CHRO 2026 Predictions

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All right, let’s give it a few moments, folks, as people are trickling in. We’ve got a little bit of a break, which is nice for folks. So while we’re waiting for folks to trickle in, Kelley and Tracy, we just listened to the 2026 culture report, where 48 million employee responses indicate that the top trending issues for folks to have on their radar is, I guess, one is polarization, so people, surprise, surprise, people not feeling connected or aligned in many ways, you know, with kind of a lack of politics, or is that, what is that? Social and politics, and a lack of empathy.

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The other one was a real erosion of psychological safety in team dynamics in the organization, people not feeling comfortable to speak up, which is, you know, not lovely. And then actually the one positive indicator is a perception that there is an increased accountability throughout the organization. So kind of back to basics, let’s keep everyone accountable.

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I definitely feel the polarization. So I think social media is also creating a lot of isolation and people feeling not connected to each other, and out of kind of, it’s like if you got left off the party invite kind of thing, it gets worse. Well, folks can join us as they kind of trickle on in.

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I think let’s get started. This is always one of my favorite sessions of our People Leader Conference, so I’m excited to have this. Let me introduce our two speakers that I feel so fortunate to have them weighing in.

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So we have Tracy Cote. She’s the Chief People Officer of Slick Deals and Online Marketplace. Previously she was the Chief People Officer of Zenefits and an author of the HR Playbook.

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And also with us is Kelley Steven Waiss. She is Chief Transformation Officer of ServiceNow. Previously she was many CHRO roles, but right before ServiceNow, founder and CEO of Hitchworks, a talent mobility system.

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So both are board directors of different organizations and both are on my kind of go-to list whenever I want to get a finger on the pulse on what people are thinking about in the HR kind of landscape. So thank you to both of you for joining me today. Totally appreciate it.

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I know our community appreciates it too. What we’re going to be talking about is, you know, one of, like I said, it’s always kind of my favorite session. It’s like, let’s get some predictions out here in what we should all have on our radar moving forward into the next year, right? I think we all realize that we’re in a time of transition as AI is very, very quickly changing the nature of work and how we’re going to get to the outcomes that we’re tasked with getting to in the business.

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And so, you know, figuring out what do we need to have on our radar as HR leaders and people leaders moving into next year is a conversation I want to have. So, Tracy, I’m going to start with you. You and I had a conversation last week when I said, okay, as an HR leader, what’s the top thing that you think an HR leader needs to be responsible for? Yeah, I mean, I think the topic of AI is very hot right now, but I would say one of the top responsibilities for HR leaders needs to be thinking about how do we drive the cultural change as AI becomes embedded in how we work.

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It’s not just about our own department transformation. It’s about enabling that company-wide transformation. So, helping people build confidence and proficiency with AI tools and then really thinking about the right division of labor between humans and the AI agents.

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We have to help organizations navigate this shift. Yeah. Kelley? I think it is about, we’ve talked a lot about digital transformation efforts over the years.

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You know, technology never slowed down. I think this one is very different because, as Tracy said, it’s not just about the human beings being enabled, but it is about an operating model shift. And it’s not just an operating model shift.

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When I say operating model, I mean structure, governance, accountabilities, and ways of working. And it’s not just really driving HR’s transformation and operating model. It’s driving the whole company, as Tracy said.

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And so, there are lots of dynamics that need to change, not only how individuals themselves have to build new skills for the future, how their roles are changing, but what are we going to do with that reallocation of capacity? And how are we going to measure our success and return on these investments that we’re making in technology? And it would be awesome if technology solved all of our problems, because we just buy software and go home. And I’m sure ServiceNow would love that. But that’s not how it works.

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So, a lot of focus, I think, on workforce transformation next year. So, that totally makes sense to me. And obviously, as CHROs and people leaders, the folks holding these roles have a central role in that transformation.

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Want to kind of bring a couple other ideas onto the radar here. So, we started off our conversation earlier with Hugo Serza, the CEO of Udemy, saying, listen, with AI agents, I think we’re all seeing this in different ways, maybe 70% to 80% of what was the workload last year is just being automated, right? Leaving a whole lot of capacity for different teams to achieve more. And just the nature of capitalism, we’re always going to want to achieve more.

