At one point, many companies made Human Resources and Information Technology departments report to the same leadership matrix. This smart play takes advantage of each sector’s distinct expertise. Their aim is to increase organizational nimbleness and effectiveness. Leading this trend are firms like Moderna and Covisian, which have recognized the need for integrated leadership to navigate the complexities of modern workplace requirements.
Tracey Franklin, Chief People and Digital Technology Officer at Moderna, has been leading this effort from the cutting edge. Franklin manages a diverse staff of over 5,000 employees. She fervently advocates for offering them better tools that allow them to adjust to an evolving work landscape. “We’re saying, ‘here are the tools to rewrite how work gets done,’” she states. Moderna’s strategic collaboration with OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, should raise eyebrows. In the name of transparency, to prove it’s eating its own medicine and embracing productivity enhancing technology, the company has trained all 100 employees to deploy AI technologies.
In the same way, Bianca Zwart, Chief Strategy Officer at online bank Bunq, points out advantages of combining the departments of HR and IT. At Bunq, Product and Tech are united in their goal. They expect to have 90% of their operations automated by the end of 2025. Despite this bold ambition, Zwart claims that even now the company has avoided laying off employees as they still plan to hire new staff on net. “In any company, people need to understand that they need to work in a completely different way moving forward,” she explains.
The trend towards consolidating these departments is not purely anecdotal. A recent survey conducted by Nexthink revealed that 64% of senior IT decision-makers at large companies anticipate a convergence of HR and IT functions within five years. David D’Souza, Director of Profession at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), would agree, citing the important complementary skillsets of HR and IT professionals. As he explains, the overlap between them is quite small. He states, “Complex people issues require an understanding of organisational and situational factors, different from the specialist expertise required in IT.” In this context, he is calling the merger “like a natural merger.”
Fabio Sattolo, Covisian’s Chief People and Technology Officer, made a daring move like this one in April 2023. To further promote collaboration, he brought his company’s HR and IT teams together into a single group. Covisian has about 27,000 employees, mostly working in call centers for different customers. Sattolo explains how this merger has facilitated smoother operations: “Making people speak the same language was the hardest part because IT and HR people are really different.” He remembers times he had to play referee in negotiations, working to bring the two departments together to help everybody stay aligned.
This merger of these two functions is a huge and amazing opportunity. Finally, it encourages a more nimble organizational design, better able to react rapidly to shifts in technology and the workforce. Franklin stresses that the leader heading up such a merged function does not have to be an expert in both worlds. Instead, member boards’ attention should be on establishing leadership, creating a clear vision, and developing a culture of shared governance. “What they have to do is set direction, provide vision, do capital allocation, remove obstacles, set culture, and do employee engagement,” she notes.
Additionally, Franklin opines that the better we understand how technology will augment, replace or transform human skills, the better prepared we’ll be for future success. “It’s about how work flows through the organization and what should be done with technology – whether that’s hardware or software or AI – and where you complement human skills around that,” she adds.
With this new, integrated approach, organizations can help their employees become more self-sufficient. Covisian’s aim, as they put it, is to enable their team of more than 700 agents to create their own automation and AI workflows. Sattolo remarks on how this initiative allows team members to become adept in both HR and IT domains: “We’re talking about developing people on one side and developing IT on the other.”
As organizations explore this brave new world of integrating HR and IT departments, there are roadblocks to overcome. Managing the competing cultures of these two professional worlds won’t be easy. Sattolo likens his role to that of a judge who helps facilitate negotiations between these diverse teams: “It’s like a judge who makes them negotiate to find the proper solution.”