**1. Introduction**

The role of the HR professional has changed dramatically along with the workforce and economy, and that evolution will continue as machines and technology replace tasks once performed by humans. Tomorrow's HR leaders will need to be bigger, broader thinkers, and they will have to be tech-savvy and nimble enough to deal with an increasingly agile and restless workforce [1]. As organisations push on into the future and adapt to new realities, HR leaders should stay abreast of changes to prepare for the future world of work [2]. In order to progress towards a new understanding of workforce management within future organisations, it is essential to shed light on the different HR competencies that will be needed, future workspace, engagement, employment relations and resilience. It is important that HR academics, HR leaders and management take note that although engagement and employment relations are dated, it will still need to be addressed in the future, especially due to the man– machine connection, remote working and other future world of work challenges.

The role of the HR manager has changed dramatically along with the workforce and economy, and that evolution will continue as machines and technology replace tasks once performed by humans [2]. New technologies are here to stay, so companies need to understand and prepare for how it's already changing the relationships within the workplace. Once there is this understanding, HR can then build a plan that ensures relationships will be shaped and supported in ways that help organisations and employees now and in the future [3].

As business strategies and teams grow more agile to keep pace with recurring change in companies, HR technology must adapt as well, including providing employees with more user-friendly and efficient experiences. HR leaders should therefore revise their priorities for 2021 and onwards. Future workspace should inspire workers to communicate, collaborate, solve problems, deepen engagement and spur productivity. The implications for HR is to equip leaders to manage remote teams over the long haul, preserve the company culture with a more distributed workforce and engage workers in a cost-constrained environment. According to [4], resilient HR should support with the business transformation.

### **2. HR competencies**

Schultz [2] found that HR leaders should have the necessary competencies to be able to make a strategic contribution, to engage properly and to add value to ensure peaceful employment relations. Schultz [2] also found that innovation, business acumen, leadership, analytics and metrics and personal characteristics such as selfefficacy, honesty, openness, agility, flexibility and adaptability are of the essence. Leveraging HR Analytics to drive all people-related decisions is an essential future HR competency [5]. HR needs to start developing core business acumen rather than standardised HR capabilities. Fundamental business drivers like economic growth, capital markets, changing customer behaviour, competition and global business trends must be clearly understood by HR leaders [6].

McCartney et al. [7] found six distinct competencies required by HR analysts including consulting, technical knowledge, data fluency and data analysis, HR and business acumen, research and discovery and storytelling and communication. With the advent of new communication platforms and digital tools, the topic of the development of communicative competencies received a new round of interest from researchers [8]. HR should promote open dialogue and instal direct communication channels between all levels within an organisation to help keep leadership informed of employee concerns [9].

Schultz [10] found that foresight and being adaptable are essential HR competencies. Numerical data such as metrics focuses on outputs and analytics focuses on the combination of data that are part of metrics [11]. To be competitive, it is essential that HR leaders have the ability to meet the needs and future needs of line management in the workplace [12]. In order to ensure successful human and machine collaboration, HR leaders must understand analytics and automation to improve productivity and decision-making [13]. The current explosion of HR technology is far from over. On the contrary, there is hardly any HR function left that does not have an impressive range of software and tools designed to automate and digitise its processes. As automation and digitalisation continue to reshape job roles and skill needs, HR and learning groups will need to create increasingly agile and effective reskilling strategies for workers [14].

HR can navigate this new landscape by taking advantage of the advancement in technology – most notably by utilising AI and big data to open up opportunities for strategic value creation [15]. Technological agility will therefore be a key differentiator for HR's value add to business outcome [5]. There could be a more dramatic, revolutionary impact in the business environment and on workforce management from AI and technological advancements in the near future. The world is still in the early phases of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, thus many areas remain unpredictable and uncontrollable. Functional HR competencies alone will not enable successful HR careers. Specialist skills will be required to fast track HR career opportunities and career growth [5]. Within the overall HR skill sets, future-oriented capabilities

#### *The Future of HR DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.96672*

will take prominence. Functional changes in HR operations are freeing up HR professionals for more strategic work. This is also enabling the emergence of new roles such as workforce analytics professional, robot trainer, virtual culture architect, data, talent and AI integrator and cyber ecosystem designer [15].
