SHRM’s Emily Dickens on driving change in the workplace

The Society for HR Management (SHRM) hosted its Annual Conference and Expo, SHRM23, in Las Vegas last week, gathering more than 20,000 professionals from the world of HR to discuss the latest trends, tools, and best practices for HR pros.

HR Brew spoke with SHRM’s chief of staff and head of public affairs, Emily Dickens, to learn more about a wide range of policy and workplace priorities she and SHRM are focused on once the Mojave dust settles.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

There were many workplace changes amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Let’s first talk about how HR can keep moving forward, incorporating what has been learned amid those shifts.

You and I’ve talked before [about] those three major pieces of legislation…in terms of modernizing the laws that govern our workplace. We can’t, 25 years from now, still be asking about paid leave. We can’t, 25 years from now, still be trying to decide how workplace immigration can work for our businesses…and we absolutely can’t be still talking about the same things every few years on overtime payments and independent contractors and gig workers. We’ve got to have some solutions.

We talked in February about those “three big things.” How are you feeling about efforts to address paid leave, immigration, and updating the Fair Labor Standards Act?

There are a couple of bipartisan groups that are meeting about these [issues], and they’re meeting about AI and the meeting about the worker shortage. Congress is taking this seriously...lots of listening sessions, which I think is important…[and] hear[ing] from people like HR professionals. I’ve implored some members of Congress in these bipartisan groups to listen to HR professionals. It’s always great to listen to Big Business, but call the person who has to execute [workplace policies] on the daily.

The business case for some of these reforms makes so much sense to HR leaders, but do you think that there’s movement in Congress?

A lot is possible…Some of the issues we talked about [are]: How can [businesses] get together? We actually floated something related to insurance. If you get an insurance pool that can help cover paid leave, because we know the issue is a lot of small and mid-sized companies would not be able to cover the cost, and they along with a large company—who, by the way, is probably already doing this, because they can afford to—we could really all help the country and help all citizens in a way that we can now provide [paid family leave] at some point.

At the SHRM23 conference, former President Bill Clinton touched on this, supporting paid family leave and figuring out how to accommodate the limited resources of small and mid-sized businesses.

We knew he would be passionate about FMLA, because it was his first piece of legislation… It was really good to hear him say that.

I want to get your thoughts on the future of AI.

[Government] can’t rush to regulate. I say, “rush to educate.” Find as much information as you can about those tools that you think could be helpful in HR.

If you’re gonna try to regulate, let’s have some flexibility. Let’s not try to do mandates, and let’s also say that those who are creating these tools have got to have some accountability…There are HR professionals that want to use the tools so that they can get new talent, because what they were using previously didn’t work. You don’t want them to [not] even want to try [AI] now because [they] can be penalized.

To that end, the EEOC recently issued guidance on workplace discrimination related to AI, what’s your take on that?

We testified at length last year…How can people do a better job in using [AI] to solve the inclusion issues that we see in our work, not perpetuate it, and then where we see software…is not doing [that]...vendors have to be accountable for that as well. This is what we mean [by] everybody being a good actor.