SHRM CEO Johnny C. Taylor Jr. wants CHROs to become ‘chief work officers’

HR pros, have you weathered the storm?

Johnny C. Taylor, Jr., president and CEO of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), has warned attendees of his organization’s annual conference about a storm hitting the people profession since 2024. Now it seems that storm has passed, and a revolution has begun.

“There are moments that test every profession, and then there are moments that actually decide whether the profession will survive,” Taylor told thousands of HR pros during the annual SHRM conference in Orlando on June 18. “We’ve spoken of an HR revolution for a long time, but this time, my friends, there’s something really and entirely different.”

What’s the revolution? As AI continues to transform the workplace, Taylor urged chief people leaders to become “chief work officers” who oversee the work that gets done by both people and technology.

“You want to talk about a revolution…There’s nothing more revolutionary right now than the incursion of intelligent automation into the workplace,” he said.

Amid this shift, Taylor said HR pros need to prioritize their “critical customer”: the CEO. “They don’t care whether the answer to a work problem is a person, a platform, a partnership…They just want the work done, lowest cost, highest quality.”

New world of HR. As chief work officers, people pros should be leadership’s “first stop” for financial, technical, organizational, and labor-related issues, Taylor said. As such, they should be able to predict workplace trends, like workplace meteorologists, he added.

“We can, and we must make ourselves essential to the future of business,” he said.

His parting advice for leading the workplace revolution? “Strong doses of courage,” Taylor said.

“Find your inner lion. Find the most courageous part of yourself. Don’t hide from the threat beyond,” he said. “Don’t wait to be invited to the feast. Don’t wonder if you’re ready to fight. The lion is prepared to act fearlessly to anything that comes, even when he has every reason to be afraid.”