Human Resources Conferences

Organizations everywhere are experiencing radical workplace change: Where work is done, how it’s done, who does it (and with whom). These workforce and workplace trends require organizations to radically rethink traditional assumptions about work and roles — making the employee-employer relationship, or “employment deal,” the most urgent priority for HR leaders today, and the natural theme for Gartner’s HR conference, ReimagineHR 2020.

There are huge implications for all HR professionals — and for the organization’s short- and long-term success in attracting, retaining and developing leadership and talent. For example, HR must equip leaders to manage remote teams over the long haul, keep workers engaged in a cost-constrained environment and preserve company culture with a more distributed workforce. 

To adapt successfully, HR leaders will need to update their strategies for talent acquisition and recruitment, performance management, development, total rewards, talent analytics, and diversity, equity and inclusion. We crafted the agenda for the ReimagineHR human resources conferences series to address these critical needs.

CHROs who lead their executive human resources teams and strategy to respond effectively can ensure their organizations stand out from competitors.

The increase in remote work is one example of a trend accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic response. More remote work prompts a range of considerations and actions for HR leaders — and all HR professionals. They must explore the critical competencies employees will need to collaborate digitally, be prepared to adjust employee experience strategies, and perhaps shift performance goal-setting and employee evaluations for a remote context.

The increase in organizational complexity is a new macro trend to navigate. As the pandemic subsides, there are likely to be more mergers and acquisitions as companies try to expand their geographic diversification and invest in secondary markets to capture opportunity, manage risk and acquire assets. This rise in complexity, size and organizational management will create challenges for HR leaders as operating models evolve.

For example, they will need to enable business units to customize performance management, because what works for one part of the enterprise might not work for another. And as organizational complexity complicates career pathing, HR will need to provide reskilling and career development support — for example, by developing resources and building out platforms to provide visibility into internal positions.

We’ll share more on these critical HR trends and how CHROs and senior HR leaders can respond at Gartner’s HR conferences.

Absolutely. As business models change, HR leaders have to work with business leaders to identify which skills will be needed to drive the reimagined business, which is likely to rely heavily on digital skills and capabilities. 

This requires a mindset shift in which HR focuses less on roles — which group unrelated skills — than on the skills needed to drive the organization’s competitive advantage and the workflows that fuel that advantage. 

HR will also need to show employees the career benefits of developing critical skills, an approach that potentially opens up multiple opportunities for their career development, rather than the usual approach of preparing for a specific next role. HR will also need to plug skill gaps. For example, learning and development leaders can partner with managers to upskill a select cohort of motivated and influential employees to provide personalized learning support to colleagues.

Even more fundamentally, HR leaders must champion the use of talent analytics so they have good data on the supply, demand, availability and location of the skills they need. Fifty-three percent of respondents to a recent Gartner TalentNeuron™ survey said that the inability to identify needed skills was the No. 1 impediment to workforce transformation. Thirty-one percent reported that they have no way to identify market-leading skills. Talent analytics can help HR leaders make better talent decisions and educate business leaders as they together develop future-forward talent strategies.

It’s also imperative in today’s shifting landscape for HR professionals and leaders to continue to develop their own skills. The ReimagineHR Conference connects CHROs and other senior HR leaders to industry experts, thought leaders, and networking opportunities, for example.

Many organizations have had to shift the focus of employee experience to sustaining the performance and engagement of a distributed workforce — where some employees work fully remote or partially remote and others are at the workplace. HR leaders had to ask tough questions, such as:

• Do our employees really believe we value people and ensure their well-being? 

• How are employees collaborating with and learning from team members? 

• Are we helping employees to get the skills, tools and resources they need to be successful in this disruption and the new normal?

Many employers have found themselves playing an expanded role in their employees’ financial, physical and mental well-being — offering support such as enhanced sick leave, financial assistance, adjusted hours of operation and child care provisions. These measures prioritize the well-being of employees as people over their role as workers. 

Employees and prospective candidates will increasingly judge organizations by the way in which they treat employees, so HR leaders must be highly mindful of the lasting effects on employee experience and employment brand of decisions made during and after the pandemic — and in response to other disruptions, from racial tensions to weaker economic conditions.

Technology can be a significant tool to measure and monitor employee engagement and create a more holistic “voice of the employee” (VoE). There is no standard set of HR tech capabilities around VoE, but technologies such as employee sentiment and social analytics tools collect and analyze opinions, perceptions and feelings of employees and workers, and provide a way to harness multiple sources of information to understand the dynamics of the employee experience.

The potential benefit is high, and over the longer term, a VoE approach can contribute to improving an organization’s overall employee experience and employment value proposition — and potential employees are more likely to be attracted to a work environment in which their voice is heard.

