Gartner HR Symposium/Xpo, North America: Day 1 Highlights

We are bringing you news and highlights from the Gartner HR Symposium/Xpo taking place today through Wednesday, October 29 in Orlando, FL. Below is a collection of the key announcements and insights coming out of the conference. 

On Day 1 from the conference, we are highlighting the Opening Keynote, how to engage the workforce through disruption, developing HR digital dexterity to drive organizational success and AI’s impact on organization design.

Be sure to check this page throughout the day for updates.

• Gartner Says CHROs Must Become an Enterprise Leader of How Work Should Change in the AI Era

Presented by Harsh Kundulli, Vice President Analyst, Gartner, and Katie Sutherland, Director, Advisory, Gartner

CEOs plan to fuel the next wave of growth by taking costs out of the business, reinvesting in growth areas, and capitalizing on AI. In the opening keynote, Harsh Kundulli, Vice President Analyst at Gartner, and Katie Sutherland, Director, Advisory at Gartner, explored how HR can become a leader of transforming how work gets done across the enterprise by expanding from its traditional focus on the workforce to how work itself must change.

• “Despite increased investment in AI, Gartner data shows only one-in-three AI initiatives boosts productivity, one-in-five delivers measurable ROI, and just one-in-50 delivers disruptive value.”
• “To build an organization fit for the AI era, CHROs need to shift their focus from the workforce to the work.”
• “Work is changing in three ways:
  • Augment: Make existing work better
  • Reengineer: Redesign workflows and functions
  • Invent: Create new AI-based ways of working”
• “HR has a huge piece in all three work changes:
  • HR’s role in augmenting work is to help the organization get to value faster by being more directive and guiding AI adoption.
  • For reengineering work, HR can ensure redesigns happen responsibly, by getting ahead of talent and organizational ripple effects.
  • To help their organization safely move into inventing new ways of working, HR should focus the conversation on timing, bridging the gap between now and the future.”

Journalists can receive additional information and/or request an interview with the Gartner expert by contacting Gerri Weinberger at gerri.weinberger@gartner.com. 

Presented by Rachael Dix, Director, Advisory, Gartner

Employees are experiencing disruptive change daily, and HR leaders fear engagement will be negatively impacted. In this session, Rachael Dix, Director, Advisory at Gartner, shared tactics to proactively connect employees to leaders, to work, and to one another to lay solid foundations for engagement as change inevitably continues.

• “A high-change environment cuts the likelihood that an employee will be highly engaged almost in half, compared to an average change environment.”
• “71% of highly-disengaged employees are not actively looking for another job.”
• “82% of CHROs have cited employee disengagement as a barrier to growth and performance.”
• “Highly engaged employees are five times more likely to be high performers when compared to those with lower engagement.”
• “The three core connections to support employee engagement through disruption are:
  • Connect to leaders to build trust: Provide clear and contextualized communications on strategic direction and encourage leader visibility and dialogue. Connect to work to build control: Reprioritize goals to drive clarity and team accountability and empower employees to identify and solve productivity problems.
  • Connect to peers to build support: Help employees identify their unique connection needs and establish varied peer connection opportunities.

Journalists can receive additional information and/or request an interview with the Gartner expert by contacting Gerri Weinberger at gerri.weinberger@gartner.com. 

Presented by Stephanie Clement, Senior Director Analyst, Gartner

Many HR teams struggle to support business leaders in AI and digital transformations because they lack digital dexterity. In this session, Stephanie Clement, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner, explained how CHROs can develop their team's digital dexterity in order to support the broader enterprise.

• “77% of CEOs expect AI to significantly reshape their industries within three years.”
• “When it comes to AI initiatives, the impact on people isn’t always front and center; only 21% of CIOs prioritize the impact of AI on employees’ work.”
• “To lead, influence, and drive organizational success for AI initiatives, HR leaders must employ digital dexterity – the ability and ambition to understand technology innovations and guide their use to solve talent challenges and drive business results.”
• “However, 86% of HR leaders don’t consider digital dexterity to be one of their greatest strengths.”
• “To build digital dexterity, CHROs should follow a simple three-part model:
  • Learn: Build knowledge and AI literacy by defining HR personas and mapping them to essential components of AI literacy to ‘right size’ their learning.
  • Expand: Deepen capability and readiness by understanding AI’s impact on the workforce through conducting targeted assessments to understand the effect on roles and workflows.
  • Apply: Embed HR into real transformation work by leading projects and/or forming fusion teams and driving results.”

Journalists can receive additional information and/or request an interview with the Gartner expert by contacting Gerri Weinberger at gerri.weinberger@gartner.com. 

Presented by Cian O Morain, Senior Director, Research, Gartner

Today, organization designs are built around human decision-making processes; but the rapid adoption of GenAI into work means we are entering an era of blended human-AI decision making. In this session, Cian O Morain, Senior Director, Research at Gartner, explored how AI will impact models for organization design and what the implications are for HR leaders’ talent strategy.

• “Organization design serves three functions:
  • It decides what work people do
  • It steers how decisions get made
  • It drives how teams work together”

• “In today’s digital era, leaders were promised the agile organization, but have gotten the matrixed organization: 53% of workers require at least three layers of formal signoff to ensure their work is aligned across siloes.”

• “In the AI era, organizations need to shift their organization design in three ways:
  • Role Design: Shift from designing roles to build specialists, to designing versatilist roles where talent conduct generative/agentic AI to deliver value across broader parts of workflows
  • Decision hierarchies: Move from functional structures that are subdivided to optimize for human intelligence, to product or outcome-aligned and flatter structures that optimize for human and AI
  • Coordination: Transform from coordinating work across functional siloes to coordinating skills and mobility across outcome siloes that serve the new needs  employees will have working in fusion teams to deliver customer outcomes.”

• “The best CHROs will orchestrate a talent strategy over the coming 24 months that ensures their organizations are fastest to change.”

Journalists can receive additional information and/or request an interview with the Gartner expert by contacting Gerri Weinberger at gerri.weinberger@gartner.com.