HR Without People?

Industrial Evolution in the Age of Automation, AI, and Machine Learning

Anthony R. Wheeler, M. Ronald Buckley

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781801170406
• eBook ISBN: 9781801170390
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Development
• Index: Business

As artificial intelligence and machine learning practices grow, entire industries and jobs could become more automated or cease to exist altogether. HR Without People? traces provocative and challenging timelines for future developments in ten, thirty and fifty years' time, to interrogate how modern HR practices need to respond to far reaching technological and industrial change.

Focusing on the role these technologies are playing in changing the HR profession and how they could and should develop industry practices in the future, HR experts Anthony R. Wheeler and M. Ronald Buckley explore how this profession has a vital role in responding to these changes and how it can adapt to meet the new challenges faced by both employers and employees.

Examining key issues such as the effects of big data and algorithms ongoing role in influencing recruiting and selection, the changes in virtual technology that will alter training, and how the role of government will expand to address the needs of citizens affected by the rate of change in workforce displacement, HR Without People? is a stimulating and confrontational challenge to conventional thinking on this people-centric profession's role in the future of work.

1

The Evolution of Humans and Their Work

Take a moment to think about who you are as a person. After saying your name, how do you describe yourself to others upon first introduction? Do you begin your description with a set of nouns that convey a set of relationships – are you a mother or father? Do you begin your description with a location – where are you from? Do you begin your description with words about belonging to groups, teams, or organizations – are you with these people; do you work for this company? Or do you often introduce yourself based upon what you do for work – are you a human resources management professional? Obviously, situations dictate to a certain extent how you will initially describe yourself, but chances are that you will refer to your work or for whom and with who you work when describing who you are as a person. Whether you like your work or your employer very much or not, your work is fundamental to who you are as a person. Our work not only gives us a sense of self and expression but also provides us with opportunities – opportunities to move, opportunities to provide, opportunities for fulfillment, opportunities of relationships and love, opportunities of freedom. Or work can, similarly, restrict all of those opportunities.

Some might argue that work provides nothing more than a means to an end. With work comes money or remuneration. With money comes the ability to purchase goods or services that sustain life, such as food, shelter, and safety. With money comes the ability to live a life of status or esteem. That is, some argue that the money earned through work can satisfy both our needs and wants. However, work – one's own work – can be dissociated from money. Consider that some people never work a day in their lives for need of money because they have wealth from previous generations. Yet even those who have inherited wealth often choose to work or assume a vocation – derived from Latin to mean “a calling” – to not just occupy their time but also to find some sort of meaning in their lives.

Moreover, money itself holds differential meaning for people and even societies.¹ Before the advent of money, people engaged in barter – an exchange between goods or services that required a time-consuming and sometimes messy process of establishing comparative worth between exchanged goods or services – that rendered money largely irrelevant in most societies. Money, however, and the meaning ascribed to is still relative. In more individualistic societies, money increases the focus on personal goal attainment while money erodes communal behaviors in more collectivist societies. Simply stated, money disrupts cohesion and harmony between, with, and among people. People also vary in their attitudes toward money and the value they ascribe to money in terms of whether or not money is needed to live one's life the way one chooses to live that life. Inside of organizations, money is a known disruptor due to perceptions of equity or fairness in terms of how the organization distributes money in exchange for work. An employee can find perfect contentment in his or her salary, which satisfies both that person's wants and needs. Yet when that employee learns that a coworker earns more money – for doing the same job or another job altogether – that employee will suddenly feel dissatisfaction with the employer, become frustrated with how the employer treats employees, and likely begin looking for a new job in another company. The simple knowledge that a coworker earns more money can radically alter not only how one views his or her employer but also how one assesses how much money is now needed to cover his or her wants and needs. To further demonstrate the relativity of money, try the following experiment. In your mind, think about how much money you need to earn to happily live your life. Put an actual figure on that amount of money. Now ask your friends, family members, and coworkers that same question and ask if they will tell you their figures. What you will likely find is that your monetary figure will increase upon hearing what others' monetary needs to live a happy life are.

Not that people naturally talk about their earnings in social settings. Typically, the work one does will convey the social meaning of affluence or status. More to the point, though, is that people seldom describe themselves in terms of how much money they make. Money might provide the means to whatever ends a person wants or needs, but money does not provide the sense of self or belonging that one's job provides.

