What’s Required of HR in the New World of Work?
By: Michael McQueen
With AI making waves across industries and hybrid work demand still strong, HR leaders find themselves in a unique moment of needing to reassess some of the systems they have in place.
Rather than fight the tide that has well and truly turned, leaders need to rethink how in-person work, corporate culture, and human-AI collaboration function
Here are 3 things HR leaders would do well to consider in the new world of work:
1. In-person work needs a fresh sell.
Many organisations have opted to mandate in-person work, whether it is a few days a week to full-time. However, employees are not convinced.
Many employees are either refusing job offers with strict in-person mandates or choosing flexibility and autonomy over promotions, while others are turning to ‘coffee badging.’
“Coffee badging” is a new term that describes a strategy where employees show up at the office for long enough to tick the in-person attendance box, before returning home to work remotely. First coined by Owl Labs, this trend is growing among hybrid workers who prefer to balance their time between home and office. A 2023 report found that 58% of hybrid workers in the U.S. engage in coffee badging, and it remains a popular tactic today.
While many leaders may be frustrated by this, the reality is that in-person work has not provided enough of a selling point to many workers. Employees are finding that they are attending the office, only to be doing the same work they would have done at home, in a more distracting and less convenient environment.[1]
Rather than simply mandating the change, leaders need to actually gear in-person work time towards activities that utilise it. Atlassian is a case-in-point of a company that understand this and is exploring a new way for doing in-person work that provides a genuine incentive for showing up while making most of the time.
For the past year, they have been trialling a ‘Connection Hub’ – a space where workers can show up (the key word is ‘can’, not ‘must’) in order to collaborate in person. The company’s fierce commitment to flexibility is exhibited by their Team Anywhere initiative, where employees can work in any of the 13 countries where the company operates. While other organisations have been seeing candidate numbers dwindle and employees resign over mandating efforts, Atlassian’s counter-cultural approach has seen the number of candidates per role more than doubled since the launch of the initiative, without any dips in productivity.[2]
Using in-person days for collaborative meetings, team activities, and creative ideation offers meaningful reasons for employees to return to the office voluntarily. After all, if an employee never had the option to say no, you can’t expect them to be very invested in their ‘yes’.
2. Leaders need a humanised plan for corporate culture.
Within an age of flexible work and the empowered employee, though, leaders need a new plan for building corporate culture. In my work with leaders and organisations, I’ve found it to be consistently clear that a thriving corporate culture begins with trust. If employees don’t feel trusted to do their work, especially when seeking more flexibility, they are unlikely to participate in a positive workplace culture.
However, every leader knows the unique power of a water cooler for catalysing incidental creative conversation and innovation. For this reason, finding ways to create incidental connections through digital channels, even when they may sometimes feel like time-wasters, is crucial for maintaining connections and innovation within teams. Communicating more than feels necessary about what is happening in peoples’ work helps to replicate the conversations that naturally take place when people are in the same room.
Beyond this, personally checking in on employees as people, rather than just workers, is key to building a team that genuinely wants to engage at work. To support employees’ investment in their work and build psychological safety, people need to feel that their leaders care more about them than they do about their work.
3. To really harness AI, we need to rethink how humans spend their time.
Not only do employees need to be treated like humans, but the work they do as humans needs to be fundamentally rethought.
We’ve all heard about the ways AI will save us time, but harnessing its real value will depend on the ways we repurpose and upskill the humans we have working with us. Beyond this, human workers need their human resources leaders to support them through the transition of embracing new kinds of work as AI replaces their previous tasks.
Qualtrics Principal Behavioural Scientist Dr Cecelia Herbert highlights that increased productivity isn’t simply a matter of doing things faster; it’s about how the freed-up time is spent. For real gains, employees need to be shifted to high-value tasks that demand creativity, empathy, and deep problem-solving—things that technology alone can’t achieve.
Instead of bringing HR in as an afterthought, Dr. Herbert encourages involving them from the beginning of the tech implementation process to ensure that both the technology and individual workers can be harnessed and supported for the best results.
The rise of AI is providing leaders and organisations with an opportunity to rethink the role of the people in their teams and discern the best way to play into their uniquely human capacities while utilising the capabilities of the tech.[3]
As technology evolves, so does work. To keep their organisations happy, healthy and thriving, HR leaders must rethink how their systems and people operate in this new world of work.
[1] Torres, M 2024, ‘Over 50% Of Hybrid Workers Admitted To Partaking In A New Controversial Office Trend, And This Is Why They’re Defending It’, BuzzFeed, 4 July. [2] Swan, D 2024, ‘Is Atlassian’s year-long experiment the future of work?’ The Sydney Morning Herald, 4 July. [3] 2024, ‘HR “can’t skip this part” when implementing AI’, HRDaily, 22 July.
Article supplied with thanks to Michael McQueen.
About the Author: Michael is a trends forecaster, business strategist and award-winning conference speaker.
Feature image: Photo by Luca Bravo on Unsplash