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So, talk to us a little bit, both of you, on how can an HR leader figure out and align with what are the business metrics that they need to be solving for? And let me just kind of color that a little bit with it’s so easy to get isolated in the work, like you’re working, you know, in the trenches, you’re working in the business, not necessarily on the business, if that makes sense. But how, you know, what techniques have either of you, you know, identified to allow a people leader to get out of the trenches and see, like, where their North Star is in really moving the needle? Well, I’ll tell you, one of the first things that I did early on in my career was get a little more steeped in financial acumen, because it’s not something that we grew up in, right? In fact, I didn’t even study business in college. I was a journalism major.

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So, I stayed as far away from math and finance as I could at the time. And so, I think becoming a little more astute about how does your company make money, first of all, what are the core metrics they’re paying attention to from a business standpoint is an important element of even selling the ROI of any transformation that you’re going to make in terms of people, process, or technology. So, I think, you know, I attended Stanford’s FANFI program, Finance and Accounting for Non-Financial Executives.

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I can’t even remember. I think that was 2008 or 2009. And it was really helpful.

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And it actually made me, as a CHRO, pivot towards my team and put them through a similar type program to just get more conversant on the business outcomes and KPIs that we would be needing to be conversant on in terms of selling any type of transformation that we are going to. We always had to say, what is the value of these investments? And what are the drivers that we’re going to change? So, I don’t know, Tracy, if that’s familiar to you, too. Absolutely.

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I think it makes a ton of sense. I mean, as I think about this, the role of HR, we have to be thinking about if we’re going to add value and not, you know, have AI take away all of the administrative that we do all day, every day, which we want it to do. We have to pivot from those admin kinds of focus roles to being business enablers.

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And to do that, you have to understand the business. And a lot of HR people, unfortunately, are just having grown up, you know, grown up the ranks really understanding the business because it’s historically been possible to do an HR job without really understanding the business. And I think that’s really changing.

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And so, you know, I recommend just making a habit of asking tons of questions with your CFO and your other business leaders to really understand, you know, the numbers. What’s driving the revenue? What are the biggest costs? Where do we need to be driving efficiencies? Because, you know, the CFO should be your best friend. And, you know, this is how we’re going to help the business make that pivot and continue to focus on people, but through a business lens.

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I mean, in my current role, I’ve been able to expand beyond the HR function, which has been really rewarding and really helped me make that pivot, quite frankly, because I haven’t had a choice. And sometimes you feel like you don’t have the luxury of time, but you really have to make the time to learn about the business that you’re in, whatever it is. Yeah, Janine, I was going to make a comment on that because it’s interesting because we both kind of held roles that spanned across the business.

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I know in my last CHRO role, the COO left, and I ended up taking all of his functions, including IT. But I think that to your point, I think that AI initiatives, if you’re a little more intimate with the business, you’re going to understand where AI actually takes, if the goal is cost takeout or it’s productivity or it’s experience, you’re going to know which levers you can pull on and then how to speak to where you’re moving the needle and where you’re not. And I think that that is an understanding of business.

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Yeah, so that reminds me of something that Tanya Jackson that started off our discussions today said where, you know, she was she came from the manufacturing supply chain side of her business, Lexmark printing technology business, and her CEO asked her to lead the HR organization. And part of that motivation from the CEO was just to have an HR leader who understood the business more. And so she, you know, kind of implemented ways for everyone in her HR organization to basically meet with different business teams so they can, you know, kind of quickly get up to speed on the business dynamics.

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I’m thinking about that because I think this is a helpful maybe nugget for folks tuning in. Any suggestions, any ideas on, I mean, this has got to be self-motivated, I think, for HR leaders to just like integrate themselves and start to have more visibility into different, you know, organizations within their business. It’s knock on doors, ask if they can attend meetings.

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I mean, I think all three of us are, you know, in an interesting situation where we all have done like more expansive workflows than just strictly HR, right? But I think that that’s probably hard to get there unless the situation just kind of forces you there. But I think you have to spend some time. I mean, I know as a CRO, you have to know your peers really well.

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You are the concierge to the CEO. So you have the understanding of the business and how the business makes money and what are the challenges, even at an industry level and market level, you have to understand all those dynamics. You also have to have a clear understanding of how the people inside of your organization are doing in terms of driving those things.

