Dive Brief:
- HR staffers are overworked, SHRM’s recently released 2025 State of the Workplace report showed: 62% of professionals said they’d been working beyond their capacity last year and 57% said their department was understaffed.
- Still, more than half of HR professionals and 70% of HR execs said that HR function strategy and management was “effective or very effective” last year.
- Meanwhile, only 41% of employees felt HR had been “effective or very effective” last year. SHRM noted this was predictable given workers’ “limited insight into the internal operations of the HR function.”
Dive Insight:
Unsurprisingly, the HR teams that described themselves as understaffed were less likely to say they were effective, compared to those who didn’t describe themselves as understaffed: 66% vs. 76%, respectively.
While SHRM called for better HR staffing, it noted the dearth of adequate staffing could provide “a promising opportunity for 2025” — which is AI. Polling showed that AI was top of mind for HR, according to SHRM.
Some cited the technology as a means to take “some of the burden off our manual practices,” to automate practices and to make their workloads more efficient.
While previous reports have noted that AI skills are covetable, some talent experts are sharing data that suggests employers are feeding an untenable hiring boom for AI talent.
No matter how one slices it, some states are cracking down from a regulatory standpoint to streamline how AI is handled at work. One California politician introduced the “No Robo Bosses Act” this month to mandate human oversight of AI at work.