It is important to understand the pairing of “sense of self and belonging” mentioned above, as it helps to further explain why work becomes integral to one's sense of self. Humans by nature and evolution are primarily social animals, something obfuscated by pop – and quite frankly, junk – psychology that virally spreads through social media and the Internet. Even an introvert, someone whose natural predisposition is to prefer one-on-one or small group conversations as opposed to the extrovert's predisposition to prefer large group settings, is a social creature. Humans have a primary motivation to belong to groups that they feel are attractive and important. Belonging to a personally attractive group reflects favorably onto the individual. If a person belongs to an attractive group, it must mean that the individual is an important or good or attractive individual. This explains why companies with high brand identity receive not just more applicants for job openings but also significantly better applicants. Working for a highly recognizable company boosts the self-esteem of the employees who work for that company. It says something about who you are as a person to work for such a well-known and esteemed company.

Delving deeper into the psychological power of belonging to groups and how belonging to those groups alters your sense of self, consider what occurs to individuals when the groups they belong to come under attack or scrutiny. Let us assume you proudly work for a company that you feel is considered an industry leader. Your LinkedIn and other social media profiles display your work affiliation. You own company-branded apparel that you wear outside of work. Your company is a good company, and you are a good person. Unrelated to your actual job or even division, a public scandal hits your company. Word leaks and spreads quickly through the Internet and news media. Instead of reading or hearing about how great your company is, you now only hear negative things about your company. How do you feel about this? Do you proudly wear your company-branded apparel outside of work? Do you shy away from discussions about work with friends and family? You likely feel cognitive dissonance – you are a good person but you work for a scandalous company. You will feel the need to alleviate this dissonance. Will you leave the company? Or will you double-down on your affiliation with the company? It is still a good company that employed people who did wrong, but that does not mean the entire company is bad. It does not mean you are bad.

This type of process plays out every day in almost every facet of one's life. This social identity process explains why groups of people have fought wars against each other for reasons that in hindsight appear trivial. Yet, when one's group is attacked – even verbally – it feels as though you as an individual are attacked. In defending your group's honor, status, or physical well-being, you are in fact defending your honor, status, and well-being. The levels of this social identity process can scale from a small unit of a group or team to a company to an industry or profession to a society. We see this social identity process play out in rivalries between sports teams, which can lead to physical violence among followers. We see this social identity process play out in labor relations settings. We see this social identity process play out in national politics, as political polarization continues to spread across the globe.

In terms of work, humans often identify with what they do for work, with companies and industries to which they belong, and with the professions to which they belong. It starts with what we do and scales to larger groups as societies scale in complexity. Consider surnames that provide hereditary links to previous generations. The English surname Wright derives from wood working. The surname Fletcher derives from the French word for arrows used by archers. The Italian surname Bagni derives from someone who worked as a bathhouse attendant. The Spanish surname Cervantes derives from those who worked as servants. The Greek surname Bakirtzis derives from coppersmiths. The German surname Farber denotes someone who worked as a dyer. The Chinese surname Zhang is believed to have derived from bowmakers. All of these examples demonstrate how powerful the connection is between work and an individual's identity. It is so strong that for some people, their work is their name. Your family may have been one that constructed wheels (Wheeler) or were primarily herdsmen (Buckley).

Identifying people based on they work they do or the profession they belong to dates to the Middle Ages. During this feudal time period before the age of enlightenment, work was largely based around serving the needs, wants, and operation of a local royal's kingdom or principality. The local royal owned the lands, resources, and means of production of all people living in that kingdom or principality. An array of skilled trade jobs and professions proliferated in feudal economic systems: multiple types of smiths working with different metals to produce products or military armament, tanners and cobblers working with animal hides to produce garments and shoes, masons and carpenters working with materials to build structures, millers and bakers taking farmed grains and creating bread, and falconers and grooms working with animals. What one did for his or her work on behalf of the royalty was passed down from generation to generation, often through heredity and an apprenticeship vocational training system, and guilds to protect and oversee trades. If your father farmed the land to provide food for the royal's kingdom or principality, his surname – perhaps Farmer – would denote that occupation. The farmer's offspring inherited that surname and likely worked the land for generations to come. As the Enlightenment, Renaissance, and Industrial Revolution came, the work or profession of one's offspring might change, but the surnames continued to pass from generation to generation.

