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\n Earlier this month, a senior executive at a global company shared a story to give me a sense of how people feel about human resources in corporate America these days. They were planning a dinner party \u201cand someone came running into my office and said, \u2018Why are you inviting the head of HR? The whole vibe\u2019s gonna go away.\u2019 And I was like, what are we going to be doing so wrong that HR can\u2019t be in the room?\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n Although this anecdote could be read as being about one buzzkill, or even the entire HR discipline being a party nonstarter, it\u2019s much bigger than that.\n <\/p>\n
\n Employees and company leaders alike have very strong feelings about HR\u2014and not much of it is positive. In a series of Fast Company LinkedIn polls, more than 1,500 respondents expressed negative views about HR.\n <\/p>\n
51% say HR is not very responsive when they bring it a concern.
\n 75% say HR is ineffective\/nonfactor in helping them achieve professional goals.
\n 56% say HR is adding very little (33%) or no significant (23%) value to the organization.<\/p>\n
\n These results reinforce a March 2024 survey<\/a> of nearly 1,000 workers that revealed 86% of them were afraid of their Human Resources department.\n <\/p>\n \n In August 2005, Fast Company published a cover story that blared \u201cWhy We Hate HR<\/a>.\u201d Since then, the human resources discipline has seemingly been wholly transformed. Increasing investment in technology (currently estimated at more than $50 billion globally) has delivered cloud-based platforms that provide workers greater flexibility, more communication tools, and access to benefits and payroll information from anywhere on their mobile devices. It has created vast libraries of custom-made learning and development curricula. Applicant tracking systems have streamlined the talent acquisition process.\n <\/p>\n \n The HR tech boom has spawned tens of thousands of companies, with big winners such as Workday ($36 billion market cap) and Rippling ($17 billion valuation) becoming sector giants.\n <\/p>\n \n The function has also achieved rarified corporate stature, as new C-level titles such as chief human resources officer (CHRO) and chief people officer (CPO) have proliferated<\/a>. If a top complaint two decades ago was that HR didn\u2019t have a seat at the strategic table, increasingly it does.\n <\/p>\n \n Some HR leaders have even become business celebrities! Patty McCord, chief talent officer at Netflix, created a 120-plus page \u201cculture deck\u201d that promoted \u201cthe keeper test\u201d and other strategies to increase \u201ctalent density\u201d for the overall good of the team. Sheryl Sandberg, then Facebook\u2019s chief operating officer, described it as \u201cthe most important document ever to come out of Silicon Valley.\u201d Google\u2019s senior vice president of people operations, the ex-McKinsey consultant Laszlo Bock, turned his advocacy of \u201chigh-freedom\u201d companies (those that granted autonomy to employees) into a best-selling book. And Google\u2019s focus on people analytics further fueled the proliferation of HR tech.\n <\/p>\n \n These days, it\u2019s hard to imagine a book entitled Work Rules!, Bock\u2019s bestseller, resonating with so many readers. Whatever progress HR made in the twenty-first century\u2014via technology, greater responsibility, and worker-friendly policies such as expanded benefits and remote-work policies (facilitated by new tech tools and accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic)\u2014has waned. It likely hasn\u2019t helped, either, that HR is having to unwind flexible work policies for return-to-office mandates and serving as a key collaborator in rolling out AI<\/a> tools that have workers fearing for their jobs.\n <\/p>\n \n Read more on Fast Company Premium.<\/a>\n <\/p>\n \n A Fast Company Premium subscription offers readers full access to subscriber-only stories including exclusive reporting and trend analysis on technology, business innovation, future of work, and design.\n <\/p>\n \n Get the details and subscribe here.<\/a>\n <\/p>\n Google will now let you log in with a selfie<\/p>\n \n By \n To keep accounts safe from malicious intruders, having various passwords and authentication steps has become the norm. With that comes an oh-so-common predicament: doing such a good job securing an account that even you can\u2019t get back in.\n <\/p>\n \n A new Google feature aims to solve the problem. Last week, Google announced<\/a> a new sign-in method: Selfie Video.\n <\/p>\n \n Essentially a live video selfie, the feature is designed to help users access their account when they forget their password or don\u2019t have their usual phones and computers readily available, which Google also uses to authenticate logins.\n <\/p>\n \n To set it up, users record and follow a series of \u201cguided head movements,\u201d the company explains in the blog post.\u00a0 (You essentially look from side of the screen to the other.)\n <\/p>\n \n Then, the next time the user struggles to access their account, they may choose the selfie method to sign in. They take a new selfie video and Google compares it to the one used at the time of setup in order to authenticate the user and that it is a live video.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cWe also use our standard security practices to detect and help prevent suspicious sign-in attempts,\u201d the announcement says.\n <\/p>\n \n According to Google, the video used to set up the method is stored and encrypted at rest, and may be deleted at any time. This serves as a form of safeguard against unauthorized entities trying to access an account through impersonation attempts like deep fakes or AI<\/a>-generated content.\n <\/p>\n
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\n Mar\u00eda Jos\u00e9 Guti\u00e9rrez Ch\u00e1vez
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