Robin Schooling

Employee Relations is the Whole Ball Game Now

I was perusing the agenda for an upcoming HR conference and noticed something entirely typical. The ballroom gets the AI keynote. The large breakout rooms get talent strategy, skills architecture, and something with “future of” in the title. And then, somewhere down the hall past the coffee station, in a room that will hold forty chairs, there will be a session on conducting workplace investigations. Presented by an employment attorney, it will be attended by the practitioner looking for some last-minute tips because they have a live matter on their desk and need something they can use on Monday.

That room, not the ballroom, is where the profession’s next decade is really being decided – although almost nobody in the building thinks that’s the case. But there’s a rule in play here that has nothing to do with HR: what fills the seats and what wins the games are rarely the same investment.

Just take a look at professional (the American kind) football; no NFL franchise has ever sold a season ticket package on the strength of its offensive line. Who brings in the fans? The star tight end perhaps or the running back destined for the Hall of Fame certainly have their followers. Yet, while the marquee name quarterback gets the folks in the seats, it’s the offensive line that determines whether he’s even still standing upright in December.

And every general manager who has ever decided to skimp up front in order to spend big on skill positions eventually learns this in the same expensive, publicly humiliating way. The glamour and the outcome sit in entirely different places on that football roster – which becomes a genuine problem when the budget got approved on the basis of what looked impressive and flashy in the scouting films.

What’s Left When the Easy Yards Are Gone

I’ve argued that AI functions as a diagnostic for HR rather than a disruption of it, and that the transactional layer – the routing, the processing, the summarizing, the answering of questions that have answers – is heading to the machines regardless of how any of us feel about it. That’s fine; it’s overdue, even. But we ought to be precise about what remains in the pile once the routine work has been carted off, because the profession has been far too vague on that point.

What remains is judgment applied to people, power, and consequence. And in the operating reality of most HR departments, a considerable share of that judgment lives in employee relations: the investigation into the manager whose team keeps turning over, the accommodation request that fits no template anyone has drafted, the conflict between two high performers that three layers of leadership have been carefully declining to notice for eight months, and the termination decision that must be defensible not merely in a legal filing but in the version the employee’s colleagues will tell one another in the parking lot afterward.

None of that gets handed to a piece of tech or some AI model; not because the technology lacks sophistication, but because the work consists of weighing contested accounts from people who each believe themselves, reading a room that doesn’t want to be read, and then owning a decision that alters someone’s livelihood. That is a human being in a small conference room with a legal pad and a great deal of discomfort. It always was.

And it always will be.

The Bad Rap and the Better Argument

Years ago I wrote that employee relations has carried an undeserved bad rap – that it’s the discipline nobody enters HR hoping to practice, saddled with a vocabulary of enforce, investigate, and grievance while recruiting gets the flash and compensation gets the incentive design. That was true then and it’s true now; what’s changed is the stakes attached to it.

Because competent ER work is invisible by design. A well-run investigation produces a documented file, a defensible decision, and a workplace where the thing quietly stops happening; it’s an outcome with no dashboard, no percentage improvement, and no compelling narrative for a PowerPoint presentation. The failures, by contrast, are extraordinarily visible; they arrive as a demand letter, a viral Facebook post, a jury verdict, or a five-year pattern that a plaintiff’s attorney assembles into a story your general counsel reads aloud to the executive team in a tone that nobody enjoys.

So let me say plainly what doesn’t get said often enough: the practitioners doing this work are carrying a genuinely difficult load, usually with grace, usually without recognition, and usually while absorbing the emotional weight of everyone else’s worst week. They sit with people on the hardest days of those people’s working lives.

That’s real and consequential HR work, and it deserves considerably more respect than the profession has historically extended to it.

Film Study

Here’s where the strong ER programs distinguish themselves, and where technology becomes genuinely useful rather than merely purchased.

A good coaching staff doesn’t wait until Sunday to discover a tendency; they spend the week in the film room, watching for the patterns – the guard who tips the run or the coverage that breaks down on third and long. Advance scouting exists precisely because problems announce themselves well before they cost you a game – provided somebody is watching closely enough to notice.

Employee relations generates exactly that kind of footage; complaints cluster by department, by manager, by shift, or in the six months following a reorganization. Accommodation requests spike in functions where the workload assumptions stopped being realistic two years ago. Investigations recur in the same corner of the business with different names attached. All of that is signal, sitting in a case management system, waiting for someone to treat it as intelligence rather than as a filing obligation.

