Chief Chat: Jim Link, CHRO at SHRM, on his priorities and experience using AI

CHROs have a lot on their plates, but imagine being the CHRO that also helps more than 330,000 other HR professionals!

Well, that’s exactly what Jim Link, CHRO at SHRM, has been doing since joining the organization over two years ago. Link, who has more than 30 years of experience in corporate HR, met with HR Brew at SXSW to discuss his role, how he uses AI, and SHRM’s civility campaign.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What’s your role at SHRM like?

If you think about impacting the world of work, there’s no higher calling than the world of employment. Helping someone achieve life sustaining income is at the very core and nature of what we do as an organization.

I spend about 50% of my time being a normal CHRO: taking care of the culture, the employees, the leaders, the mission, vision and values of SHRM. But I spend the other 50% of my time taking all of the great content and research and knowledge and capability that SHRM has within its arsenal of tools, and sharing that with anybody who’ll listen to me.

Is there a different type of pressure when you’re answering to members instead of shareholders?

We track net promoter scores (NPS) in the organization every time a member has an interaction with us. We have our knowledge center, where members can call in to seek advice, guidance, counsel, etcetera. And we have an executive team that spends a lot of time helping spread that message in that word in the appropriate venues based on their skill set and capability. So yes, it’s different in some ways, but to me, it’s a good difference.

Workers are using generative AI at a growing rate. How do you personally learn about and experiment with it?

When I first started thinking about artificial intelligence last summer is when I started to play with it. I use my own computer on my own wireless in a safe space. I would ask the AI for advice and guidance on things that I personally already knew the answer to.

So, I grew up on a working family farm and I remember one of the first things I plugged into it was, “What’s a shrub that you can plant in Georgia that deer will not eat?” because I know the answer. I wanted to see if what I got back was comprehensive or if it was flat-out wrong. I very quickly progressed to more complicated things, and as you play with AI, you’ll get better at how you ask the questions.

I can’t tell you the last time I wrote a job description from scratch, because I don’t need to. You go in, prompt correctly for the entity, tweak, and tweak again, and you get something pretty close to a great job description. I think about it from an effectiveness and efficiency capability perspective.

Tell me about the civility campaign that SHRM just launched.

We were hearing anecdotally from our members that they were sensing, feeling, and witnessing incivility occurring more and more in the workplace. We found that two-thirds of the people who responded indicated that they had either witnessed or been involved in an act of incivility in the workplace in the last month! For people who report that they work in an incivil environment, two-thirds were more likely to be dissatisfied with their job, and they were twice as likely to indicate that they would be leaving the organization in a year or less.

So, it’s now a business issue and not an HR issue or a feel good issue. The 1 Million Civil Conversations campaign is designed to address all those things I just described. And we’re tracking this and monitoring it with our civility index. We have resources for people to go in and download tools and check out what we have to say.