The share of corporate board directors with CHRO experience is growing. And increasingly, the work of HR leaders is intersecting with the concerns of corporate boards.
At least that’s the view of Francis deSouza, a former board member at Disney and the cloud-computing firm Citrix, as well as a co-founder of SynthLabs, which seeks to help companies roll out AI safely at their organizations.
DeSouza described what he sees as a “golden era for HR” at a Sept. 19 event hosted by compliance and payroll startup Deel, which recently elected him to its board.
This new era will be characterized by increasingly global, distributed companies that place a premium on their people, deSouza predicted, meaning more board discussions will revolve around “the ability to keep talent, the ability to access talent from anywhere in the world.”
“I think the percentage of time in board sessions that are led by HR are just going to keep going up,” he added.
RTO in the spotlight. One issue that deSouza sees as a board-level debate is the ongoing discussion around return-to-office, which Amazon revived last week when it announced corporate employees will be expected to work from the office five days a week starting early next year.
Despite the fact that the second-largest private employer in the US is pushing to end most remote work at the organization, deSouza said he believes “the vast majority of companies are actually going to fall in the middle of having to be flexible.”
Some 62% of firms with more than 25,000 employees offer a “structured hybrid” option, meaning they set specific expectations for when workers must be in the office, according to a recent report from Flex Index, which tracks employers’ RTO policies. The report noted, though, that the share of large employers requiring workers to be in the office full-time increased by seven percentage points from Q2 to Q3 2024, to 25%.
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As companies seek to strike the right balance, HR leaders must consider how to manage a team that can be partially remote, monitor productivity, and build culture from afar, deSouza said. Discussions around working arrangements can become divisive, and the debate “places more pressure on HR and is visible to the board,” he added.
People priorities. In recent years, executives have been asked to weigh in on issues that directly affect their talent, from compensation packages to DE&I to the cost of layoffs. At the same time, the share of directors with CHRO experience serving on boards of Russell 3000 companies has grown, from 0.8% in 2021 to 1.1% in 2023, according to tracking by executive intelligence firm Equilar.
While the share of new directors with CHRO credentials did decline in 2023, “it’s clear that companies still value the presence of HR leaders in the boardroom to some degree,” Amit Batish, Equilar’s senior director of content, wrote in a blog post about the analysis. “The overall increase in the percentage of Russell 3000 directors with CHRO experience suggests that, even amidst economic shifts and a reevaluation of human capital initiatives, the expertise of HR leaders remains critical to shaping the future of public companies,” he wrote.