The top three issues HR pros must tackle, according to SHRM’s CEO

Honey, you’ve got a big storm coming.

That isn’t just a line delivered in a recorded acting class that became a viral meme. It also was more or less the warning that SHRM’s president and CEO Johnny C. Taylor, Jr. delivered to HR pros at the organization’s annual conference last year. This year’s forecast is expected to be the same, he said at SHRM’s latest annual conference held in San Diego last week.

“It’s going to be another monster year,” he told the audience during his mainstage presentation on June 30, citing challenges including AI creating job displacement, rising layoffs, and DEI “becoming a four-letter word.”

Taylor outlined the three areas where HR pros can “rise literally above earthly expectations and really make a major difference in how people live, how they work, and how they thrive.”

Number one: Protecting “equal opportunity in a difficult climate.” Taylor stood by SHRM’s announcement in July 2024 that the organization would remove “equity” from its diversity initiative and instead call it “I&D,” a move that generated controversy among HR pros.

“My fellow HR colleagues, I’m not one that relishes in saying ‘I told you so,’ but we did,” Taylor said of SHRM dropping “equity” last year.

Taylor told the audience that US employment laws “focus on equality, not equity,” and that HR pros must know the difference between doing “what we want to do and what we are legally allowed.” He also said that SHRM will show how to execute on initiatives that are “legally compliant, workplace unifying, and business inclusive.”

When asked later by HR Brew how exactly employers can protect equal opportunity while publicly rolling back DEI programming, Taylor said HR pros must focus on those three factors—legally compliant, workplace unifying, and business inclusive—as guardrails for DEI initiatives.

He also noted there were “some instances” of employers not doing the work in a legally compliant manner, such as creating affinity groups that weren’t open to all employees. When asked how many HR or DEI practitioners were conducting noncompliant programs, Taylor said he didn’t know but pointed to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s threats to scrutinize DEI-related activities under Title VII.

When asked why SHRM is encouraging companies to shift their DEI programming when much of the law around DEI hasn’t changed, Taylor said it’s because it’s SHRM’s job as an HR organization. He cited the recent Supreme Court ruling in Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services allowing a reverse discrimination lawsuit to proceed, and striking down a rule requiring someone from a majority group to meet a different burden of proof than those from minority groups as an example. (A veteran employment attorney previously told HR Brew that the ruling wouldn’t meaningfully change anything for HR leaders.)

“We saw this coming two years ago at least, and so it is our job to ensure that the HR member is, for lack of a better term, racing to where the puck is going, not waiting for it, because you lose the game at that point if you don’t see where it’s going,” he said.

Number two: Addressing “human displacement.” Taylor followed up on last year’s warning that advancements to technology, including AI, are creating crisis-level skills gaps and job redundancies.

“AI is ripping through the labor market, wiping out entire job categories,” Taylor told the audience. (Though he later told HR Brew that AI “hasn’t yet affected a whole bunch of people, but it will,” and HR pros must proactively address disruptions.)

And who will be responsible for reskilling workers through this mass disruption? Why HR, of course, according to Taylor. HR pros will be “the architects” of how organizations will introduce, explain, and embrace AI, he said, before plugging SHRM’s AI+HI project, launched last year. However, he also said HR pros can’t stop at reskilling alone, and that in order to make lifelong learning come to fruition, the profession must partner with educators, policymakers, and employers.

“If we don’t help people shift, we’re not just losing jobs, but losing livelihoods, and that’s a failure as a society we can’t afford,” he said.

Number three: Preserving workplaces as “civil sanctuaries.” The third and final focus for HR pros that Taylor highlighted, and that he called “bigger” than both DEI and labor displacement, ties into SHRM’s civility campaign, which it launched in spring 2024.

“Workplaces are turning into battlegrounds for ideological fights that started somewhere else, literally somewhere else, but ended up at the water cooler, on the Slack thread and Zoom calls,” Taylor said.

Taylor highlighted the threat that incivility has on productivity, citing SHRM data claiming that when someone is subjected to an uncivil act at work, it takes more than a half hour to regain their composure and refocus on work. But, he said HR pros can help embody civility in the workplace, which can spread into the world more broadly.

“Goodness and compassion happen at work every day, in the open and in the shadows, and if we can model civility at work, it’ll spread beyond work into our communities,” Taylor explained.

When asked how SHRM is measuring the success of its civility campaign, Taylor said he was not deep enough in the campaign to answer.

“My instinct is...the more you raise the awareness of it [incivility], the more likely it is that people will report it,” he told HR Brew.