Welcome back. This week's column is written by Dr. Beverly Hyatt, an adjunct professor at Wilmington University in Delaware and a former HR professional.

In the postpandemic workplace, HR professionals need to go beyond overseeing recruitment, employee relations, compensation, benefits, training, development and retention. HR needs to be the agent of change and advocate for fixing anything that has been identified as wrong within an organization, writes Holly Maurer-Klein, a vice president of HR/Advantage Advisory, a subsidiary of law firm Clark Hill PLC that provides outsourced HR services to small and midsize businesses.

For many professionals, becoming a C-suite member (i.e., holding any position with the word “chief” in the job title) and getting a seat at the table represents the ultimate achievement in terms of status and influence in the workplace. 

I contacted three executives to hear more about how the HR professional can continue to have a seat at the table and the strategies people managers can adopt to implement HR policies that reflect company goals.

Anita Underwood, dean of the School of Business and Leadership at Nyack College and founding director of Nyack’s Master of Science in Organizational Leadership program, said having a seat at the table is “being consistently or structurally involved in the C-suite group and that ideas are visibly perceived as a key value-add to the organization.”

Ms. Underwood and others I spoke to said that the contributions of HR to a company’s strategy also depend on the chief executive’s philosophy, whether that person views employees as assets and HR as a business partner to the organization.

Deirdre Evans, a manager with more than 28 years of experience and oversight of 150 people, says that many HR professionals are excluded from C-suite meetings because leaders’ primary interest is to increase the bottom line and satisfy stockholders rather than reflect on how internal decisions could affect employees.

Many companies have moved beyond the thinking that HR is a cost center and doesn’t add value to the bottom line. But the onus is on HR executives to show they can provide value. Ms. Underwood said that as an educator she strives to teach adult students how to have a leadership mind-set that leads to contributions for an organization to flourish.

“The value of HR is key to keeping a pulse on the human element of the organization,” said John Sheehan, general manager at Insperity, which provides human resources and business services. 

HR professionals have the “responsibility and obligation to hear the voice of employees and govern organizational practices based on the needs and priorities of their people,” he said.  

The real goal, as suggested by each of my interviewees, is for the entire HR team to listen and hear from people across the organization, and for the HR leader to be their voice and represent them in the boardroom. HR leaders also should place emphasis on learning the business, guiding their teams in creating policy that reflects human-capital-focused goals, while staying connected with senior executives’ goals and objectives.

Doing so will ensure that HR gets and keeps its seat at the table.

There is myriad literature citing what HR professionals need to do to have a seat at the table.

Carol Anderson, principal at business consulting and services provider Anderson Performance Partners LLC, says that HR must be an active and vocal element in telling leaders what they should do to be more effective in their C-suite roles. Even though employers are aware of the need to comply with HR (basically to avoid legal ramifications), there often remains a disconnect between HR professionals and leaders. Indeed, the HR professional is all too often omitted from C-suite meetings and lacks a voice in decisions intended to advance the business.

“Employers expect HR professionals to understand the business, be accountable for the people part of their organization as strategic leaders to source, hire, engage, measure and develop talent. However, the HR professional is inexperienced in the business, which renders leaders hesitant to turn over such an important part of the company to their HR professionals,” Ms. Anderson said.

In addition to assisting businesses in reaching their goals, HR professionals are expected to “think beyond the boundaries of HR’s functional area to determine what needs to be done,” Lance Wright says in his book “HR in the Boardroom.”

Mr. Wright recommends that the HR team should assess the executive team and determine where changes can improve organizational effectiveness, add value to the organization and get noticed so that C-suite leaders include them in higher-level decision-making.

We talk to Brian Kropp, a VP at consulting firm Gartner, about why some companies are walking back expanded leave and what that might say about the future of the employee-first workplace. Listen here.

Some companies are using remote work to bring more diversity into their workforces, by hiring or developing recruits far from the communities where the companies are based.

As more staff return to offices, some employers say remote work remains a tool to recruit and retain workers, including those from ethnic or racial minority backgrounds. A broader recruiting net lets them hire in places with bigger pools of Black and other minority talent than, for instance, Silicon Valley or the rural Midwest. And recent surveys show a greater share of Black workers want jobs that let them work from home, compared with their white peers.

“From a diversity perspective, there’s not a lot of Black talent in San Jose,” says Aleta Howell, global diversity and inclusion business strategy lead at Cisco Systems Inc., which is based in that city.

Cisco has had success in stepping up its recruiting at historically Black colleges and universities and other schools near its North Carolina campus in Research Triangle Park and its offices in Texas and Atlanta for jobs that can be performed at home, she says.

• Black and Hispanic Employees Often Get Stuck at the Lowest Rung of the Workplace
   
• Black Professionals Say Workplaces Have Changed Since George Floyd—but Not Enough

• How to Evaluate a Potential Employer in a Downturn (Harvard Business Review)
                                                     
• Don’t Let Your Corporate Culture Be the Next Casualty of the Great Resignation (Fast Company)
   
• Politics in the Workplace: How Should We Deal With Opposing Views? (Financial Times)

Chitra Vemuri curated and edited this newsletter.

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