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What are their motivations? Because you’re often dealing also with their compensation and how we keep them motivated and retained. So spending a lot of time with your peers and understanding both their aspirations and challenges is a part of the job and makes you better. I think the other thing is the metrics that those people are having to drive in their specific areas of the business.

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Part of their challenge may be efficiency might be a challenge or quality might be a challenge. So how are you going to have the visibility to the data and analytics that drive some of those things? And Janine, obviously, a little plug for Emtrain. I mean, having a consistency across the workflow in terms of how people are actually doing in terms of behavioral change is really important as well, because we are the ultimate guides to our peers and we are the ultimate guides to both the CEO and the board.

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So we have a really, really important position and a catbird seat to really see what those drivers need to look like. One thing I would like to jump on top of that to mention, I think you’ve got to be really careful not to become a business tourist. So don’t just go to business meetings and be a fly on the wall.

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That is not really a great look. Now, it might be helpful for you, but try to have a purpose when you get involved with the business. And it’s really easy for HR to do that because there’s so many points of entry from a people perspective for doing this, whether it’s driving AI transformation, process efficiency, hiring, pulse survey reviews, sentiment analysis from the harassment training courses that people took.

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I mean, you take your pick. There are so many points of entry into every department. It’s very easy to come in at any kind of entry point that would be sort of a typical HR entry point and use that as your launching off point to ask questions, offer advice, learn more about that function, which helps you learn more about the business.

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It makes you a better HR person, and it’s a very natural way to get involved and start to make yourself useful, depending on what your particular skill set is or what that function needs help with, whether it’s they don’t do a good change management, they’re not doing good communication, their people are unhappy for this, that, or the other reason. And understanding the business context will help you give them good advice and help you learn about the business and make your function more valuable. No, for sure.

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So I think, you know, to state the obvious, the next, you know, year, year and a half, as we are all going through business transformation, the culture is going to be super important, right? And so, you know, Tracy, last week, I think you made a comment that really is the CHRO chief people officer, like your main one of your main responsibilities is the culture keeper, if you will, or steward of the culture. You know, thinking through how we empower that, and I want to kind of connect that idea with Kelley, you had mentioned last week, and actually earlier, that our HR operating models need to change, right? So, and this is, this gets to what Tonya Jackson said earlier, like, it’s just so easy for HR to have silos, and to be, you know, in many ways, working kind of completely autonomously from the business units, right, like just a couple points of connection. And no judgment, no critique, it’s just what happens, but somehow figuring out a way to get it more integrated.

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So, Kelley, I want to, I want to start with you, because you had kind of outlined to me, like, where the HR operating model needs to start trending. And I’m going to, I steal this framework from Volker Jacobs, who is a good colleague of mine in Germany, I think he wrote a white paper on this. And he basically said that with the emergence of AI, if you think about in a triangle, right, you have operations, people operations at the bottom, you have business partners in the middle, and you have centers of excellence at the top who face then the ultimate customer, your employees.

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And those centers of excellence, with good intent, have bought best in breed technology, have created programs and processes that suited the work that they were doing, they were optimizing the work that they were doing. In the future, AI will bring a lot of lift to service managers in the operating model. Business partners will become more problem solvers, i.e. needing a lot more data to drive some of their decisions and consult.

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And then at the very top, centers of excellence need to become product managers. So thinking about how do we integrate, you know, things like performance, compensation, culture, talent development, and career development, how is this becoming really a product that we deliver, integrated, as opposed to individual programs and processes. And so in a sense, HR becomes from center of excellence led to more product led in the future.

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And I certainly think AI is the great tailwind behind that logic. And I’m already seeing it at service now. So we are operating our HR organization in that way.

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That’s so interesting. You know, where I went on this question was people initiatives, people related initiatives, whatever they are, upskilling or change management, transformation, whatever those things are, they have to be part of the company’s strategic initiatives. Like there has to be that level of attention for whatever the people initiatives are that have to be also part of the company’s business related objectives.

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And it can’t be performative. I think that that’s a trap we get into where we talk a lot about stuff that sounds good, but we don’t actually just do the systemic things that need to happen. So really thinking about that difference.

