Senior HR leaders offer insights on reshaping HR’s narrative, highlighting its critical value to organisations and elevating the profession to new levels of influence and impact.

A New York Times article titled ‘So, Human Resources Is Making You Miserable?’ captured the attention of HR practitioners and workplace leaders alike in mid-2024. It highlighted the struggles faced by many HR practitioners, predominantly in the US, sharing their stories of frustration and burnout. It also cited research suggesting they were leaving the profession in significant numbers.

While no one would deny that working in HR has its challenges, it’s crucial to recognise that it’s also deeply meaningful work, playing a vital role in shaping the future success of businesses.

To gauge how Australian HR practitioners feel about their roles, HRM conducted a pulse survey in October 2024 via AHRI’s member-exclusive Lounge on LinkedIn, gathering responses from more than 50 members. The results revealed that 44 per cent feel energised by their work and 57 per cent consider their current workloads manageable.

However, this isn’t to say it’s easy work. With substantial changes and challenges in the external and workplace environments, the scope of the role and the demands on HR have expanded significantly in recent years, creating extra complexities.

“There’s a lot happening in our workplaces,” says Dr Michelle Phipps FCPHR, AHRI board member and Chair of its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Advisory Panel.

“New workplace legislation has been implemented at a lightning pace, including psychosocial hazards, the Right to Disconnect and the positive duty to prevent sexual harassment and bullying in the workplace, just to name a few. 

“It’s a really exciting time for CPOs because they can redefine what it means to lead the human capital agenda.”  –Dr Juliet Bourke GAICD, former Partner in Human Capital, Deloitte, and non-executive director and Chair

“At the same time, our workplaces themselves are changing through hybrid and remote working and new technology, while employees’ needs and expectations of their work and workplace are also evolving. Together, these changes affect compliance, culture and the employee experience across the whole employee lifecycle.”

All jobs have uplifting and challenging elements. HR is no different, says Dave Ulrich, co-founder at RBL Group and Rensis Likert Professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.

“HR can be a tough job because you’re constantly navigating paradoxes: individual and organisation, short and long-term, administrative and strategic, social wellbeing and financial performance.”

But the payoff is worth it, he adds.

“If you want to do work that creates value for all the stakeholders of an organisation, HR is a great place to be.”

HRM’s pulse survey also found that 36 per cent of members believe the HR function is viewed positively by other organisational stakeholders. Isa Notermans, Chief People Officer at Fleet Space Technologies, expects this statistic to shift in an even more positive direction in the near future.

“I remember when I started my career in HR, people would come up to me and say: ‘HR is the last resort. I’m not going to come to you unless something really bad has happened.’ That was happening up until pretty recently, to be honest.

“But now, we’re the first line of defence rather than the last. When employees and leaders need to get something done, they say: ‘I’ll go to HR.’

“That gives me confidence and assurance about the perception of our profession. And it’s all because we know how to tackle disparate challenges, because we can problem-solve and think critically. 

“The skills businesses need for tomorrow are naturally built into our roles; they’re a natural part of our ethos.”

Hear more from Isa Noterman’s in AHRI’s podcast episode about how to reframe HR’s role in the business.

HR’s evolving skill set 

To enable human capability within organisations, we need more practitioners operating at a governance level, says Dr Juliet Bourke GAICD, former Partner in Human Capital at Deloitte and experienced non-executive director and Chair.

“It’s a really exciting time for CPOs because they can redefine what it means to lead the human capital agenda. 

“That means leading the organisation at the executive and board level, helping decision-makers see how organisational value is created through a human capital lens, rather than only focusing on how to create value by managing risk and finances.”

“There should always be a CPO sitting at that executive table. The CPO is not just an operational role. They have a strategic role in ensuring an organisation has the skills and capabilities to execute its mission.”

It’s for this reason that many organisations are now working to reset some of the HR function’s expectations and responsibilities.

“[HR’s] remit now is very broad. It spans the entire enterprise. It’s the voice of employees and prospective employees. It’s about culture, leadership, analytics, influencing, as well as keeping the lights on through the policies and processes.”

Cementing HR’s position in leadership ranks is about developing business acumen and putting yourself in situations that require strategic thinking, says Notermans.

“There’s an expectation that we understand a P&L or the financial commercial standings. We need to understand how all the different pieces of the business fit together. 

“Inspect your business’s board reports and work backwards from there. Where did the business start from? What were the key inflection points in its history? What external factors were at play? These insights are incredibly powerful and can shift your perspective from being an HR technician to a strategic business thinker.”

HR and the board

While many HR practitioners are already delivering this level of value to their organisations, the real challenge lies in demonstrating HR’s strategic importance to other stakeholders – particularly the board, says Dr Bourke.

“We’re in a state of transition at the moment in relation to what boards are expecting of the CPO role because of their own lived experience,” she says.

For example, some board members have only experienced HR in organisations where the people function is not yet treated as a key strategic partner, she says.

“Whereas others have just come out of an executive role where they worked alongside the CPO, so they absolutely understand what a modern CPO looks like, and so have much higher expectations.”

Relying on individual sentiment to drive HR’s value narrative is risky. True change will be driven from more HR expertise at the board level.

