HRchat Podcast
Listen to the HRchat Podcast by HR Gazette to get insights and tips from HR leaders, influencers and tech experts. Topics covered include HR Tech, HR, AI, Leadership, Talent, Recruitment, Employee Engagement, Recognition, Wellness, DEI, and Company Culture.
Hosted by Bill Banham, Pauline James, and other HR enthusiasts, the HRchat show publishes interviews with influencers, leaders, analysts, and those in the HR trenches 2-4 times each week.
The show is approaching 1000 episodes and past guests are from organizations including ADP, SAP, Ceridian, IBM, UPS, Deloitte Consulting LLP, Simon Sinek Inc, NASA, Gartner, SHRM, Government of Canada, Hacking HR, McLean & Company, UPS, Microsoft, Shopify, DisruptHR, McKinsey and Co, Virgin Pulse, Salesforce, Make-A-Wish Foundation, and Coca-Cola Beverages Company.
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Podcast Music Credit"Funky One"Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
HRchat Podcast
AI, Economic Uncertainty, and Workplace Civility with Dr. James Atkinson, SHRM
What happens when 19 million jobs face potential displacement from automation and AI? And why aren't half of all workers using AI at all? Dr. James Atkinson, Vice President of Thought Leadership at SHRM, uncovers these startling insights and more in our illuminating conversation about workplace transformation.
Fresh from celebrating his one-year anniversary at SHRM after an impressive 11-year tenure in HR research at Gartner, Dr. Atkinson separates AI hype from reality. While headlines focus on job losses, James explains to Bill Banham how his team's research reveals a more nuanced future, one where success hinges not on competing against AI but learning to work alongside it. "It's not just about displacement," he explains. "It's really about the transformation of jobs."
Beyond technology, James and Bill explore how SHRM's research team tackles today's most pressing workplace challenges, from macroeconomic uncertainties to the shocking $2 billion daily productivity loss caused by workplace incivility. Dr. Atkinson shares exclusive insights from SHRM's economics team on wage inflation, labor market trends, and how HR professionals can navigate these complexities. With SHRM25 in full swing, he also previews the cutting-edge research his team will unveil on multiple stages.
Whether you're concerned about AI's impact on your career, struggling with workplace culture issues, or simply trying to stay ahead of workplace trends, this episode delivers actionable intelligence from one of HR's foremost thought leaders.
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Welcome to the HR Chat Show, one of the world's most downloaded and shared podcasts designed for HR pros, talent execs, tech enthusiasts and business leaders. For hundreds more episodes and what's new in the world of work, subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit hrgazette. com.
Bill Banham:another episode of the HR Chat Show. Hello listeners, this is your host today, bill Battam, and this is a pretty special episode today, actually, because we've got none other than Dr J James Atkinson, vice President, thought Leadership, over at SHRM. Hey, dr J, welcome to the show today. How are you doing Hello? Thank you, j. Welcome to the show today. How are you doing, hello?
Dr. James Atkinson:thank you, I'm doing well, doing well. How are you today?
Bill Banham:I am super the sun is shining, which I'm in the UK at the moment. That doesn't happen very often, so that puts me in a good mood. Okay, so, as we were recording this episode, shrm is coming up. So, as we were recording this episode, sherm is coming up. Uh, it's uh. It's in less than two weeks now, so it's uh, it's lovely to get an opportunity to talk with you. I'm also talking with uh wendy from sherm foundation later today as well. Um, why don't you start by taking a minute or two and introducing yourself to our listeners and giving them a bit of an overview of your role at sherm, which I understand is pretty new? You started just last year, is that right?
Dr. James Atkinson:Yes, that's correct. Well, as you said, hello everyone. James Atkinson here and I am the VP of Thought Leadership at SHRM. I just hit my one-year anniversary just a few days ago, so have been here during that time and had a fun year across the year.
Dr. James Atkinson:So, as the VP of thought leadership, it means I get to lead all the thinking, which is kind of fun. It means I have a wonderful team that is conducting research across all things related to really HR and the workplace. We cover a wide range of topics across that and we basically put together all of the data and insights that we get to share out across our membership, across the media and presentations and conversations, really across the different parts of the world where our members are. And, as I said, I've been here for about a year. I've been in this HR space for a little over the last 11 years. Most of that time I was working in various product leader, research leader, data products type roles at Gartner in their HR research and advisory practice there. So I've been kind of covering, studying and talking with HR executives for the last 11 years or so.
