HR is at a crossroads. The rapid pace of change, shifting employee expectations, and technological disruption have rendered traditional approaches ineffective. After years of being viewed as the department of policy and paperwork, HR must now become more agile, personalized, and human-centered to meet the challenges of the modern workplace.
So, how can HR and talent teams adapt to a world where change is constant, collaboration crosses boundaries, and employees demand relevance and impact from their work experiences? What practical strategies can HR leaders adopt to build practices that are genuinely fit for the future?
My guest this week is Lucy Adams, CEO of Disruptive HR. A self-described “recovering HR director,” Lucy has firsthand experience of what holds HR back—and how to break free from outdated thinking. She shares her vision for transforming HR by moving away from paternalistic policies and embracing a more modern, adult-to-adult relationship with employees. Lucy also reveals practical ways HR can harness continuous learning and AI-driven insights to foster agility, collaboration, and innovation to ensure that HR is an effective force in shaping organizational success.
In the interview, we discuss:
• Making HR more relevant and impactful
• Agility, productivity, collaboration, and innovation
• Principles rather than policies
• The personalization of the employee experience
• Human-centered design
• How do organizations need to think differently about talent?
• Changing the structure of the talent function
• Talent Scouts and Career Agents
• Marketing, consulting, and technology
• What new skills are needed?
• What does the future look like?
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Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:01:35]:
Hi there. Welcome to episode 667 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. HR is at a crossroads. The rapid pace of change, shifting employee expectations and technological disruption have rendered traditional approaches ineffective. After years of being viewed as the department of Policy and paperwork, HR must now become more agile, personalised and human centered to meet the challenges of the modern workplace. So how can HR and talent teams adapt to a world where change is constant, collaboration crosses boundaries and employees demand ever more from their work experiences? What practical strategies can HR leaders adopt to build practices that are genuinely fit for the future? My guest this week is Lucy Adams, CEO of Disruptive hr. A self described recovering HR director, Lucy has first hand experience of what holds HR back and how to break free from outdated thinking. She shares her vision for transforming HR by moving away from paternalistic policies and embracing a more modern adult to adult relationship with employees. Lucy also reveals practical ways HR can harness continuous learning and AI driven insights to foster agility, collaboration and innovation to ensure that HR is an effective force in shaping organizational success. Hi Lucy and welcome to the podcast.
Lucy Adams [00:03:16]:
Hi Matt, lovely to be here.
Matt Alder [00:03:18]:
Well, it’s an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Lucy Adams [00:03:24]:
Yeah, sure. So, Lucy Adams. I kind of describe myself as a recovering HR director. I was an HR director for more years than I care to think. And in some fairly large organizations, and the ones that your listener will have probably have heard of, was I was HR director at the BBC for a period of time. And. And it was really during my time as an HR director that I. My frustrations with my own profession got to a point where I felt I had to do something about it. And so that’s where disruptive HR comes from, which is the organization I lead now and which I have been leading. It’ll be 10 years next year, which we’re really excited about. And we’ve got a kind of basic mission around just changing people practices for good to make them much more relevant and impactful in the world that we’re in. You know, when I was an HR director, I kind of was, you know, all. Particularly at the BBC, you can imagine the changes that were going on there. And there was I still doing HR pretty much as I’d been doing it in the 1990s. And so. So disruptive HR is an organization. We just work with HR professionals and leaders directly to help them think differently about how they lead, engage, develop their people, but also to provide them with very practical ways of doing it.
Matt Alder [00:04:45]:
If we’re talking about disruption, I don’t think. I certainly can’t think of a more disruptive time than the last few years that we’ve been living through. And it just continues to kind of sort of accelerate a pace here. From your perspective, what are the forces that you’re seeing driving the change we’ve got at the moment in HR and talent? And I suppose reflecting back to what you said just then, how does current thinking need to change to deal with the world as it is at the moment and how it’s likely to be in the future?