“HR can be a tough job because you’re constantly navigating paradoxes: individual and organisation, short and long-term, administrative and strategic, social wellbeing and financial performance.” – Dave Ulrich, Dave Ulrich, co-founder at RBL Group and Rensis Likert Professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.

“However, the current situation is that only one per cent of board members have human capital in their backgrounds. Positively, there is an important conversation emerging about the composition of boards, including a nudge by the AICD to include board members with human capital expertise. 

“This is informed by the changing role of CPOs, and, of course, it will also create new expectations of CPOs.” 

Although influencing board composition may seem beyond the control of most practitioners, HR can adopt strategic approaches to position themselves effectively for such positions.

“When a question is asked of a CPO or an aspiring CPO, they should take an enterprise perspective, so they don’t just see the question in isolation, but are able to speak to the bigger picture.

“For example, when asked a question by the board like, ‘Why should we invest in this learning and development offering?’ it would help if the CPO responded with something like, ‘This is aligned to our strategic goal of ‘X’ and will deliver value or mitigate risk by doing ‘Y’.’ If the CPO can’t demonstrate this alignment, they would have to ask themselves, ‘Why would we be doing that?’”

Operating in this way is impressive and beneficial to a board, says Dr Bourke.

“A board is thinking about two things: value destruction and value creation. The destruction is when there’s risk in the business. You’re not compliant for some reason, or the culture is not right, and therefore it’s destroying value. 

“Value creation is about how you identify opportunities and then create growth in a business, and without paying attention to human capital, there can be no, or severely curtailed, growth.”

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Critical HR skills

Effective HR teams need to be adequately resourced with a broad range of capabilities in line with AHRI’s Australian HR Capability Framework, helmed by a CPO with an enterprise-wide leadership view. 

“What’s needed is someone who can influence others, who can shape a culture, who can be the trusted advisor to the CEO and who can be the voice of employees. The skill set that’s required for that has significant breadth,” says Dr Bourke. 

In recent times, these skills have included more comprehensive strategies to deliver EVP/culture, acquisition, wellbeing, DEI and workforce architecture, says Dr Phipps.

“At the end of the day, business skills and HR skills are one and the same thing. However, more recently, the capabilities I’m seeing that are needed in businesses are around workforce planning and instructional design.

“With the rise in AI, TikTok and ‘edutainment’, it’s important for an instructional designer to embrace the employee experience and get consistent knowledge and communication out to employees as quickly as possible.

“Also, more than ever before, boards and executive teams are focused on the employee experience, rather than just policy and compliance.”

HR should also lean further into their natural skill sets, says Notermans.

“We see patterns between people, practices, processes, performance and business outcomes – and we know that those things are all connected. This means we need to be really good at listening and seeing, which are both different skills. 

“Listening is about knowing what people are really saying. And seeing is: what are you seeing that no one else is seeing?”

Adaptive intelligence is an emerging skill that Notermans sees as uniquely suited to HR practitioners.

“This is about knowing when to adapt and when to maintain stability. You could also call it ‘dynamic stability’. 

It’s the ability to keep things running smoothly while managing changes beneath the surface. Think of it like a duck gliding effortlessly across the water while paddling furiously underneath. That’s a superpower HR brings to the table.”

By leveraging their unique combination of people skills, data insights, analytics, humanity and coaching abilities, HR practitioners can help create organisations that remain stable amid change and can adapt when needed.

“These aren’t skills you typically learn in an undergraduate or master’s program. They come through experience and exposure to various business units and organisations,” says Notermans.

“My advice is to wear as many hats as you can – it’s the best way to understand how different parts of the business operate and respond to change.”

“We see patterns between people, practices, processes, performance and business outcomes – and we know that those things are all connected.” – Isa Notermans, Chief People Officer, Fleet Space Technologies

Another critical aspect of rewriting HR’s story lies in demonstrating the positive impact of the function’s work. 

Over half (55 per cent) of AHRI members surveyed said they didn’t feel their work and efforts were adequately recognised by the rest of the organisation. Contributing to this could be the fact that HR often can’t tell their success stories, such as preventing a redundancy from happening, because those conversations tend to be confidential. So how can we make HR’s work more visible?

“There’s nothing like having job rotations or multidisciplinary teams where you get exposure to a different discipline,” says Dr Bourke. “Sometimes that happens in graduate programs, but there’s nothing to say you couldn’t do it at any level. Some organisations already do this. For example, in Defence they regularly rotate military personnel, including doing a few years in HR. This gives them this sense that they’re a total ecosystem. It helps break down organisational silos too. Lived experience and exposure can be helpful.”

A united people function

Dr Bourke suggests that the next evolution of HR could perhaps involve uniting all people-related aspects of the business under one cohesive umbrella.

“The way the workforce behaves has a direct relationship to the customer experience. Investors, the board, the customers, the workforce, the shareholders – imagine them all under one umbrella. How transformative would it be if we recognised all people elements of a business together?

If we recognised the people inside and outside of our organisations, that would create a very different conversation at the executive table and in the boardroom.

“This is a moment of transformation for human capital, the likes of which we have never seen before,” says Dr Bourke. 

“I can’t think of any other part of a business I would like to have an influence on than the human part of a business.”

A longer version of this article first appeared in the Dec/Jan 2025 edition of HRM Magazine, which is exclusive to AHRI members.