A lot - and they are all harder
If HR was once about compliance, culture and compensation, in 2025 it runs the full alphabetical gamut from AI to zero growth.
Traditional models and metrics no longer apply. Regulatory, social, cultural and technological changes have transformed what were distinct tasks into a complex matrix of strategy, business transformation, employee satisfaction, legal and safety risks and, somewhere in there, day to day operations.
A recent global survey by Korn Ferry found a major shift in strategic priorities for CHROs and that their remit was wider than ever.
CHROs reported they now spent 33% of their time advising CEOs and leadership teams, 30% leading company-wide transformation, 22% managing HR functions and 15% managing people-related issues.
The survey of 750 senior HR Leaders, including 450 CHROs, found that since 2023 growth and market expansion had increased as a strategic priority by 25 percentage points followed by risk and reputation, up 25 percentage points, and AI and technology was up 10 percentage points.
Growth and market expansion was the top strategic business priority, followed by cost efficiency and productivity, and transformation.
“This highlights the challenge HR leaders face trying to balance the need for immediate operational efficiency with long-term growth,” the report said.
Senior Lecturer Dr Andreas Pekarek (pictured above) from the School of Management and Marketing at the University of Melbourne said HR leaders have always had to handle tough issues and juggle competing demands and complexity.
“I think what's different now is that there's more complex issues happening simultaneously,” he said. “Change has always been there but it’s more varied, more intense and faster.
Pekarek said HR leaders were dealing with greater and more diverse expectations from employees, boards and CEOs.
And compounding all of this is technological change, including the use of AI in hiring, the growth of analytics and data in workforce decision making, and collaboration and communication tools.
“It requires new skills of HR leaders and new capabilities, but also it introduces new expectations about how HR leaders do things, how well they do things, but also new risks come with that,” Pekarek said.
He said HR leaders were having to manage issues that were not strictly HR issues, but business issues that cut across functions.
“For HR there's greater scope, but also greater expectations around integrating and orchestrating across those functions,” he said.
HR leaders were now expected to have business acumen, tech fluency, data literacy, ethical reasoning, political intelligence and change management skills.
“Leaders need to be able to work with data, interpret data, predict risk, to complement their decision making around HR strategies and approaches,” he said.
“There is a requirement on HR to have a more diverse and sophisticated skill set.
All of this is putting more pressure on CHROs, a role Pekarek says can be a “lonely” position.
“HR leaders are under greater pressure and they're no different to other employees in the sense there are challenges like burn out," he said.
“It is perhaps ironic but HR leaders are central to managing workforce wellbeing but there is a risk they neglect their own wellbeing in the process. There is an emotional load, a cognitive load with that comes with managing this complexity.”
Research suggests this may be having an impact, with the most recent Global CHRO Turnover Index from Russell Reynolds showing average tenure for departing CHROs has dropped to 4.1 years.
Angela Weber (pictured above), a partner in the employee relations and safety team at King & Wood Mallesons said it is becoming more complex and technically demanding to be an HR leader in an Australian workplace, particularly for leaders who operate in an environment where they do not have in-house specialists in different HR disciplines.
“Two things are making it especially challenging - the general complexity in the employment legal landscape and then the amount of change that we've had in the last 18 months to two years,” she said.
“The extent of change and the pace of change have made it very challenging to be an HR leader in an organisation today.”
Weber said one example of this complexity was managing an employee dispute or complaint within the workplace that was not an external litigation matter.
“To do that effectively does require quite a bit of technical knowledge but also experience across a breadth of legislative obligations and case law. It is not sufficient to have a familiarity with the basics of the Fair Work Act and what is required to mitigate the risk of an unfair dismissal claim," she said.
“You also need someone who is able to understand and identify risks under, for example, anti-discrimination law, the whistleblower protections under the Corporations Act and, increasingly, work health and safety law. More than ever the domains of safety law and employment law have become overlapping areas.”
Another issue for HR leaders can be understanding the consultation obligation requirements that can arise during change management or organisational change in workplaces and the effective management of safety risks.
“There are quite complex questions around how, in the context of change, consultation obligations under an industrial instrument might interact with obligations under work health and safety laws.
“They are not the same. They are not triggered by the same set of circumstances and so it really does place a big ask on HR leaders to draw together the different disciplines within the organisation to make sure that risk is being managed holistically,” she said.
Weber said HR leaders need to see themselves as being in a continuous cycle of professional development to ensure they are advising with the latest legal understanding.
“It’s really making sure you don’t have blind spots in the range of risks that you are called upon to manage as an HR leader,” Weber said.
