Review of the webinar «Sustainability @ HR Vaud» of June 15, 2021
This conference, broadcast live from the Lausanne Palace, was co-hosted by the members of the Sustainability commission of HR Vaud : Karine Lammle, Anthony Sorlin, and Guy Zehnder. Gathered in a round table format, Isabelle Chappuis – Executive Director of the Futures Lab at HEC Lausanne – The Faculty of Business and Economics of the University of Lausanne and Frederic Meuwly – Founder & Director of Actitudes Coaching – discussed human challenges within organizations by 2030.
What human challenges should we prepare for by 2030: whether for teams, at the organizational level, or on an individual basis?
The profound changes we have been experiencing for several years will continue to induce major transformations by 2030. Digitalization, robotization, human-machine collaboration, artificial intelligence, and the HR function will be called upon to play a key role in supporting these evolutions as the manager of human capital, whether physical and/or virtual.
Challenges for teams
- Teams as we know them today will transform to integrate new forms of human-machine collaborations.
- The complementarity between humans and machines will create in future teams new modes of communication, new interdependencies, and new dynamics that will become more complex to manage.
- As machines will progressively become full members of our work teams, it will be up to the HR function to support the resistance and fears related to these changes so that we can accept being augmented and working in interdependence with new types of « digital colleagues« .
Challenges at the organizational level
- Organizations will recurrently face successive shocks and will need to demonstrate resilience to be able to cope, adapt, and be sustainable. HR will therefore need to prepare human capital to transition and proactively develop resilience capacity within the organization.
- To better manage uncertainty and complexity, organizations will need to develop new skills to know how to use new prospective tools. These working methodologies will gain importance because they will make it possible 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 a certain form of ’organizational anxiety«. To avoid falling into this trap, HR must work to create a climate of psychological safety within their organization, which will allow them to think about the future with hope and project themselves confidently towards 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 within their environment and «pivot» to make the micro-adjustments necessary for their adaptation.
Challenges on an individual level
- Individuals will have to face their own «obsolescence» several times in their lives and will need to train throughout their lives to remain employable.
- For HR, the nature of the employer-employee contract will continue to evolve and the new norm «commitment = employability» will tend to accelerate and become widespread, because the old norm «loyalty = job security» will be completely obsolete.
- In the future, we will be less and less in a " «linear-transactional» logic» where one uses their skills in exchange for a job and we will evolve towards a logic «circular-systemic» where we seek to contribute to co-creating value in the broad sense within our ecosystem.
Goals of the Sustainability commission @ HR Vaud
The mission of the Sustainability commission @ HR Vaud is to be a driving force for proposals, to connect the different internal/external actors of the HR Vaud association's ecosystem and to work together on future and sustainable themes.
Our work axes are divided into 8 themes that form an ecosystem
Do you wish to contribute?
Are you enthusiastic about the idea of being able to contribute to this initiative?
You are welcome to contact the HR Vaud association: contact@hr-vaud.ch to join a working group of the Sustainability commission.
Join a working group
Working groups are based on collective intelligence and co-creation and are divided into the 8 main themes of the ecosystem, which constitute as many areas of work:
- New professions and issues related to’Employability
- Value co-creation and new Knowledge
- Emergence of new Skills and ways of working
- Inclusive approach to the Social contract and human rights
- Search for meaning at work
- New modes of Collaboration
- Integration of sustainability into the business strategy
- Impacts on the’Environment