Lucy Adams [00:05:13]:
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, that the forces that are driving change, you know, I’m kind of not a futures expert, but I think, you know, everybody would recognize that most organizations are impacted by the same kind of things, whether it be digital disruption, changing employee expectations, changes in the social demographics, just the sheer pace of change. I think that just. And it’s no longer the kind of change where we could have a nice neat Gantt chart with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and it would all be nicely wrapped up in a year or two years. It’s dealing with competing changes. Whenever I’m sort of speaking to leaders of businesses, it’s just huge changes that they’re facing as an organization, but also the pace of it. And most organizations that I meet are really trying to wrestle with four things. They’re trying to be more agile, to be able to cope with the pace of change and respond to changing customer expectations. They’re trying to be more productive and just achieve more for less. Whether that’s because of financial struggles or whether just because the financial volatility that we experience now means that that efficiency, that productivity needs to be a continual driver. Collaboration is the third one that need to reflect the fact that departmental or geographical boundaries just don’t make the same sense that they once did. And so the ability to work across those boundaries to collaborate effectively with different parts of the organization. And then the final one is innovation. The need to either create new markets, fend off competitors for market share, and just kind of continually stay ahead of the competition. So those changes and those need to be more agile, productive, collaborative and innovative are really creating a challenge for HR and talent teams in that doing things in the same ways don’t make as much sense. Maybe they never made a huge amount of sense, but they certainly don’t have the impact that they want them to now. And so we talk about disruptive hr, a kind of framework to summarize how that thinking needs to change. And it’s called the each Framework. So if you’ll indulge me just for a minute or so, I’ll just give you a little bit of background on that. So it stands really for the kind of key trends that we’re seeing in HR and talent around. And it stands for employees as adults, consumers and human beings. And the reason we like it is that our clients can remember it. But it also provides a useful and fairly neat overarching summary of how we need to think differently and behave differently. So do you want me to break that down for you a little bit or is it clear?
Matt Alder [00:08:21]:
Yes, please give us a bit of a breakdown of what that means.
Lucy Adams [00:08:24]:
Okay, so employees, adults is really this idea that most organizations, and therefore most talent and HR teams, operate in quite a parental way. So we have the caring parent where we try and do stuff for them. You know, I mean, I can remember people at the BBC, very senior people, saying to me, you know, what’s next for me in my career? As if somehow the organization was going to look after them and produce these nice, neat career ladders for them. Or we have the critical parenting, which is where HR tries to design our approach around the rogue minority, the people who are going to behave badly, the very small percentage of people that we can’t trust. And yet we design around that lowest Common denominator. So adults, employees as adults is recognizing that if we want a workforce, an employee base that are prepared to innovate, who are prepared to embrace new things, who are prepared to challenge the status quo, then we need to create an environment where they feel more comfortable to do that, where they feel that they have the autonomy to embrace change, to try new things. And so to create that autonomous environment, that empowering environment, we have to move away from the parenting and to be much more adult to adult. So in an HR talent context, that looks like moving away from detailed policies to lighter touch principles. So for example, instead of having a detailed dress code about you can wear flip flops or you can’t wear jeans with a rip in them, it’s about dress for your day, it’s about this sense, look, you’re a grown up, you know what’s right for you, you know really how to make the right decisions. So starting from a position of trust, treating people as adults adult is about employees own and driving their own careers rather than it being done for them or done to them. It’s around treating leaders as grown ups in terms of some of their talent and people decisions. So the first one is adult, the second one is around treating people as consumers. And I’m sure we can pick this up later on in relation to talent and personalization of talent approaches because you know, one size fits all was always, always felt to me as an HR director to be a good thing. It was scalable, it was monitorable, it was more cost effective. But of course we know that A, there are employees are no longer interested in one size fits all because it’s actually what about me? I want it relevant for me. But also if we as an HR team want to have impact, then it has to be personalized. So I think this is one of the biggest challenges HR faces is how do we ensure fairness, how do we make sure we’re not inflating costs and complexity too far, but at the same time providing a personalized experience. And then the third piece is around human and this is really a kind of rejection of many of those 1990s processes that many HR professionals have had to endure or have been guilty of promoting. So in relation to talent management, performance management, L and D, really moving away from some of those and instead being much more interested in human centric design and really designing around how human beings actually think, feel, behave, learn, are intrinsically motivated and so on. So that’s really I suppose our manifesto for change in terms of how HR can think differently. But Also how they can do things in very, very different ways that help build our credibility, help actually drive change in the way that we need and that create an environment where our people can be more agile, productive, collaborative and innovative.
Matt Alder [00:12:27]:
That makes a huge amount of sense, I suppose, digging into some of the specifics around this. So one of the big themes that we’ve had on the podcast this year has been talking about skills, for example. So skills going out of date very, very quickly, you know, really sort of challenging the way that we thought about careers, the way that we think about how we get skills in our business and massively impacting things like talent acquisition and you know, talent management. You sort of talked about how HR needs to think differently about itself, but how do organizations need to think differently about talent as a whole?