This is where the tools earn their keep. Pattern detection across thousands of cases, thematic analysis, trend identification across time and business unit – machines are great at that (considerably better than a human reviewing files by hand at 11 PM). The ER professional who walks into an operations review and says “we have three separate matters in your Southeast region in ninety days, they share a root cause, and here is what I’d recommend before this becomes something none of us can fix” is doing strategic HR work of the highest order. That practitioner isn’t the enforcer of policy; they’re the scout who saw it coming.

The judgment stays human even as the pattern-finding gets help. That’s the trade the technology makes available … and the organizations getting it right are pulling meaningfully ahead.

The Position We Refuse to Draft For

Now consider how the profession invests in this. Employee relations is, in most organizations, where you place the person who is unflappable and doesn’t say much. There’s rarely a defined career path into it and almost never one out of it. The development budget flows to the HRIS implementation, the certifications, and the leadership cohort, while the ER specialist receives a webinar on recent agency guidance plus a standing invitation to call outside counsel when matters turn sticky. The role sits several layers down the org chart, reports through operations, and appears on precisely zero slides in the CHRO’s strategy slide deck.

We have, in other words, spent years drafting quarterbacks and hoping the line would hold.

I’ve written before about pressure-testing your HR function – asking where you’re over-resourced in the wrong places and under-resourced where it counts. That question has a sharper answer in 2026 than it did when I first posed it. When throughput disappears and the advisory work is claimed by whoever can credibly claim it, what remains as unambiguously, defensibly HR’s is the hard human stuff: the consequential decisions about people, carrying legal weight and moral weight at once, which cannot be shipped to a vendor.

The function’s credibility, then, comes to rest on the competence of the practitioners the profession has invested in least; people who have perhaps been hired for temperament rather than developed for skill, kept out of the succession plan, and never quite included in the conversation about where any of this is headed.

You can build a line. It requires drafting for it, paying for it, and enduring a season or two in which the investment shows up in nothing the fans care about.

What you cannot do is discover in week 14 that you needed a strong line all along.

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Send in the Clowns: HR’s Problem with Conference Themes

Somewhere right now, a volunteer conference committee is deciding between “HR Under the Big Top” and “Lights, Camera, HR!” for their HR professional association’s annual event. This means there will either be a logo with a circus tent or a logo with a film reel and a klieg light. There may be costumes. Someone will suggest a photo booth with feather boas and crazy hats, and everyone will agree this is a wonderful idea.

I would like to gently ask: what are we doing?

Because as far as I can tell, HR is the only profession that does this. Your local CPA society is not hosting “Under the Sea with the Accountants.” The bar association has never once themed its annual meeting as “Let’s Luau!” Even the marketing and PR associations — the people who theme things for a living, the folks you’d absolutely expect to show up in matching t-shirts with a tagline — manage to hold professional conferences that are simply called professional conferences. They gather, they learn, they network, and they go home without anyone having dressed as a pirate.

But SHRM chapters and state councils? They simply cannot resist. Year after year, event after event, they wrap serious professional development in carnival packaging, as though a full day of sessions on compliance, compensation strategy, and workforce planning cannot possibly be endured unless it arrives dressed as Hollywood, Vegas, the Roaring Twenties, or a superhero universe.

What, I keep wondering, is wrong with “The [Your City Here] HR Association Annual Conference”? It’s clear. It’s professional. It tells attendees — and, more importantly, tells the executives approving their registration fees — exactly what this is: an industry association gathering for the purpose of professional education. That’s a brand. A perfectly respectable one, in fact, and one that every other profession seems content to use.

The Infantilization Problem

Here’s my deeper concern, and it goes beyond aesthetic taste (though my aesthetic objections are considerable). The themes infantilize us.

When we package our professional development in dress-up-day wrapping, we signal — to ourselves and to everyone watching — that the content alone isn’t enough. That HR practitioners need to be coaxed into learning the way toddlers are coaxed into eating vegetables: hide it inside something fun. Other professions assume their members will show up for substance because the substance matters. We apparently assume our members need a costume contest.

