As CHRO, your role has never been more dynamic. The CHRO mandate has evolved rapidly and you are expected to be a strategist, an operator, a trusted advisor to the CEO and a voice of the employees—all while facing the strain of shifting workforce expectations, AI adoption, financial pressure and a leadership team that wants faster results with less overhead.
That’s a heavy mandate. You’re at the center of the storm, translating the needs of the leadership team to the entire workforce and shouldering the push and pull of the rapid change we find ourselves in. It’s not easy by any means. This work doesn’t happen in a vacuum and is actually all the more reason to ask: Are you visible to your frontline?
Generally, a CHRO’s interactions with the frontline workforce are limited to reports funneled up through HR managers and mandates funneled down from your office into every employee’s inbox. Most people have an ambivalent attitude toward their HR leaders at best, and at worst, see them as adversaries. How do you instead partner with your workforce, including frontline employees? How do you create bidirectional feedback mechanisms that actually integrate knowledge from the floor to the field?
Culture is either designed intentionally or by default, and by default, the people closest to the customers get no say in it. This leads to reduced engagement, increased turnover and a huge talent pipeline issue. Here is how CHROs can change that.
Make Sure They Know Why
“Because the boss told me so” isn’t good enough. Again and again, we see employees begrudgingly implementing new AI-driven project management, inventory or tracking tools because someone decided they need to “use more AI.” The organizations who are and will win in the next few years know that generative and agentic AI aren’t just buzzwords, they are the technology that will drive strategy for years to come. Don’t reinvent a perfectly good spreadsheet. Instead, find out where the actual pain points, time sucks and resource drains are. A tool or system is only efficient if it’s solving a problem, not adding to a laundry list of things to adopt and double-check.
The “why” matters for any new system, tool or policy you are leading. You are far more likely to get buy-in from your managers if they are able to explain to their reports, “This is the problem being solved and this is how it helps me, you and the organization.” It is also a clarifying question for your own thinking and culture strategy. You shouldn’t be leading a single initiative that can’t be tied directly back to your three- to five-year strategy.
It may seem counterintuitive, but discipline around culture and strategy is what allows an organization to be responsive, not just reactive. Making changes without rigorous attention to strategy isn’t adaptive, it’s messy and haphazard. And your frontline feels the brunt of that, fielding questions from disgruntled customers and bearing the load of burnout.
Work Hand-In-Hand With Managers
Instead of the status quo top-down people leadership, enlist your managers as partners. They can be ambassadors for their teams as well as advocates for tools, systems and policies. Middle managers are an especially neglected segment of your workforce, but you cannot effectively transform your culture without their leadership. These are also the people with the most insight into the talent pipeline, able to identify emerging leaders, talent gaps and intractable daily issues on their team.
Recognition of the work they do goes a long way to building these relationships. When someone’s only interactions with HR leaders are punitive or directive, they will come to every conversation with caution. Managers know what works in practice versus on paper. They’re your collaborators and confidants, and they can be the greatest ambassadors of culture change throughout the organization.
Listen to the Early Warning System
Decades ago, coal miners would carry canaries down with them to do their dangerous work. If the canary passed out, they knew the oxygen level was dangerous. They cared for the canaries, reviving them whenever possible, and they certainly didn’t just keep mining. The point was to stop, assess and take action.
Frontline workers, whether they are researchers, farmworkers or retail employees, are your organization’s early warning system. And you shouldn’t wait for dire results to act. This summer gave us a stark example of what happens when frontline concerns are dismissed: We faced numerous food recalls partly attributed to poor working conditions. Frontline employees work with your products and services and receive real-time feedback about them all day. Someone working at an Aldi or a McDonalds hears constantly about how the store looks and feels, about menu items, prices and customer frustrations.
That feedback is invaluable for adjusting and refining strategy, programs and products, and these employees often know better than anyone which problems need to be solved to strengthen the company’s results. It takes trust built up over many visits to gain a lifelong customer, but only one terrible experience to lose one. CHROs have to lead the work not only to receive that employee and customer feedback, but to integrate it into the way decisions get made, and quickly.
CHROs can’t interact one-on-one with every employee or manager. But they can make themselves and their strategic priorities known by empowering every HR leader with strategic, data-backed “whys” for every goal, policy and initiative they enact. Visibility is not literal, it’s systematic. You become visible when employees understand not just what is changing, but why it matters. You become visible when HR is experienced not as an office of enforcement, but as a partner to make the workplace better. That visibility enables you to form a genuine relationship with your workforce, and be a leader for all.