The increased focus on remote work prompted many organizations to make sure employees didn’t feel marginalized during physical isolation — or by being in a segment of the workforce still entering a physical workplace. Many organizations worked to identify behaviors such as racism and ageism that can make people feel marginalized. Some worked to help employees educate themselves on conscious and unconscious bias to better recognize and reduce both.

But the spotlight on diversity, equity and inclusion was intensified by anti-racism protests in the U.S. and around the world, which sparked unprecedented social discourse about race, equity and justice. That prompted many organizations to make public commitments to diversity and equitable treatment for all employees.

Employees may have appreciated these initial statements and conversations, but many are skeptical about or wary of what will come. It has never been more important for organizations to clearly and loudly commit anew to their DEI strategies, but that commitment must be sustained. 

The mandate for HR leaders now is to build more inclusive leadership, embed DEI values in talent and business processes, and commit to driving systemic change. But to date, few DEI leaders claim real success in building a diverse workforce or diverse and inclusive leadership bench.

HR leaders will have to assess candidly what the organizational and employee challenges are so as to enable the design of a relevant DEI strategy. 

Talent management processes — succession planning, recruiting, performance management — are the most susceptible to bias, and should be the starting point for embedding DEI. 

At Gartner ReimagineHR Conference, we dedicate an entire agenda track to diversity, equity and inclusion. We address today’s environment and sustainable recommendations for HR leaders and HR professionals to bring back to their organizations.

HR is in a position to play a much more strategic role now than ever before. COVID-19 forced HR leaders to take a seat at the table if they didn't have one before. From that seat, they have had to work with their CEO, management, the board and other members of the C-suite to think through the future vision of the organization. 

And that means facing really tough challenges as they think about broader strategy, asking, for example, Should we move to an all-remote workforce? What are the ways we can use technology to augment a remote workforce to come up with new product ideas and new solutions for our customers? How can we reimagine the service delivery experience to clients and customers in a world that is dramatically more remote than it has ever been? 

Those are fundamental strategic questions in which HR is now involved. If we get our response right, we're going to accelerate the performance of our business. And if we get it wrong, we're in a lot of trouble. That’s why we address these issues in numerous agenda tracks for our ReimagineHR  human resources conferences.

CHROs and Heads of HR have radically new responsibilities today. If you roll the clock back five years, it was essentially about hiring and developing the right people. Now, HR leaders are being held accountable for far more — a whole set of issues they weren't facing before.

The pandemic forced them to address all sorts of health safety issues, as well as a host of cultural and engagement questions. But HR leaders are also being held to a new standard and asked really big questions like, “How do we define the role of our company in society?” They're being asked what should the organizational stance be on Black Lives Matter and other social and cultural issues of the day.

HR leaders are on the hook for a new set of accountabilities, which is why we address them at our ReimagineHR human resources conferences. For HR leaders, it's not just about talent acquisition and retention; it’s about engaging, promoting and developing talent. It's about ensuring that employees feel safe, and understanding and communicating the organization’s role and mission in society. 

That's a whole new set of responsibilities — as we start to view our employees as key stakeholders in everything that we're doing as an organization.

Historically, we always thought about the deal between employees and employers as a zero-sum game. In a great labor market, employees were winning. In a bad labor market, employers were winning. It became a question of who got a bigger piece of the pie in terms of the rewards, benefits and services offered to employees

What we're realizing now — and why we’re incorporating this issue into our annual HR conference, ReimagineHR — is that reimagining the employee deal provides benefits for employees and improves productivity for employers. We no longer need to think about the world as a zero-sum game. 

For example, if we rethink where, when and how much our employees are working, and by doing that create massive flexibility for employees, we can actually increase the productivity of our employees dramatically.

By reimagining what the employment deal looks like between employees and employers, we can improve profitability and expand the pie; everyone benefits. Employees have a better experience. Employers get better results out of their workforce. We no longer have to play a zero-sum game anymore.

The more we thought about it, the more we realized that a virtual conference environment creates a wealth of opportunities we've never had at a human resources conference before.

1) Increased network of attendees. By eliminating travel and associated costs, we’ve expanded the network of professionals who can attend. The virtual platform accommodated an even-larger number of HR leaders and other HR professionals than an in-person conference, so that creates more networking opportunities for all of our attendees.

2) Virtual access to more sessions. We recorded all the sessions, so attendees can actually see and be involved in more things than they can at an in-person conference — where, by definition, you're missing other sessions taking place at the same time as the one you’ve selected. 

3) Broader set of sessions. Without the constraints of physical space, we were able to dramatically increase the number of breakout sessions, the number of roundtables, the number of Ask the Expert sessions. That created more choice for attendees so they could really create an experience that best aligns with the initiatives that they're working on and the key priorities and challenges that they have as an organization.

So for all those reasons, the virtual HR conference format really created a great overall experience for attendees. Check back for updates on our 2021 HR conferences calendar.