Lucy Adams [00:13:02]:
Yeah, I mean there are so many things here, it’s such a massive topic. But I’ll, I’ll kind of call out, I suppose, three areas that I see. Talent teams, talent acquisition teams, HR teams generally having to rethink how they approach the issue of skills. And the first one I suppose would be, we used to call it lifelong learning, continuous learning. But I think most people recognize now it’s this idea that learning isn’t something that we do when we go onto a training program and that kind of old fashioned thinking where we would do a training needs analysis at the start of the year, the HR team or the L and D team would put on training programs, contract without external providers and everything would just take so long. We would put people onto training programs away from their day job where they would be one size fits all training programs, 80% of which they would forget, not because they’re stupid, but because they’re human. And that’s what the human brain does. So instead of this very unagile, one size fits all year long planned learning and development, we’re seeing this idea of learning being something that is done every day. So I think it’s. Schneider Electric has a mantra which is what will you learn today? And it’s this kind of culture of continuous learning, but also then the ability to access learning in ways that are much more appropriate for a busy place of employment. So bite size, I love, I think it’s telefonica, have learning shots. So instead of a shot of tequila, their learning is packaged up into these small shots of like, you know, three minute videos, toolkits, mobile based. So you can learn from anywhere. I think Cisco has that as their kind of learning tagline. You can from anywhere. So it’s this idea, this Complete shift. It’s also democratization of that continuous learning. It’s no longer something where you’re nominated to go on to, but there is this kind of open access. And the role that talent play becomes much more around helping people navigate what’s available, providing technology to enable personalized development plans for them to own and drive themselves, tailored to the skills gaps that have been identified. So I think that kind of continuous curiosity, recognizing that learning doesn’t happen in a classroom, but it’s happening all around us. And HR’s role changing from being a function that puts on training programs to instead helps people navigate and find the learning choices that are right for them. I think the second area in which we need to rethink our approach to skills is around the flexible working models that are becoming much more dominant now and much more prevalent, rather than certainly when I started out in hr. I mean, if you wanted to have a job on the side or you want to, you had extracurricular activity that you wanted to engage in, you kind of had to ask for permission, had to fill out a form because it was seen as being almost. And you were being negligent of your day job. Whereas actually the ability to be much more inclusive around side hustles, as they’re known, you know, these kind of, you know, side gigs, the ability to not just focus on one employer, but to have a range of fractional working as part of that workforce strategy. I love what HubSpot do. So you’re probably familiar with them. They’re a CRM provider, but they have something which is about pursue your side hustle. And they say, this isn’t just something that we permit, but we positively support and embrace. We’ll provide you with potentially some investment for your side hustle. We’ll definitely support you. We’ll create groups where you can come together with other employees who have also got side hustles going on, because they see that the side skills and capabilities that people are developing in these alternative flexible work models are of huge benefit to the organization, not just in terms of skills development, but also retention. I remember talking to someone at Warner Music and they were saying that they had a lot of people who were doing DJing on the side or setting up their own small record label. And the typical response would be, well, you can’t do that here. And so people would leave. And of course, instead what they’re saying is, we welcome that. We’ll give you the flexibility to pursue this side hustle. And of course, the insights into new music talent were then coming back and staying within the organization and they weren’t losing great people. So I think that kind of being much more open, much more inclusive around a range of different types of work would be the sort of second key area where I see HR teams having to think differently about skills and different types of work. And then I think the third one would be a technology driven one. Again, it’s all about how we can use technology and AI, particularly to think about talent, the talent marketplace. So instead of it being purely about applying for a job internally, it becomes insight driven. So helping employees understand how they can arrive at their chosen career path, recommending learning certifications, but also connecting employees with relevant projects and gigs, matching them to potential mentors who can help them with their talent, the course of their talent management and their career development that they’ve chosen. And there’s loads of great AI out there. I mean, gloat is one that stands out. And organizations like Standard Chartered, for example, are using gloat. And it’s about growing your career in a way that’s accessible to everybody. So it’s employee driven. You know, no one’s going to care about your career as much as you do. So instead of poor time, poor managers feeling, oh my God, I’ve got to have a career conversation with all my team, it becomes actually you’re empowering the individual to drive and own that for themselves and creating more talent mobility as a result. So I think those are the three key areas. This continuous learning, flexible working models, but also technology driven talent management. Employee owned in talent management is possibly a better way of putting it.