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And it has to be in service of the business goals, and they have to be realistic. And then we can’t just run around trying to like do AI by making a bad process faster. It needs to be about innovation and rethinking things, both in HR, but also as enabling the company to do these things.

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And then our role is to really help shepherd those changes and bring people along, whatever those are for your company. Every company is at a different stage of development on this. I’m sure ServiceNow is way ahead of the game in so many ways because it’s an advanced technology organization.

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But a lot of organizations are very much at the beginning of their journey and just trying to figure these things out. Yeah. How do you folks think about tapping into workflows? Because I think one area of opportunity that I’ve certainly seen, and then I’ll just kind of state the obvious, Emtrain clients realize this, but Emtrain has tapped into an existing workflow, meaning learning about respect, learning about code of conduct, learning on these topics.

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And then we’ve integrated a secondary workflow, meaning tell us what’s going on in your workplace right now. What skills do you see to get double output, double, triple output, right? Do you folks see, certainly with AI agents, the ability just to tap into workflows to get second and like triple outputs as opposed to it’s like so far, it’s just been like siloed one-to-one systems, like, all right, we’ve got a performance management system. Here’s our results and so on and so forth.

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Because I think that’s part of maybe what the landscape is shifting. I think for a lot of data, right, you’ve got data across all of those workflows, right, that needs to come together to form a set of actions. But often that data has been so siloed or locked into either a system or a specific guarded workflow, right? So with agents, this ability to traverse, to use a skiing analogy, right, to traverse the mountain, left, right, straight down, if you choose, but to get a lot of data points together, particularly around an individual’s needs.

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And I think that’s what’s the most interesting about this is that we can scale this hyper personalization, but at the organizational level, we can heat map very specifically who needs to change, what needs to change, and we haven’t really been able to do that in the past because the data was so fractured and siloed across. Yeah, I mean, I would add, I mean, there’s an opportunity to move from sort of reactive insights to true predictive intelligence and agentic predictive intelligence where it just happens. We don’t even have to tell it what it should be looking for.

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It will, we’re getting to a point now where you put the right data into the machine and it will tell you what you need to be worried about. And then, you know, we can supplement those insights with recommendations that will support whatever the area we’re in. So instead of just knowing what’s happening, we can start to understand better why and what’s likely to happen next.

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And that’s where HR can be better than a reporting function, but a driver, an advisor for business performance. Super. What thoughts and recommendations do both of you have on the culture piece? So let’s just kind of focus in on the fear and anxiety that employees are feeling.

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And I think that was pretty clear and evident in our 2026 culture report. Also, Hugo Serzin, you know, the CEO of Udemy had referenced that too. He’s been talking to a lot of HR groups.

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And HR folks are anxious, but certainly rank and file, you know, employees in the workforce are anxious. So leaning into, you know, how do we build a culture the next year, year and a half, specifically, that gets people a little bit more comfortable. Any recommendations for folks? I think we have to create more community at work.

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I think that also extends into not making everything tech oriented. So I think in the culture survey report, right, it was about polarization of people and lack of psychological safety. I think a lot of that comes from the fact that we are tribal and communal.

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And so, yes, we might have to think about community in the future as how are we bringing people together? Maybe technology assists us in being able to execute it. But that human dynamic and understanding each other and having the right communication skills, and Janine, you know this better than anybody, some of the behaviors that we have to change or drive to avoid issues of sexual harassment or any of these other compliance related risks are because we have this lack of human connection and understanding. And as a mother of four and the mother of a 25-year-old, you know, who’s working, he needs to be in an environment where he sees and meets people and has community.

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So I think as HR leaders, something we need to think about, we sort of went on the mental health wave, and I think that’s supporting health and wellness. We also have to think about how are we creating community so that we don’t have this polarization and lack of psychological safety that comes from human connection. Oh, I love that.

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Tracy, your thoughts? I love that. I mean, just to reinforce that from a kind of a step progression perspective, it’s like start with the why, not the how. If you launch into the tools, people freak out.

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Your CEO is like, hurry, hurry, hurry, do this stuff. So you have to start by demystifying, not overhyping it and not telling people this is going to, we’re making them feel like it’s going to take over their jobs, but it’s going to make them more efficient, more productive, allowed to do higher level work. And then really thinking about what does proficiency mean in this area and how you want to define that for your organization and creating the programs around it, whether it’s training or five coding sessions or whatever it is, lunch and learns, whatever your organization does to kind of reward the exploration and transparency that you want to see.

