Nine Future HR Trends: A Deeper Dive

As John Boudreau and I began to socialize the six themes discussed above with a broader range of HR and operating executives, we found increasing interest in exploring the future of HR more deeply. This interest spurred a cross-industry consortium of eleven companies to band together through the USC Center for Effective Organizations. We worked with more than 300 HR leaders from these eleven companies to examine nine deeper-dive themes related to the future of HR.

1. Big data 
2. Gamification 
3. Generational diversity 
4. Globalization 
5. Mass customization 
6. Open innovation 
7. Personal technology 
8. Social media 
9. Sustainability 
 

Most of these themes were derived from or are extensions of our original research and findings, but allowed us to develop a better understanding of the degree to which these trends were becoming more important and real to HR people. We also wanted to understand how important these trends were relative to one another. And we wanted to examine the role that HR people think they should be playing in each of these areas in the future compared with the current state.

For purposes of this chapter, I am going to briefly and simply describe each trend and then focus on...

Credits: Excerpt from the Book ‘THREE: The Human Resources Emerging Executive’. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.