Bill Banham:Okay, well, now you've mentioned Gartner. What a pedigree. We've had lots of folks on for Gartner over the years, as well as folks from SHRM, so you are the man to talk to today. Okay, so, as I mentioned just a moment ago, shrm is coming up, shrm 25, the big annual conference, and expo is not far away. Sadly, listeners, I'm not going to be there this year, sigh, but I'm sure I'll be back next year. What are you most excited to see at this year's big annual conference?
Dr. James Atkinson:What are you most excited to see at this year's big annual conference? So, for me, it's always just exciting to see such a huge number of HR professionals all converging on the same place. You know, we're upwards of 20,000 people going to be there and there's just always such a buzz about all of the things that are happening right now. So obviously I'm interested in all of the trends and the insights and the things that are happening right now. So obviously I'm interested in all of the trends and the insights and the things that are going to be shared there. But for me, it's really just getting to have those conversations with all of the different people who are kind of day-to-day making sure that our workplaces are functioning well and that the people at those places have the support that they need in order to do their jobs well. So yeah, for me it's always the people and the conversations I get to have there.
Bill Banham:And I'm assuming that John and his team have got you on stage at the annual conference, will you be doing a talk? Will you be joining a panel? Tell us more about that.
Dr. James Atkinson:Yeah, so I'll have a pretty busy schedule there. So I will be delivering about four different presentations while I'm there, so on a variety of different stages across the few days that are there and my team broadly. I think we've got around 15 or so across the team so we will be very active and very kind of front and center on a lot of different topics there at annual.
Bill Banham:Okay, I'm glad that you're earning your keep. Four different talks across those days Very good, you're going to be a busy chap, okay, yeah absolutely, absolutely.
Dr. James Atkinson:I spent a large portion of my day reviewing a lot of these presentations from my team yesterday, so we're gearing up and ready to go.
Bill Banham:So, as VP of thought leadership at SHRM, you're obviously at the forefront of identifying trends shaping the future of work. What are some of the most critical workplace challenges that SHRM is currently focused on addressing?
Dr. James Atkinson:You know, there's no shortage of challenges across the workplace right now. We are covering a lot of those things that are at the forefront but we kind of cover them in a few different big buckets. So one is really thinking about a lot of those macroeconomic challenges and the impacts that they're having on the workplace. So things like wage inflation or rising costs of goods and services, general economic uncertainty, layoffs. We have an economics team on the thought leadership team here at SHRM that really covers a lot of this closely. So we're covering monthly jobs reports and jolts reports. We're doing snapshots of different parts of the labor force, understanding how they're involved and so on and really making sure we understand also how kind of HR executives are thinking about the economy, thinking about the labor market and so on. So we're kind of starting with those big macroeconomic challenges and the trends that we see around that Part of that, as well as some of the big technological challenges and changes and advances that we see.
Dr. James Atkinson:And you can't turn on any kind of news or read something in the paper without hearing about AI, and we're certainly covering that and the impacts that it might have on jobs and whether or not jobs might be displaced. Related to that, we're looking at how AI is being used in HR and what are some of those trends there, but also how employees are prepared, like, are they ready for this? Do they have the skilling that they need to meet these types of challenges? And then we also kind of dig into just some of the workforce challenges as well. So one of the areas of research we've done a bit over the last couple of years is just really looking at civility.
Dr. James Atkinson:I mean, we've had a generally kind of polarized environment. Civility isn't always the norm around understanding, you know, acts of civility and the impacts that we might see when civility is not a key part of day-to-day life, and some of the economic impacts of that. You know, one of our pieces of research says that, you know, instability in the workplace is causing about $2 billion of productivity each and every day. So those are the types of things that we are covering those big trends across the big picture, but also across kind of what's happening as employees are interacting with each other in the day to day.
Bill Banham:Very good. So we can't record an episode of the HR chat these days without talking about AI. You briefly mentioned AI earlier on. I jumped two feet in a couple of years ago and I now organise AI summits over here in the UK on a regular basis actually. So with AI and hybrid work and generational shifts disrupting traditional models, how is SHRM?
Bill Banham:helping HR leaders adapt and prepare for the future workforce. Do you have any examples of recent or upcoming research? And just to add to that, because I often ask this question when we are talking about AI, if you were able to offer any suggestions about what you think those future goals would be that people will be doing as their jobs continue to be replaced, I would love that, because everybody's still trying to figure that out. There's a lot of headlines out there right.