Matt Alder [00:20:17]:
And I think, and you’ve touched on this a little bit already, but the move to these kind of strategies is really kind of making it clear that the old delineations within HR of talent management, L and D, you know, talent acquisition, you know, they’re kind of perhaps no longer relevant. You kind of see those, those silos coming closer together. I mean, do you think we need to break down those silos? What’s going on out there? What do you think the future looks like in terms of structure for hr?
Lucy Adams [00:21:17]:
Oh, absolutely. I mean, I couldn’t agree more, Matt. I think those, these divisions that we’ve created are no longer helpful to us because the idea that talent acquisition only focus on getting external people in learning and development, only focus on training people up, and talent management only focus on internal mobility when it’s all part of the same pie, isn’t it? You know, I mean, I think that, you know, there’s so many benefits to both HR professionals, but also for the business in breaking down those silos and beginning to combine them. And we’re seeing this happening already. You know, if you just think about the benefits to hr, it’s, you know, the greater skills development there is, you’re saving time and money, you’ve got better use of data because you’re sharing it. I mean, I was talking to one client who was saying that it was easy, easier to get a job externally than it was to get a promotion. You know, this is often the way people feel that internally that talent mobility is not clear to them, whereas actually it’s just easier to go and apply and get another job. A huge loss of talent. So it’s definitely happening. Just some examples, let me think T mobile. So they’ve changed the structure of their HR team. So instead of a talent acquisition team, they have what’s called a talent scout. And this is the traditional recruitment team. But their job is about finding internal talent just as much as external. They have what they call career agents and this is around developing employees into future leaders and creating internal mobility. We’re seeing companies like Global Logic, so they’ve integrated talent acquisition and L and D. So they’re not just hiring great people and then thinking my job here is done, they’re also helping them grow and adapt. Cisco do something similar, cross functional HR teams hiring and training, working together and then using this data that they’re getting from these combined functions to predict future skill needs and develop talent from within. So it is definitely happening. And I think it actually, if we get over ourselves and you know, not worry to not be too precious about the fact that our unique focus is being diluted. I think actually it’s a fantastic opportunity for people in HR to have much greater breadth and be much more employable as a result and much more enjoyable in a way because you’re really contributing to the employee experience in a much broader way.
Matt Alder [00:24:21]:
Such an interesting time. Part of that is this huge acceleration and development of AI and it’s sort of cropping up in everything that we do. What’s your perspective on it at the moment? You know, what are you seeing? What might it be changing? What could the impact be?
Lucy Adams [00:24:37]:
Well, I think the, I mean, I’m not an AI expert by any stretch, but certainly the clients that we work with and the research that we do is showing us that we’re seeing it starting to go mainstream. So I think instead of it being the preserve of a few kind of, you know, nerdy guys, usually guys that would get terribly excited about it, it’s actually much more mainstream within HR now and the talent and TA functions. I think that it’s starting now to move away from it being purely about saving time. There was a whole piece around it being about an efficiency drive. It meant that you could shortlist CVs more quickly or it meant that you could get better insights into things. So it was all about sort of time saving, efficiency, removing the transactional elements. And I think what we’re recognizing now is that we can use it to create that. It’s about having, not just about saving time, but genuinely enabling us to be more creative, more impactful. So from, I think, let me try and remember the company who’s doing this, it might be Spotify, but they are creating their job adverts, their social media campaigns, making sure that they’re creating the right messaging and the language to reach, perhaps harder to attract groups of talent, you know, much more creative. We talked about the personalization piece and I think again that’s really helping from personalized onboarding, personalized talent management and career development, personalized learning and development. So I think it’s moving now from being the preserve of a few people that were brave enough to have a go. And it’s moving from being time saving, transaction focused to it being really about adding value, really about creativity and contributing to those four elements that I mentioned at the start. Enabling people to be more agile, productive, collaborative and innovative. You know, it’s really playing a kind of key line role there now.
Matt Alder [00:26:56]:
No, absolutely. And I suppose the next question, you know, we talked about skills, we talked about people, things changing, we’ve talked about HR thinking differently, evolving all those, all those kind of things. What new skills do we need in the talent function? You know, what new skills do we need in HR and TA in all these different places to be able to be effective in this, in this kind of rapidly changing situation?