And there’s a second, thornier layer to this. HR remains a female-dominated profession, and it has spent decades fighting the perception that it’s the corporate equivalent of the social committee — the department that plans the potlucks, orders the retirement cakes, and decorates for the holiday party. That stereotype is unfair, tired, and has done measurable damage to HR’s organizational standing and reputation. So when our own professional associations voluntarily lean into it — and when the most visible public artifact of our professional community is a conference that looks like a themed bridal shower — we’re doing our critics’ work for them. We’re confirming, in glitter and balloon arches, exactly what they already suspected: that HR is a profession run by people who would rather be event planners.

Now let me say this loudly — I want to be perfectly clear that the individuals on these committees are usually volunteers giving their time, and the impulse comes from a generous place — a desire to make events welcoming and memorable. I don’t doubt the intent; I doubt the calculus. Because “memorable” and “credible” are not the same.

The Spectacle Becomes a Pattern

I wrote recently about SHRM’s long courtship of celebrity keynotes and what it reveals: a profession seeking external validation because it isn’t quite sure it believes in its own substance. The themed conferences are the same insecurity at local scale; big SHRM chases Oprah while chapters and state councils chase a Party City line of credit. Both are bets that the packaging will carry what, or so it’s feared, the content cannot.

But the content can carry it. The work HR does — navigating AI transformation, rebuilding trust in fractured workplaces, advising leaders through genuinely hard decisions — is substantive enough to fill a conference agenda without a single sequin. And the practitioners doing that work deserve professional gatherings that treat them like the professionals they are.

Attorneys convene. Accountants convene. Engineers convene. But HR professionals, somehow, get a Wild West-themed party with coffee service, breakout sessions and bandanas in the swag bags.

HR’s most well-worn cliché is “we want a seat at the table.” Perhaps we could start by not showing up to our own events in a costume.

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Time to Talk about “The Rizz”

I have, in the last week or so, participated in two separate conversations in which the phrase “the rizz” was deployed, unironically, by adults. Adults who are, every one of them, well past the age of forty. Adults with mortgages, aching knees, and a collective grasp of Gen Z slang so outdated that we were essentially LARPing as teenagers using a dialect that even the teenagers themselves abandoned roughly eighteen months ago. We knew this of course, and yet we used the phrase anyway – with the full-throated confidence of people who have long since stopped caring whether they sound current, so long as they still sound like they’re having fun.

But the LOLs got me thinking about the real thing underneath the slang, because “rizz” is just this decade’s word for something organizations have been trying, badly, to identify and hire for since long before TikTok existed: charisma. And charisma, unlike its meme-ified cousin, is not actually a joke. It’s one of the more consequential and least examined traits we attribute to leaders, yet most of what gets said about it in the business context is embarrassingly vague.

What Are We Even Describing?

Ask someone to define charisma in a leader and you’ll get a lot of blathering on about vibes and auras.

“They walk into the room, and people just feel it.”

“There’s a presence.”

“Everyone just wants to be around them.”

This is the corporate equivalent of describing a wine as “interesting;” technically an observation, but not one that tells you anything useful, and certainly not one you should act on.

So let’s try to be more precise, because precision is the entire point of this exercise/blog post. Charisma in a leader is not, no matter what the org chart implies, a magnetic field that makes people want to genuflect; nobody is dropping to their knees in the break room. Nor is it fear – although the two get confused constantly – largely because both produce compliance. (Important to note though that only one of them produces loyalty that can survive a brutal round of layoffs).

What charisma looks like, in my opinion, is closer to a kind of interpersonal fluency: the ability to make someone feel genuinely seen and understood, in real time, without the performative theater. The charismatic leader in a meeting doesn’t perform warmth so much as demonstrate that they were listening to the last three things you said. Then they fold that listening into what they say next and so on and so forth; a much rarer skill than most executive coaching programs suggest.

Charisma, then, is less “commands the room” and more “reads the room and adjusts accordingly.”

The Business Case for Not Being Boring

Here too is where the HR-adjacent argument comes in, because charisma isn’t a nice-to-have personality trait we’re discussing purely for entertainment. It’s operationally useful, in the specific sense that people take direction more willingly from someone they trust to be honest with them, and charisma, done properly, is primarily a trust delivery mechanism.

The leader with genuine rizz (and I recognize what I just wrote, and I regret nothing) isn’t the one who breezes into every room or is the most quotable person on the town hall stage. Rather, they’re the leader who participates in consistent and maybe-even-unglamorous interactions with all sorts of people day-in and day-out. They look people in the eye, seem genuinely pleased to be in whatever space they happen to be in, and make others feel welcome. They’re the person who can deliver bad news minus the spin. They’re trusted.