(28:05 – 28:20)

And so you have to model that. And then you have to just make sure there’s some kind of ethics and empathy along the way. And just like with any change, you’re going to have your percentage of people who are all over it, your percentage of people who are just literally never going to get there and everybody else.

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And you kind of got to focus on that, everybody else and how do you bring them, get them on the train to be supportive and innovative and thinking about this. And then your leaders have to just lead by doing. Totally agree.

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Yeah. I like the question here from Elizabeth. How do you folks think about investing in the soft skills, interpersonal skills or culture skills at this time? This is right up my alley because I think I had a whole LinkedIn post about the fact that I think I was a journalism major.

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OK, so I’ll put that out there. But the communication skills were more important than a computer science degree in the future. I really think that we are in a crisis in this country because people don’t know how to talk to each other or connect.

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I think that’s what’s showing up in the data. Yeah. Well, I would say to anybody, and I include my adult children in this, is that if you because I have a kid at Stanford who said he had to sort of dumb himself down into a communications degree.

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And I said, whoa, whoa, whoa. Right. A communications degree is actually going to be very valuable in the future.

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And and so I think we we so this came out of a roundtable discussion I had in Chicago about early in career and their skill sets, one of which was low on the communications skills. And I said, so how do we build that? I think we create core cohorts of young people. We hire them and put them on projects that need to be solved.

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And we see their skill sets. They grow their skill sets around communication and connection and resolving conflict. But these are the most critical skill sets for the future.

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I think they will be very rare and highly valued. So yeah, I don’t have this one. No, no, it’s so funny.

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So I was an English major with a communications minor. You’re here. My kids are liberal arts majors.

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So, you know, I’m right there with you. I mean, I think first and foremost, I would just reframe soft as strategic. That is terrible marketing for what is really important.

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How about culture skills like what I’m trying to call it? People don’t like that either. You know what I mean? It’s just touching feeling. Nobody wants that.

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So I think I would call it strategic because it is strategic. I mean, I can write a summary, but I can’t read the room. And so how do you use data to target where you need those cultural investments and train? Actually, that’s what you do, which I think is great and was ahead of its time as far as thinking about that.

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And then just thinking about how do you tie these strategic skills to hard outcomes? Because companies we know with higher trust scores perform better than their peers. And so that’s data. Those are facts.

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How do you bring that to the table to help people understand that these things are important? And it’s funny. I just tried an AI coaching tool, which you can actually use some of these tools to help people with those kinds of skills. And so I think there are ways to integrate both into the conversation.

(31:35 – 31:45)

Super. I think we’ve got some time here. I think we’re going to end a little early, which is nice to give people a little time back.

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We do have some time for some questions. So if there’s any questions and answers for either questions for Tracy and Kelley, maybe easiest is to put them in the chat. And while waiting for folks to see if they have any burning questions to ask either one of you, I just want to summarize what I heard, which was so culture, getting people feeling comfortable, psychologically safe.

(32:11 – 32:49)

That’s going to be obviously, as it is every year, on the radar of chief people officers and CHROs. Figuring out, Kelley, as you said, kind of a new operating model, if you will, to click into the business in a more maybe integrated fashion, as opposed to what typically happens is a more siloed approach. Work on, I like Tracy, your strategic skills, strategic interpersonal skills, because along with AI, you still have the humans, and as an employment lawyer, litigator, I always say where you’ve got humans, you have conflict.

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So how can we build up the skills so that we have less and less conflict, we have more cross-functional collaboration so that we can get to the success that we’re all looking for? Did I miss anything there? I think that kind of wraps it up. All right. We’re at the top of the hour.

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I’m going to say thank you to both of you. Kelley, Tracy, thank you so much, everyone. Thank you for tuning in.

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I appreciate it. Have a good day. Bye.

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Bye. All right. Hi, folks.

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Again, thank you to our CHRO panel. That was fantastic. We have an Emtrain product preview coming up at 12.20 p.m., Pacific time.

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And our product team will go over what’s coming, what we’ve covered over the past few months, and share some exciting new developments on the Emtrain platform with you. So stick around. See you at 12.20. Thanks.