Today’s HR professionals have a lot to contend with: Recruitment and workforce planning, emerging technologies, the need for new skills and continuous upskilling, remote work—and the communication issues that come from a dispersed workforce. 

On top of this, HR professionals have a whole new generation (hello, Gen Z!) to cater to with wholly different expectations of employers, approaches to work, and workplace values. 

But the biggest shift of all is how HR teams have transformed from a support role to fundamental business decision-makers with a seat at the table in just a few years.

As Stacey Harris, Chief Research Officer and Managing Partner at Sapient Insights put it, “HR is the only function that can help companies build unique, lasting differentiators. We do not get innovation, continual growth, or deep customer relationships through HR cost-cutting. Instead, we get frustrated employees and more attrition. When HR is viewed as a strategic partner, talent, HR, and business outcomes all dramatically increase.”

And the numbers agree with Stacey, with a survey showing that 46 percent of respondents view HR as contributing strategic value, a noticeable rise from 38 percent in previous years.

What is Influential HR?

People matter more than ever in today’s working world—and so does HR. This presents a key moment for HR to reinvent itself, and that’s where Influential HR comes into play. 

At its core, Influential HR sets the tone on how to put your team first. It’s next-level HR strategy that acts as a key strategic part of the business, enriching a people-first approach with data-driven insights. 

Influential HR professionals transcend traditional HR functions. They actively contribute to the strategic direction of the business, driving initiatives that enhance the employee experience, support organisational goals, and contribute to overall business success.

How Influential HR leaders do it
Influential HR leaders are at the forefront of transforming business dynamics. They do this by harnessing a mix of cutting-edge technology, valuable people data and analytics, and building resilience throughout organisations. 

• Utilising people data and analytics. Garnering insights from people data and analytics can be key to impacting the C-suite and getting their buy-in for people-first business strategy and programming.
• Building resilience. Influential HR leaders can build and develop resilience by promoting a culture of continuous learning and adaptive change across all levels of the business, from high-level decision-makers and managers to individual team members and other contributors. 
• Embracing emerging tech. They view emerging tech as an opportunity and not a threat or something that replaces people. Influential HR leaders integrate new tech into daily workflows to help people reach their goals. 

How to become an Influential HR leader

Embracing Influential HR as your leadership strategy requires creative, agile, and tactical thinking. It’s about leveraging HR tech and data to build people-first business plans, get broad buy-in from stakeholders across the organisation, and see your plans through to the end. 

Let’s take a look at some of these principles in more detail. 

• Adopt a strategic mindset- Influential HR leaders understand the importance of formulating their people strategies around the usage of a unified and connected system that their people engage with every day. This unified system can become the backbone of your people strategies, coupling engagement with people analytics. It can also give you actionable data that HR, people managers, the C-suite, and other team members can leverage.
• Get buy-in for a unified people system- When you adopt a data-driven mindset and leverage tech alongside the information you gain from it, you’re in the perfect position to influence the decisions and actions your organisation takes. The use of this hard data gives you the authentic, data-backed evidence you need to showcase your HR initiatives’ effectiveness and alignment with your overall business strategies.
• Achieve widespread usage of HR tech- When asked about the adoption of HR tech, industry expert Josh Bersin said: “If we can make this stuff easy to use, the consumption is going to go crazy, and it’s going to add huge amounts of value to organisations.” When you champion a people-centric HR strategy and marry it with an easy-to-use HR platform with broad functionality that everyone across your company can benefit from, it leads to widespread usage that influences each and every part of the business.

With their unique position in the modern workplace, HR teams are set to drive more influence and impact in the years to come.