A look back at the "Sustainability @ HR Vaud" webinar held on June 15, 2021
The conference, broadcast live from the Lausanne Palace, was co-hosted by members of HR Vaud 's Sustainability Commission: Karine Lammle, Anthony Sorlin, and Guy Zehnder. Isabelle Chappuis - Executive Director of the Futures Lab at HEC Lausanne - the University of Lausanne's Faculty of Business Studies - and Frederic Meuwly - Founder & Director of Actitudes Coaching - discussed the human challenges facing organizations in 2030.
What human challenges do we need to prepare for by 2030, whether for teams, organizations or individuals?
The profound changes we have been experiencing over the past few years will continue to bring about major transformations by 2030. Digitization, robotization, human-machine collaboration, artificial intelligence, and the HR function will be called upon to play a key role in supporting these changes as the manager of human capital, whether physical and/or virtual.
Team challenges
- Teams as we know them today will be transformed to integrate new forms of human-machine collaboration.
- The complementarity between humans and machines will create new modes of communication, new interdependencies and new dynamics in the teams of the future, which will become more complex to manage.
- As machines gradually become full-fledged members of our work teams, the HR function will need to support the resistance and fears associated with these changes, so that we can accept being augmented and working interdependently with new types of " digital colleagues".
Organizational challenges
- Organizations are going to face successive shocks on a recurring basis, and will need to demonstrate resilience to be able to cope, adapt and be sustainable. HR will therefore need to prepare human capital for transition, and proactively develop resilience capacity within the organization.
- To better manage uncertainty and complexity, organizations will need to develop new skills in the use of forward-looking tools. These working methodologies will gain in importance, as they will enable us to "fill the void" and mobilize teams around "inspiring" scenarios, rather than letting people imagine the worst and create "disaster scenarios".
- Complexity and uncertainty are also a source of "organizational anxiety". To avoid falling into this trap, HR managers must work to create a climate of psychological security within their organization, which will enable them to think about the future with hope and project themselves confidently into the future.
- To be sustainable, organizations must combine the ability to manage both the long term (sustainability) and the short term (agility). They must constantly sense changes in their environment and "pivot" to make the micro-adjustments needed to adapt.
Individual challenges
- Individuals will have to face up to their own "obsolescence" several times in their lives, and will need lifelong training to remain employable.
- For HR, the nature of the employer-employee contract will continue to evolve, and the new norm of "commitment = employability" will tend to accelerate and become more widespread, as the old norm of "loyalty = job security" becomes totally obsolete.
- In the future, we will be less and less in a "linear-transactional" logic where we put our skills to good use in exchange for a job, and we will evolve towards a "circular-systemic" logic where we seek to contribute to co-creating value in the broadest sense in our ecosystem.
Goals of the Sustainability Commission @ HR Vaud
The mission of the Sustainability @ HR Vaud commission is to act as a source of proposals, to bring together the various players in the HR Vaud internal/external ecosystem, and to work together on future and sustainable issues.
Our work focuses on 8 themes that form an ecosystem
Would you like to contribute?
Are you keen to contribute to this initiative?
Please contact the HR Vaud association: contact@hr-vaud.ch to join a working group of the Sustainability Commission.
Join a working group
The working groups are based on collective intelligence and co-creation, and are divided into the 8 main themes of the ecosystem:
- New professions andemployability issues
- Co-creating value and new knowledge
- Emergence of new skills and ways of working
- An inclusive approach to the Social Contract and human rights
- Searching for meaning at work
- New modes of collaboration
- Integrating sustainability into corporate strategy
- Environmental impact
