Let’s face it—how HR and the businesses serve is increasingly out of sync. Despite years of buzzwords, new initiatives, and endless influencer-driven trends, HR is still struggling to align with what really matters: business outcomes. And let’s be clear: the influencer community in HR is not helping. If anything, they’re making it worse by promoting ideas that sound nice but are disconnected from the reality of what organisations need to succeed.
Take, for example, the rise of wanky job titles. HR influencers love to create new titles—like “Chief Work Officer”—hoping they’ll somehow magically grant HR a seat at the leadership table. But here’s the truth: wanky job titles don’t give you political capital. They don’t align you with the business, and they certainly don’t transform your function into a proactive, performance-enabling, data-backed machine.
The role of the Chief Operating Officer (COO), on the other hand, is crystal clear. The COO is responsible for two critical areas: operational capability and organisational capability. In simple terms, the COO ensures that a business has the right tools to get the work done, and they make sure the workforce can deliver on the company’s goals. That’s it. There’s no magic. No smoke and mirrors. Just the fundamental need to ensure operations run smoothly and the right people are in place to execute the strategy.
When influencers create buzz around titles like “Chief Work Officer,” they’re missing the point. This title, while it may sound cool, does nothing to address the underlying issue: HR doesn’t own the operational tools or the organisational capability of the business. The COO does. HR should be focused on capability growth, competency growth, and skills growth—but instead, it’s being bogged down by overhyped roles and disconnected initiatives that don’t move the needle.
Instead of creating wanky job titles, here are three things HR should be doing to drive value and align with the business:
- Build data capability: HR needs to get serious about data. The ability to track, analyse, and leverage workforce data to make informed decisions is the cornerstone of becoming a true performance enabler. HR should focus on collecting and utilising data on skills, employee performance, and organisational capabilities to drive business outcomes. The more HR understands the workforce, the more it can directly support business needs.
- Find successes: HR should be identifying and showcasing the internal successes that align with the company’s strategic goals. This might mean highlighting high-performing teams, sharing stories of talent development, or mapping out how HR initiatives have contributed to growth. Finding and celebrating these successes builds credibility and shows how HR’s work is tied to business success.
- Move away from long-term problem-solving: HR often gets bogged down in solving long-term, abstract problems that don’t lead to immediate results. Instead, HR should focus on quick wins, tackling short-term challenges that have a tangible impact on the business. Whether it’s improving talent acquisition processes, driving skill development programmes, or addressing urgent capability gaps, HR needs to be agile and responsive to the business’s immediate needs.
HR needs to stop chasing shiny objects or shiny job titles and focus on what matters: aligning with the business. HR isn’t a separate entity or a “cool” title—it’s a function that enables the organisation to perform better. It’s about ensuring the workforce has the skills, capabilities, and support needed to meet business goals. Until HR starts focusing on real outcomes and stops letting influencers drive the conversation with empty buzzwords, it will continue to be disconnected from the very thing it’s supposed to be supporting: the business itself.