This is also, not incidentally, where charisma gets weaponized, because the same fluency that builds trust can be used to manufacture it artificially. The leader who charms a room and never delivers is not charismatic; they’re a confidence artist. Sadly, organizations that can’t tell the difference between the two tend to promote the wrong people for years before anyone notices the pattern.

It’s Not Just for the Leaders

And this is where I like to push back on the original premise a little, because we tend to reserve the charisma conversation for the C-suite, as though it’s a talent or trait that’s exclusive to the corner office. It isn’t. The most charismatic person in most organizations is not the CEO; it’s a mid-level manager, an admin, or a team lead nobody’s written a case study about, who somehow makes every person on their team feel like a valued collaborator. That’s the skill in its purest and most useful form; no stage and no audience.

Walking into a room and having people feel awe, or fear, or the urge to applaud isn’t what denotes “the rizz.” It’s shining the light on someone else and letting them keep it. That’s harder to come by than it sounds, and considerably more difficult to fake.

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Last Call for HR: One Diagnostic, Neat

For the better part of two decades, the conversation about technology and HR has run on a single anxious loop: the machines are coming, and they’re coming for us. Every new wave arrived wrapped in the language of disruption, from the applicant tracking systems that promised to fix hiring to the analytics dashboards that promised to predict everything to the generative models that can now draft a policy in the time it takes to refill your coffee. The framing was always the same, as though HR were a taxi medallion and AI the rideshare app circling the block, headlights on and meter running.

But disruption is the wrong word, and on reflection it was always the wrong word. AI isn’t the disruption for HR. It’s the diagnostic.

It’s the moment someone turns the lights on at closing time, and now you can finally see what the bar really looks like – the sticky floor, the duct tape on the third stool, and the patron who has been nursing the same flat drink (and the same grievance) since four o’clock.

Nothing has changed about the room; it’s just that the lights came up and what had been comfortable in the dark is suddenly – unflatteringly – visible.

Hiding in the Dark

For a very long time, HR’s professional identity rested on “volume”. We were the keepers of the information, the processors of the forms, the people who knew which policy was which, how folks enrolled in their benefits, and which employee was three documented incidents into a problem.

This gatekeeping, while decidedly unglamorous, wasn’t trivial; it was real work, and it made us necessary. But necessary is not the same as strategic, and the sheer mass of administrative throughput gave the profession a place to hide whenever someone asked the harder questions about our value and contributions.

AI can now remove that volume. It can do the transaction, the routing, the first-draft summarizing, and the predicting-attrition-with-colorful-graphs that we used to do by hand and call insight. And once the transactional layer is gone – once the machine has absorbed everything that was process pretending to be judgment – what remains is precisely the work we always claimed was the point…

… the strategy, discernment and the human judgment about people, power, and consequences. The stuff we have long said no machine can replicate on our behalf.

Transactions to the machine, and judgment to the human. Which sounds mighty fantastic as a slogan, but also sounds a bit brutal as a mirror. Because it leaves nowhere to stand for anyone who built a career on the transaction piece and quietly hoped the judgment bits would never be audited.

You Can’t Stay Here

The thing about closing time is that you don’t get to vote on whether the lights come on. They get flipped on regardless of your desires and the only real decision left is what you do once you can see. You can grumble about the glare and insist the place looked better in the dark – which is true but also beside the point. As the song goes, “you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here…”

So with AI being the diagnostic for HR, it’s time, when those lights go on, to take an honest look at what the diagnostic is offering and decide what you want the HR function to look like in the morning.

The HR leaders I’d put money on are the ones treating this less as a threat to be managed and more as a long-overdue reckoning to be used; the ones moving toward something closer to a human capital consultant than an administrator. They’re the HR professionals advising on the issues that matter – because they refuse to be reduced to a workflow.

But they’re not waiting to see whether the lights are flattering. They already know they won’t be; the “function” the lights are illuminating has, perhaps, never been as strategic as we always insisted it was.

And that is why disruption was always the more comfortable story to tell. Disruption is something that happens to you – an external force with no opinion about your competence, and a convenient one to blame for the wreckage – while a diagnostic implicates you. It doesn’t ask whether the technology is coming; it asks what that technology finds when it arrives. And, more pointedly, it asks whether the function it illuminates was adding value all along, or was simply well-lit enough, until now, to never have to find out.

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