Change and chaos are no strangers to HR leaders today. Over the last few decades, they have dealt with outsourcing, freelancers, the Great Recession, the rise of social media, heightened political disagreement, a global public health crisis and remote work. Now they face a labor market in flux as restructuring in government, Big Tech and other fields have left workers feeling insecure in their jobs and uncertain about their leadership’s ability to lead through tumultuous times.
In the public discourse, the fears of being laid off or outsourced are coming to knowledge workers and programmers in ways they haven’t before. The rise of ChatGPT, along with the rapid rollout of generative features from Google and Microsoft, has undoubtedly helped drive public sentiment in this direction.
“We're all humans at the end of the day, so the initial reaction is fear,” ADP Chief Talent Officer Jay Caldwell told Newsweek. “With a lot of the hype around AI, that sometimes amps up the fear as well.”
At ADP, Caldwell says they’ve run internal pilots, shared success stories broadly and helped employees at all levels understand how emerging technology can improve their work.
“As soon as you can get people's hands on these types of technologies and really start to understand the look, the feel, how they apply, and, most importantly, how it can actually enhance their performance and growth…that fear starts to dissipate and, with the right design, [it can] switch to excitement pretty quickly.”
Caldwell emphasized the importance of valuing employees’ psychological safety, and HR’s responsibility to think about role design, training for the future and how those can be supported with generative AI and large-language-model tools.
“The faster you can start to help people understand, what does the future actually look like for you, your career, and how that will help you evolve in terms of the value you offer to your organization,” he said. “The greatest antidote to fear ambiguity is just clarity. Just start to paint a picture, even if that picture is going to change in six months, because it probably will.”
HR leaders can also emphasize their role in enforcing cultural values, like well-being and even things like pay equity, during times of change.
“You have to start culturally from a place of foundational well-being,” Melissa Hagerman, executive vice president and chief human resources officer at Genworth, a specialized insurance company with around 3,000 employees.
Employees must feel “cared for, financially, physically and emotionally…it makes those changes [and] external pressures, easier to tolerate,” she said, adding that the company’s culture includes a strong attachment to its mission, which is to enable senior care and other forms of caregiving through insurance.
Culture of Transparency and Adaptive Leadership
Hagerman shared that Genworth has invested in executive coaches with specific AI expertise to help them apply the capabilities of new technology to the operation of their functions. Genworth has also invested in developing empathy across its leadership in partnership with TLC Lions, a culture training and consulting firm. In November, TLC Lions awarded Hagerman their HR Leader of the Year and nominated Genworth for three other categories in its second annual Human Awards at New York City’s Gotham Hall.
At Salesforce, workplace strategists have teamed up with learning and development to build a thorough reskilling program that provides employees with structure and guidance for embedding new technology into their workflows and understanding how their roles may evolve.
Caldwell acknowledges that training programs amid technology disruption have a tough history and branding, “even the term reskilling sounds scary,” but tenured HR leaders can lean on their strengths and experiences in change management and driving learning outcomes to succeed amid today’s challenges.
“Some roles will have greater exposure and impact by AI, but in reality, for most people, this is just continuous learning and we've done that,” Caldwell said. “You learn new tools in your role, you learn new people, you learn new context when you change companies.”
In conversations with fellow HR leaders, Caldwell said he emphasizes that the foundational strategies for AI adoption and managing fear are within their wheelhouse.
“Yes, it's a significant change, and we, as in the organization, are here to support you, just like we always have been, including when we make other changes within the organization,” he said.
Caldwell also emphasized the importance of transparency in the future plan for AI, job design and where leadership stands on key decisions around the approach and timing of new technology rollouts.
“Helping them understand the future the best we can and where we're going with some level of transparency is really important,” he explained. “Clarity builds confidence…[be] open about how your company is philosophically thinking about AI.”
What is that stance at ADP?
“Our stance is AI is going to help augment our people and what we provide as an organization…another one of our values is each person counts, so we're not going to leave people behind on this.”
At ADP, Caldwell has seen good ideas for AI come from all over the organization, making the case for enabling experimentation, with some guidance and guardrails, as he said it probably won’t work to just give all employees ChatGPT and hope for the best. He expressed a need for HR leaders to focus on the ethical considerations, how employees might respond to new technology rollouts and understanding workflows within and across departments.
“We're humans. We have habits. We have ways of working, even if it's just for ourselves,” he said. “The question is shifting pretty quickly from ‘Can we do this?’ to ‘Should we?' and not just in terms of priorities, but also around ethics, and that's, that's where HR has a significant role to play.”
At Genworth, Hagerman said the approach is “we want to use AI to help us work smarter. That doesn't mean roles won't evolve. That doesn't mean we'll have different talent needs in the future than we have today, but having that open and honest conversation and starting from a healthy place mitigates the stress that comes with it.”
Skills for All
In terms of getting all employees ready, a skill like prompt engineering is a good one to share information on.
“You don't need to be a technologist to use them. What you need to do is be open to using it, and…changing your habits,” Caldwell said. “If you really think about it, all it is is asking good questions and giving good instructions.”
As someone who identified as an AI novice before working with her executive coach, Hagerman also shared that prompt engineering was a key skill to pick up.
“One of the most important things was really understanding the importance of the prompts and knowing how to ask and what to ask and the value of getting the right prompt is critical,” she said.
Surveys have also helped Genworth understand employee sentiment so they can address technology rollouts, change management and other company matters, Hagerman said.
“We have become incredibly attuned to feedback loops,” she explained. We collect data, we measure data, we pull levers, and then we go back and re-check the data and measure it against the previous set of data. We do that multiple ways throughout the year, and it is fascinating, what we can find out by using feedback loops and measuring people's attitudes and beliefs.”
Hagerman shared that an employee survey found that 72 percent of employees identify as a caregiver of some kind, either for kids, elderly relatives or otherwise. This insight has helped the company maintain a focus on well-being and low turnover as well.
To make good use of surveys, Hagerman adds that making sure employee feedback is heard and being acted upon where possible is just as important as collecting the survey data.
“You can't ask the question or collect the data and then not do anything. You owe it to people. You owe it to them to get back to them and say like we heard you, we understand you, and we're willing to do XYZ, or we heard you, we understand you, but right now we can't do that,” she said. “I think that that goes a long way for people.”
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