Lucy Adams [00:27:17]:
There’s so many skills and I think sometimes we can, we can feel overwhelmed by it. I was reading somewhere the other day that, you know, true HR professional, they’re are 125 competencies, which just makes me want to go back to bed, to be perfectly honest. You know, the idea that anybody is going to have 125 individual competencies is just a nightmare. I’ll focus on three that we see as being both useful and increasing. I think in terms of the really high value HR functions, I think the first one is around an understanding of marketing. Marketing and talent acquisition in some ways was always ahead of the game here. They know how to sell, they know how to land a message. But I think this is now becoming much broader in the wider HR function. And if you think about it, what marketing are trying to do is exactly the same as what HR is trying to do, albeit for customers. Whereas we’re working with employees, we’re trying to, to change perceptions, we’re trying to change behaviors and we’re trying to increase brand loyalty. And those are exactly the same things that we’re trying to do in hr, albeit that we call it slightly different things. So having an understanding of things like how to segment your employee based using things like employee Persona, how to develop a kind of product mindset and think about human centric design. So I think that product marketing, that understanding about how to genuinely sell and market what we’re doing within the function as opposed to just telling and communicating. So I think those skills are definitely growing. I would also point to consulting capabilities. You know, for so long we’ve been very transactional, We’ve been order takers, you know, we’ve listened to what our leaders and our employees wanted and we went ahead and did it very, you know, efficiently. We were incredibly hard working. I’ve never come across an HR team that wasn’t exhausted and weren’t working really, really hard. But I think that consulting capability, when we have the limited resources that we have to be able to genuinely question about what will be of real value, understanding the markets that we’re providing for and then using that consulting capability to genuinely provide a number of products that will have real impact. And if, then, if our, you know, if our clients aren’t using our products, then rethinking that product rather than making them go on a mandatory training program so that they have to use these products. So, so that much more sort of product marketing consulting approach to genuinely understanding what’s needed by the business, pushing back, but in a way that doesn’t alienate and doesn’t frustrate our clients and providing solutions in a proactive way that will be, that might look very different for different areas of the business. And then I suppose because we’ve talked so much about AI, I have to say that a third and final skill is embracing technology. This isn’t, doesn’t mean we need to be Coders, but I think, you know, we all need to experiment and play with AI and find out exactly what it could do with, do for us. So I think, you know, 2025, if we haven’t, if we haven’t had a play at least with ChatGPT or some of the others, some of the other generative AI providers and I think this is the year we need to start doing it.
Matt Alder [00:31:10]:
I 100% endorse that, that message as a, as a final question. You know, let’s just think forward to the, to the future a little bit. You know, it’s impossible to predict the future accurately, but what do you think the future might look like? What do you hope might happen if we were to have this conversation in a, in a few, again in a few years time, what would we be talking about?
Lucy Adams [00:31:30]:
Yeah, well, I mean, as you say, it’s almost. Not almost, it’s impossible, isn’t it, to predict? I mean, who could have predicted that we would be here three years ago? So I, I’m not going to be brave enough or stupid enough to make predictions, but I suppose what I expect to see is an increase in personalization of the workplace. I think that that is a train that isn’t stopping, that’s not slowing down anytime soon. And I think it’s very exciting because I think it means that HR will increase its relevance, will increase its impact. So I think that personalization piece is definitely some of it tech driven, AI enabled and some of it purely because we are providing better insights to our leaders to enable them to adapt their style. So I think that personalization piece, the second one I suppose is a, is a part, a hope and part prediction. I think people leadership will become, maybe it is just pure optimism, but people leadership will be perceived as more important than it is today. You know, it’s still slow and we’re still seeing people being put into leadership roles who possibly shouldn’t be anywhere near people, but certainly don’t have the appetite for it. I was talking to someone from Google the other day and they were talking about their alternate career paths and the, you know, a genuine question that comes up if you’re a single individual contributor and you’re asked, you’re going for a promotion and you’re asked the question, you know, how do you feel about managing people? If their response is not just negative, but even hesitant, then they probably don’t get to be a leader. So I think that, you know, and I think HR being much more forceful around this matters and having Pulse survey metrics about how people feel about being led by that person. I think hopefully we’ll see more teeth around people leadership and then maybe this is just a reaction to the very negative press that we seem to have been getting recently. As a function. I think it will change. Ultimately. I think we seem to be everybody’s kind of whipping boy at the moment, but I think that we will see a change because HR is changing and changing for the better. And so I think that, you know, maybe it’s going to take longer than three years, I don’t know. But I think certainly the perception of HR will change.
Matt Alder [00:34:17]:
Lucy, thank you very much for talking to me.
Lucy Adams [00:34:20]:
It’s been a pleasure, Matt. Thanks for having me.
Matt Alder [00:34:24]:
My thanks to Lucy. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast and get the inside track on everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