During the Middle Ages and clear through the Enlightenment, Renaissance, and Industrial Revolution, Western religions reinforced the link between work and one's self.² Protestant denominations interpreted parts of the Bible as meaning that one's work on Earth could lead to salvation in the afterlife. The phrase Protestant Work Ethic captures this linkage between work and one described self, albeit through the mechanism of religion. In order to be “saved” by their god, one must work hard in his or her daily life. Hard work became a way to demonstrate that one is a good person. Work literally fused to an individual's identity and salvation to the afterlife.

This leads to the question, though, of the identification of work to one's self being a recent evolutionary outcome. In the recent history – roughly 200,000 years – of human biological and social evolution, did humans begin to identify work with their sense of self only over the past 1,000 years? Anthropological research points to a longer period of time. The evolutionary ancestors of modern humans – Homo erectus – began organizing in hunting and gathering groups, likely family-sized units, more than 1.8 million years ago.³ Instead of a nomadic lifestyle that followed migratory patterns of food sources and seasonal weather patterns that affected both animals and plants, some hunting and gathering societies migrated to areas where resources could be hunted and gathered in a single geographic area. Specialized tools and hunting and gathering techniques were created to sustainably develop and exploit this type of environment Modern humans – Homo sapiens – specifically evolved as hunters and gatherers and refined the hunting and agriculture techniques that allowed for the development of larger, more complex societies. However, even in these older human societies, the roles of hunting or fishing and gathering or farming were divided among people – largely based on biological sex – within the family units or societies. Men tended to be the hunters, while women tended to be the gatherers. In these ancient family structures and societies, what one did – hunting or gathering – was part of who they were.

We see the multiple factors that embed and reinforce work as central to one's identity. Evolutionary, social, familial, and religious forces have shaped the centrality of work to humans. Several outcomes, of course, occur as a result of the centrality of work to humans and an individual's identity. This gets to the heart of the meaning of work for anyone. How anyone describes themselves is complex, as any individual has a complex self. We occupy many roles in our lives. We have myriad interests and hobbies. We maintain dozens of relationships; some close and some distant. Some of these roles, interests, and relationships are more or less salient to us at any given point in time. Based on circumstances – perhaps a wedding or a funeral – your role as parent or sibling can become more important or active in how you describe yourself. Yet that active role can become less important as circumstances change. Perhaps when sitting in the stands and cheering as your favorite football team battles its primary rival in a crosstown derby, your identity as a parent or sibling matters very little at that time. What is important to understand about the saliency of roles, interests, and relationships to one's self is that not only are these roles, interests, and relationships associated with positive feelings and emotions, but also that the more roles, interests, and relationships that one identifies with, the more one is open to having parts of one's self exposed to potentially negative outcomes. That is, the more the things you identify with, the more those things are open to being threatened or attacked. Recall that humans derive their identities, in part, through groups with which they identify. Those associations make us feel good about who we are. If an association is threatened or attacked by an outsider to that association, the attack is personal as if it happened to us. Now think about multiple roles, interests, and relationships in that regard. The more we identify with, the more we are exposed to potential identity threats.

Fortunately, humans have adapted to cope with the complexities of how we self-identify and threats to self-identity. Back to the point of saliency, some roles, interests, and relationships occupy more central places in how we describe ourselves, while others become more peripheral to ourselves. Not that these peripheral aspects of ourselves cannot become more active based on circumstances – think about attending that derby – but those peripheral aspects of our lives are likely more compartmentalized than the primary aspect of ourselves. When your favorite team loses the derby against its crosstown rival, you might feel upset for a brief amount of time; but there is always the next game or the next year. However, for those central aspects of ourselves, experiencing an attack, threat, or actual loss of those aspects of ourselves can be devastating to our overall sense of self. A death, a break-up of a marriage or partnership, or the loss of a job have been known to send even the strongest of people into a spiral that can last long periods of time and spread into other parts of one's self.

Aside from the evolution, social, familial, and religious factors that embed and reinforce work as a central part of one's identity, think more concretely about the role that work plays in your life. For most adults, as previously discussed, work provides opportunities to satisfy needs and wants. Work also occupies a large amount of time in anyone's daily life. You might only technically work a nine-hour day, but you likely take work home with you in some form or fashion. You likely check and respond to your work email and phone messages after work hours. You likely plan your next work day activities – maybe even something as trivial as what you plan to wear to work the next day – after work hours. If you are able to take a vacation or holiday, you likely spend the early and late parts of those work breaks thinking about work issues – what you are leaving and what you will return to. Outside of familial or close personal relationships, your work is central to not just your daily life but also to who you are as a person.

