessons of the pandemic all too clear, Facilities Managers will need to forge closer, more productive relationships with those involved in resetting company assumptions about issues like wellness, worker safety, hybrid scheduling, real estate downsizing and sustainability. The FM-HR relationship goes from operational to strategic and decisions on issues like air quality and desk scheduling, density and cleanliness take on a much greater importance to employees, with all the recruitment and retention issues that implies.
For Facilities professionals, this this change augers a bigger profile within the corporate hierarchy and new opportunities to partner across reporting lines to get things done. It also comes with new tools, new needs, and new training expectations to ensure today’s facility managers are as effective as they can be. (For more on the evolution of the FM role, see our new White Paper, “The Future of Commercial Facilities Management).
Of course, all of this will be a shock to the pre-pandemic corporate culture, and once again, where does a CEO go for change management? HR of course.
Realigning job descriptions, budget authorities and internal reporting structures will take time, but some of the friction points are possible to anticipate. Facilities Managers, who are generally engineers, not seated in the C-Suite and very comfortable with well-worn methods and routines, may not appreciate sharing decision making authority on questions like Smart Building technology or office configurations. FM staff also skews heavily male, while HR tends to be female dominated. This may sound petty or even irrelevant, but sociologists will tell you flatly that well-planned transformation plans can be derailed by such seemingly unimportant cultural issues.
So how to fix it all?
The professional class being swept forward won’t just rise automatically. HR professionals have some learning to do – about the technologies of Smart Buildings that help keep people safe and reassure them that the lessons of COVID-19 have been taken seriously. There are the new realities of the labor markets, and, of course, the ever-changing world of contagion, epidemiological science and the paper-thin political sensibilities surrounding it all. They don’t need to be experts in these fields, but they need to be fluent advocates of all, building new alliances within the corporate culture, leading the change management process and lending their newly empowered voice to workplace initiatives like Smart Building tech.
Heading off well established cultural resentments will also fall to them. IT and risk managers need to stop looking at Facilities Management as a bunch of jumped-up janitors. Facilities professionals, meanwhile, should put aside their fantasies of meeting the IT propeller heads in a dark alley some night and start thinking about bringing their own technology skills up to date. And empathizing with all those inside corporate institutions who need to cede authority in the new reality will take the empathy and diplomacy that is right in HR’s wheelhouse.
Most urgently of all, Human Resources leaders need to shed the burdensome “compliance” mindset often ascribed to them by their more aggressive, revenue-focused peers. This is no box-checking exercise, and no number of online surveys will prepare the company for the “new normal.”
What’s happened in the global pandemic is not a new category of risk or a new twist on corporate liability or reputational peril. It’s a genuine social shift of the kind we saw after 9/11, when concrete barriers went up around urban areas and we all took our shoes off before boarding an aircraft.
It was security professionals, rightly, pushed to the fore 20 years ago. Today, it’s HR getting the call. After all, we humans are right in their job description.
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Finally, as part of our commitment to helping businesses across the world to build back better, we have established a global Return to Work Forum with leaders from a wide range of businesses around the world. The concept of this forum is to share ideas and experiences to improve the workplace of the future following the pandemic.