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Over the past 25 years, HR has undergone a pretty extraordinary transformation. Personnel departments have become People teams, administrative functions have become strategic partners, and a profession once dominated by policies, contracts and processes is increasingly expected to provide leadership on culture, wellbeing, organisational performance, workforce data and, more recently, AI.
But beneath all that change, some of the things that make someone a great HR leader haven’t changed very much at all.
That was one of my big takeaways from my recent HRchat conversation with Siobhan Reid, Head of People and Culture at Circle Voluntary Housing Association. Siobhan has spent more than 25 years working in HR across commercial, public and non-profit environments, with her senior HR career stretching back to 1999.
Her perspective is particularly interesting because she’s experienced the evolution of the profession first-hand while also embracing some of the technologies now reshaping it.
HR Has Changed. People Haven’t.
Today’s People leader has access to tools and workforce insights that would have been difficult to imagine when Siobhan began her senior HR career. HR can analyse absence patterns, engagement data, retention risks and other workforce trends, package that information into dashboards and increasingly use AI to help leaders understand what’s happening across their organisations.
Yet the fundamentals remain remarkably human.
Fair treatment matters. Compassion matters. Listening matters. And behind every policy, process, employee relations case or line on a dashboard is an actual person.
That’s an important reminder at a time when there is so much discussion about automation and AI in HR. Technology can make the function faster and more informed, but it doesn’t remove the need for judgement, empathy and human connection.
Culture Isn’t What the Policy Says
One of the most interesting parts of our conversation was the gap that can exist between an organisation’s formal policies and the reality employees experience.
A company can have beautifully written values, extensive wellbeing programmes and all the right procedures in place and still have people dreading work on Sunday evening.
That’s a pretty useful test of culture.
The employee experience is also heavily influenced by managers. Two people working for the same organisation, under the same policies and theoretically within the same culture, can have completely different experiences depending on who manages them.
For HR leaders trying to build or transform a People function, this is why listening has to come first. Before introducing another initiative, platform or policy, leaders need to understand what employees are actually experiencing. Approaches such as asking what the organisation should stop, start and continue doing can provide a simple way of identifying where the real issues lie.
The foundations still matter, of course. Contracts, procedures, compliance and good HR infrastructure aren’t optional. But they’re foundations rather than the finished product.
Psychological Safety and Wellbeing Need to Be Real
We also discussed psychological safety and what happens when an employee finds themselves in an environment that feels difficult or even toxic.
There isn’t one solution that will work for everybody. Speaking with a trusted colleague may be a first step. Employee Assistance Programmes can provide another source of support, while HR should offer employees somewhere to turn when issues cannot be resolved directly with their manager.
The broader point is that psychological safety can’t simply be something organisations claim to value. Employees need to believe they can raise concerns, ask for help or challenge something without putting themselves at unnecessary risk.
The same applies to wellbeing.
Our conversation touched on menopause in the workplace and the need to make it a normal part of workplace conversations rather than something employees are expected to quietly manage themselves. As workforces age and organisations compete for experienced talent, creating environments where people can openly discuss the support they need should increasingly be seen as part of good people management.
We also explored the importance of genuine recovery time. Taking annual leave doesn’t necessarily mean someone has properly disconnected from work. A few days away while checking emails and responding to messages isn’t the same as having an uninterrupted period in which the brain can actually switch off.
Employers spend plenty of time talking about productivity. Perhaps we should spend a little more time thinking about recovery as one of the things that makes sustained productivity possible.
The Particular Pressures Facing Purpose-Led Organisations
Siobhan’s current role at Circle also gave us an opportunity to discuss some of the People challenges facing housing and non-profit organisations.
Purpose can be an incredibly powerful tool for attracting people. Employees often choose these organisations because they care deeply about the work and the communities they serve.
But purpose doesn’t eliminate the pressures associated with pay, workload, burnout and retention. In some cases, it can even contribute to them if highly committed employees continually give more of themselves because they believe strongly in the mission.
That creates an interesting challenge for People leaders. Organisations need to harness the engagement that comes from meaningful work without allowing commitment to become a substitute for sustainable workloads, competitive employment practices and genuine employee wellbeing.
From HR Dashboards to Decisions
The final part of our conversation looked towards where the profession is heading, particularly around people analytics and AI.
HR has become much better at collecting data. The next challenge is making that data genuinely useful.
A dashboard filled with charts might look impressive, but if a leadership team doesn’t know what action to take after looking at it, its value is limited. Good people analytics should help leaders identify patterns, ask better questions and decide where intervention is needed.
That might mean identifying unusual absence trends, spotting areas where retention is becoming a problem or understanding where indicators suggest the employee experience is deteriorating.
AI could make this considerably more powerful by helping HR teams interrogate larger datasets and surface patterns that might otherwise be missed. But the quality of the output will always depend on the quality of the underlying information. Clean data, reliable sources of truth, appropriate governance and ethical use therefore become more important, not less, as these tools improve.
A More Human and More Data-Driven HR Function
There’s sometimes a tendency to frame the future of HR as a choice between human-centred leadership and technology-driven decision-making. I think that’s the wrong way to look at it.
The strongest People functions will probably be very good at both.
They’ll use analytics, automation and AI to understand their organisations more clearly and make better decisions. At the same time, they’ll recognise that culture isn’t something that exists inside a dashboard and employee experience can’t be reduced to a score.
Twenty-five years of change may have transformed the HR leader’s toolkit, but the ultimate challenge remains familiar: understand people, treat them fairly, create an environment where they can do their best work and give leaders the information they need to build better organisations.
You can hear my full conversation with Siobhan Reid on the HRchat Podcast.