Dr. James Atkinson:As I said, you can't open up any kind of media source these days without seeing something related to AI and AI taking your jobs and watch out and all of those things. One of the things that we wanted to try and do here at SHRM is to help separate some of the hype from kind of the facts on the ground, and we've engaged in a couple of waves of looking at kind of AI and how, you know, automation and now generative AI can potentially displace jobs, and a couple of things that I will note around that. So in our first wave of this research, we came up with this headline figure of about 19 million jobs that face kind of high or very high risk of displacement due to some type of automation, ai being a part of that broader piece.
Dr. James Atkinson:Sorry, that's 19 million specifically in the US, In the US yes, so I should flag that this was all just looking at US-specific data, and you know there are certain industries where this is more pronounced or certain occupations as well. Things that are more kind of business or financial operations, for example, are kind of higher risk. There are a number of tasks there that are more kind of business or financial operations, for example, are kind of higher risk. There are a number of tasks there that are more automatable. There are a number of tasks that you might expect you could bring in some type of AI to replace parts of that.
Dr. James Atkinson:The thing that I will note is that the biggest kind of research as I said, we're kind of doing a second part of this, which we will be talking about next week or in a week and a half at annual that kind of refines our approach, uses our own proprietary data as well. But one of the biggest kind of takeaways I would say is that it's not just about this displacement that's what gets the headline. It's really about the transformation of jobs, and what we found is that it's going to be a kind of human and AI approach to many jobs moving forward. And so for the average kind of person worker who is thinking about whether or not their job is going to be displaced by AI. It's really about not is AI going to displace your job, but is are you going to kind of put yourself in the right position to where you can work with AI in your job, moving forward, moving forward, and so I think that's more the approach is.
Dr. James Atkinson:It's really about transforming a lot of jobs and the way that we've done jobs five years ago. Many jobs are going to look quite different in the next few years. This is not different than a lot of the other technological advances that we've had in the past as well. Like jobs are going to really change as a result of what this looks like. But, that said, we also looked at the level of preparedness that employees have, and we found that nearly half of US workers, for example, were not leveraging AI in any way, shape or form. We're not leveraging AI in any way, shape or form at their workplace, and so we know this new technology is here, we know it is moving very quickly, but we also know that there's a large number of the workforce that is not prepared for what's coming next, and that's where we as HR kind of as the broader hr industry have got to figure out. How do we? How do we do that? How do we train people for the jobs that are next and not the jobs that are here today?
Bill Banham:it's interesting. I was watching an interview um a month ago with with elon musk. Uh, love him or hate him listeners, he's a very clever guy and he knows about tech and and and he said you know, frankly, we've all been cyborgs for years now because we've all got these things. Uh, this is an audio only podcast. I'm holding up my phone, so we've all been attached to this stuff for years. You know, we've all been augmented for a number of years, so it's not really a new concept that that things are being replaced. It's it's just an extension of what's been happening for a very long time. Anyway, this is not an interview with me, it's's an interview with you. I've got two more questions for you, sir, before I let you go, sure. So the next one is how can business leaders and workers learn more about SHRM's research and dive deeper into how they can apply that data in their own work?
Dr. James Atkinson:Yeah. So I mean the easiest way to learn about our research is to go to SHRMorg slash research and there are some things there that are available for anyone. But obviously I would say most of what we do and what we put out there is for our SHRM members, and so with that membership you obviously get access to all of the thought leadership that my team is doing, but really the expanded set of benefits around that. So you have access to our knowledge advisors team who can kind of answer very tactical questions around how to apply some of these things to you know your day-to-day work. You know we obviously have a lot of tools and templates and things like that that can really kind of round out that understanding, moving beyond the thought leadership that comes out of my team as well.
Bill Banham:Okay, very good, and just finally, I have sent you a connection request on LinkedIn. Please accept so that when I tag the heck out of this interview, you can see that and like and share and comment. But beyond that, how can our listeners connect with you? Is that LinkedIn? Is that email? Are you super cool all over TikTok and Instagram and places.
Dr. James Atkinson:And, of course, how can our listeners learn more about all the work that you and your team do? Yeah, so LinkedIn is definitely the best way to connect with me and I welcome those connections. So, james Atkinson, they're on LinkedIn, so that's the best way.
Bill Banham:Very good. Okay, please do accept my connection request, and I will tag you in the next week or so, james. For today, though, thank you very much for being my guest. Yes, thank you so much for having me on the show and listeners as always. Until next time, happy working.
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