I recently watched this short video with the Co-founder of Hubspot ($20bn company) Brian Halligan and it gave me so much food for thought about the kinds of things we should be seeing and preparing for in the People profession.
Video here for reference (great watch, ~15 mins): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8Qx3MX43Y8&t=764s
Are there a few sensational claims about changes to orgs in the coming years, yes.
But the thing that stood out to me wasn't that, so much as the signals he's seeing IRL today as an Advisor at Sequoia Capital (VC), which indicates whether companies are pushing the envelope on AI adoption, namely (I quote):
Has your CFO lost their sh*t at you for how much you’re spending on tokens?
Has your IT person lost their sh*t at you because you’re making him make all their internal systems open and headless and shrinking their budget at the same time?
Has your HR person lost their sh*t at you because you’re messing up their lovely compensation bands
As a comp person, of course #3 grabbed my attention, but I think it goes deeper than just comp bands breaking.
Because sure, companies are rapidly redirecting saved salaries (from all those layoffs) into bigger and bigger comp bands (ClickUp just announced 22% layoffs and million-dollar comp bands in the same breath).
It's about what that change represents for us as HR people, too.
Because although the our team might be smaller, and the org, too, the expectation that we're growing and evolving and deepening the employee experience for these super workers is only going to compound.
Because soon, these million dollar salary bands will be commonplace for companies like this. Make no mistake that what we're seeing now are just the first movers. And all of us in this community know that salary isn't everything.
So while it might be cool and novel now, I think the pendulum will swing back the other way once the tech layoffs dry up and they stabilise in their newer, smaller, agile sizes - where the war for talent will just look different to how it's been in the past.
We all need to be thinking about what we're doing to evolve our functions to become AI super workers ourselves, not only because it's becoming the new norm, but because it's the only way we'll be able to adapt to this new norm with our reduced team size and ensure we're attracting and retaining the super workers our company needs going forward.