Inside SHRM 2022: “Now more than ever, our workforce needs us”

Last week, the annual SHRM conference kicked off in New Orleans to an audience of over 15,000 in-person and virtual attendees. Though the name implies that the conference is held, well, annually, the event convened just eight months after the 2021 conference in Las Vegas wrapped. In a traditional year, there might not be much to say after so little time apart—after all, eight months is less time than it takes some HR departments to create a new benefits offering or draft an ESG report—but as SHRM president Johnny Taylor told attendees in his opening address, “crisis accelerates change.”

There’s been no shortage of crises in the eight months since 9,000 professionals gathered, mostly masked, in Vegas. We’ve seen at least two more waves of Covid-19; a proposed and struck-down federal vaccinate-or-test mandate for large businesses; the nixing of most indoor masking requirements (including at this year’s conference); a mixed bag of RTO strategies; and record-high turnover.

Last year, the theme was simple: “Now more than ever, our workforce needs us.” This year, continued crises have, once again, expanded the mandate for HR. Expectations have shifted from responding to change to SHRM’s 2022 theme: “cause the effect.”

“Now having endured a slew of crises, and knowing the next one may be just around the corner, we now feel the deep-seated urgency to drive change rather than be driven by it, not just to endure, but to flourish,” Taylor said in his keynote. Failure to rise to this moment could, in his opinion, lead to “vulnerability, insecurity, and, itself, crisis.”

One of the “crises” Taylor highlighted in his opening remarks, which came up repeatedly during the conference, had to do with organizational culture: how can leaders use moments of crisis to change and create culture? What attendees heard from a variety of speakers was that while the challenges to building culture may be new, the strategies to develop their organization are rooted in the basics of HR.

What’s at stake? Karl J. Ahlrichs, employee benefits senior consultant at Gregory & Appel Insurance, told HR Brew in an interview that, to him, workplace culture is about “how we do things around here.”

In Ahlrichs’s experience, employees often learn company culture similarly to how children learn to behave: “they watch [their] parents,” the company’s leaders, for signals about what it means to be an employee at that company. When companies switched to remote work and had to learn to communicate over “low-resolution video,” Ahlrichs said it became more difficult to signal those cues. In some cases, Ahlrichs believes, communication challenges caused organizational culture to “drift.”

SHRM released its Strengthening Workplace Culture report last week, which spelled out the potential ramifications of culture drift. According to SHRM’s survey of nearly 9,500 workers from all over the world, 90% of respondents who rated their “culture as poor have thought about quitting.” In contrast, only 32% of workers who rated their organizational culture as good have thought about quitting.

Kris Erickson, director of consulting and partner at Workforce Science Associates, described the impact in dollars and cents. Erickson noted that per an SHRM estimate, the cost of replacing an employee is “between 90% and 200%” of that former employee’s salary.

The way forward. In Taylor’s keynote address, he told the audience that the old way of working is “gone forever.”

“As much as we like to think we can just get back to normal the way things used to be, we can’t. We literally can’t,” Taylor said.

Experts at the conference agreed to an extent. Unlike some CEOs in the news, no participants in the sessions I attended pitched mandating in-office work as the best way to preserve culture. Ahlrichs argued that when it comes to creating culture, a “common mission is more powerful than a common building.” He believes that companies should put their “passion statements, their mission statements, front and center,” be “intentional” about communication, and pay attention to “high performers” before they might begin to think about leaving. This, he said, can help build a corporate culture regardless of where employees physically work.

Each session I attended featured speakers emphasizing that one way to retain workers and maintain culture was to actively listen to their needs and to make them feel valued and seen.

To prove the point, Erickson presented insights gleaned from three years of data studying 402 engagement census survey projects across 284 organizations. The research found an association between flexible work arrangements and higher employee engagement and retention. She attributed the finding not to the actual work location but to what the decision suggested about leadership’s communication with employees.

“People want their voice to be heard, they want to say, because for a long time, more things were being done to employees than for them and with them,” Erickson said. In her opinion, the findings suggest popularity of flexible work arrangements is due, at least in part, to employers asking employees what they want.

It’s true that, as Taylor said, everything is changing on the surface. Who is working, and where they’re working, and how they’re connecting are all evolving. Yet, Alhrichs advised that when faced with new challenges, HR shouldn’t forget the basics.

“Everything is new,” Ahlrichs said. “Old-school still works.”—SV

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