An entire field of academic and practitioner study explores the boundaries between your work and the other parts of your life. The boundary between work and home or family is relatively permeable. That is, few people can entirely compartmentalize work and home or family. When a negative event occurs at your job, you likely have difficulty containing the negative spillover to just your work. Similarly, when something negative occurs in your home or family life, you likely have difficulty containing the negativity to just your home or family life. Yes, sometimes work or home or family can act as a respite or getaway to events occurring in the other aspects of your life, but, generally speaking, your work and home or family lives often and easily spillover into the other domains of your life. When spillover does occur, either positive or negative, it affects both domains. Divorce has been known to affect work to the point where job change or loss occurs. Alternatively, work stress often follows an employee home. Burnout – the psychological state of emotional exhaustion, withdrawal, and reduced self-efficacy – has been known to significantly disrupt home and family relationships. All of this again speaks to the centrality of work to who we are as humans.

The meaning work provides you is more than just how happy you are at work with what you do or how your company treats you. It is true that job satisfaction and organizational commitment strongly predict whether or not you will choose to remain or leave your employer.⁴ Work can provide a sense of fulfillment to someone. Accomplishing work and career goals makes one feel not only elated in the short term but also pride in the long term. Work also can provide a creative outlet for humans. While many might associate creativity with the arts, creativity and the application of creativity to useful and implementable ends – known as innovation – occurs in all facets of one's life. Solving a challenging problem at work requires creativity. Developing new ideas, processes, and products requires creativity and innovation. As we solve problems and create new ideas, processes, and products, we experience joy. It makes us feel better about who we are as people, not just in a domain or job function-specific way that self-efficacy describes but also in a global sense of how happy we are with ourselves – what we know as self-esteem. The joy we feel and the positive state of mind that it creates then makes us potentially more creative. That is, a virtuous, reinforcing progression forms where our creativity creates job and positive affect, which opens and expands our thinking so that we become more creative.⁵ From this perspective, work-enabled problem-solving, creativity, and innovation provide the fuel for entrepreneurship and new venture creation. That is, the meaningfulness we experience through work ultimately leads to larger societal structures that provide social and material resources to others in a society.

If work provides a sense of self, enables rich social interactions, provides opportunities to fulfill needs and wants, fuels creativity and innovation, and is deeply ingrained in the human experience through evolution and even religion, what happens when work potentially goes away? We might already have a sense of what it can do to individuals, as people do not work forever and retire from their jobs and careers. Removing work from one's life leads to increases in physical and mental health troubles, including increased reports of malaise and depression.⁶

Predictably, the loss of work makes one feel less positive about one's self. As previously discussed, the feeling of loss, or even the threat of loss, of one of the core dimensions of a person’s self can be distressing. The threat of loss explains why someone might feel apprehension about retiring, and that apprehension will have the same effect on one's overall well-being as does the actual loss of part of one's core self-dimensions. Loss or the threat of loss of what one values – from material resources to emotional resources to status or esteem resources – creates stress. When that stress is unmitigated, it leads to emotional exhaustion, depersonalization or withdrawal, and reduced self-efficacy and performance. These are the core dimensions of burnout. At the extreme end of burnout are issues like depression. Chronic burnout has been linked to ruinous health outcomes – weight gain, heart attack, pneumonia, self-harm – as well as the destruction of social relationships. So, this is the paradox facing retirees and likely larger segments of a workforce that gets displaced by automation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning: As one depersonalizes and withdraws from relationships, it is the social relationships that will buffer the effects of burnout. Moreover, as previously mentioned, one's sense of self can expand or collapse based up...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• About the Authors
• Preface
• 1 The Evolution of Humans and Their Work
• 2 The Importance of Work to Societies
• 3 The Current and Future States of Automation, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning
• 4 The Current State of HRM with Automation, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning
• 5 Near-term Human Resources Challenges in the Age of Automation, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning
• 6 The Next Generation
• 7 A Century of Stress Headed into the Next Century
• 8 Serving Multiple Segments of the Population
• 9 The Uneven Spread of the Fourth Industrial Revolution
• 10 A Technology-Enabled Future Renaissance?
• Notes
• Index