By Sandra Stuart, founder of OctanePeople, a boutique Talent Acquisition and Recruitment firm that works with organizational leaders on evidence-based hiring and talent strategy.
Work has always been a deal. You trade time, energy, and health; the organization trades money, some level of safety, and a place to belong. In early communities, that meant contributing effort and risk in exchange for resources and protection. In industrial economies like Canada, it turned into wages for labour under the guardrails of law: employment standards, health and safety, and human rights. The power imbalance was obvious, but at least the terms were blunt. Employers owned the capital and called the shots; workers sold their labour and, over time, governments stepped in to prevent the worst abuses.
Then the world went global. Talent became mobile, competitors could poach across borders, and capital began outrunning regulation. The simple, transactional deal didn’t go away; it just got wrapped in a new layer of promises: culture, engagement, purpose, perks. That’s where the modern HR story really starts to wobble.
We asked HR to grow up and become “strategic.” Dave Ulrich’s model – strategic partner, employee champion, change agent, functional expert – has been hanging over the profession since the 1990s. For almost thirty years, we’ve been saying HR needs “a seat at the table.” You would think by now we’d either be past that conversation or admitting it didn’t work. Instead, in 2025, McLean & Company published its HR Trends report and quietly dropped a bomb: for the first time since 2020, HR’s role as a strategic partner did not grow. Almost half of HR organizations now have a formal HR strategy, up from 37% the previous year, yet HR’s influence has plateaued.
So what happened?
Part of the answer is that we professionalized the optics, not the deal. As labour markets tightened and “talent” became the new buzzword, HR was loaded with engagement surveys, values campaigns, employer branding, and “people and culture” rebrands. Consultants and vendors moved in hard. They ran proprietary “research,” published thought pieces, and used them to sell platforms, workshops and frameworks. HR became the buying centre for engagement and culture products.
The spend is real. Benchmarks suggest HR and L&D costs typically range from 1,200–2,500 dollars per employee per year, with total HR costs often running 1–2.5% of revenue in Canadian and North American organizations. Engagement, recognition and wellness programs routinely run into six or seven figures annually once you add licenses, consultants and internal time.
You’d expect, given that investment, to see a clear shift in how people experience work. Instead, the independent data is underwhelming. Global engagement is stuck around 21–23%. In the latest reports, only about 31% of employees in the US and Canada report feeling engaged; roughly half are disengaged. Engagement actually fell from 23% to 21% in 2024 – only the second drop in twelve years – costing the global economy an estimated 438 billion US dollars in lost productivity in that year alone. Over the long term, disengagement is estimated to drain approximately 9% of global GDP.
Engaged teams perform better. We’ve known that for years. But at a system level, all the surveys, portals and programs we bought barely moved the needle.
That’s not because the science is weak. If anything, HR has access to more usable research than almost any other function. Across large meta‑analyses and longitudinal studies, including Gallup’s Q12 work, the pattern is consistent: highly engaged teams deliver materially higher profitability, stronger productivity and lower turnover than their peers. Evidence‑based HR frameworks go further: combine peer‑reviewed research, high‑quality internal data, professional judgement, and stakeholder perspectives, and you will make better people decisions.
The sticking point is usage. Reviews of HR practice suggest that fewer than 1% of HR practitioners systematically draw on peer-reviewed research in their day-to-day decisions. Most of what passes for “evidence” is vendor‑backed content, internal pulse data, and whatever everyone else seems to be doing. HR, as it is usually staffed, wasn’t built to be a research‑driven function; it was built to be a people‑pleasing one. We hired for heart – empathy, communication – and quietly deprioritized head – analytics, economics, critical thinking.
Then we handed that function a contradictory brief: keep people “engaged,” don’t touch pay too much, don’t point directly at managers as the problem, and try not to rock the boat with the board. When HR does bring hard evidence about pay gaps, impossible workloads, corrosive leadership or AI risk, it’s very easy for executives to say, “Not now,” or “You’re being negative,” and push it back to next year.
From the employee side, all of this shows up as spin. HR is the department that enforces policies, sits in terminations, talks about wellbeing on Monday and delivers restructuring plans on Friday. It’s not paranoia that drives the fear; surveys consistently find that a large majority of employees distrust or fear HR and worry that it is aligned with management rather than fairness. You don’t repair that with another town hall.
From the HR side, particularly for people who actually read the evidence, it feels like being caged. They can see – in their own turnover numbers, exit interviews and internal surveys – what it’s costing to ignore the basics. They know, from Gallup and multiple large‑scale studies, that manager behaviour explains most of the variance in engagement, and that manager engagement itself has fallen from 30% to 27%, dragging everyone else down. They’re watching AI tools get plugged into screening, assessment and performance without proper validation or governance, while legal commentary flags clear discrimination and privacy risks for employers. And still, the brief is usually, “Run something to make people feel better. Don’t make it too heavy.”
Now layer on the last few years. From 2020 to 2024, HR’s strategic role surged. McLean & Company notes that, following the pandemic, 48% of HR organizations report having a formal HR strategy, up from 37% a year earlier. HR was central to navigating remote and hybrid work, shifting worker expectations, and a genuinely tight labour market. Then 2025 hits, and that rise stalls. The same report says HR’s job now is to pivot to internal talent development and retention, while “showing, through data, how they deliver organizational priorities.” In parallel, industry surveys keep pointing out that HR is still widely seen as a support function rather than a true strategic partner.
So here we are again. AI and automation are moving into the core of how work is done. Engagement is falling for only the second time since 2009. Managers – the very layer we rely on to hold everything together – appear to be disengaging faster than their teams. Regulators are starting to ask harder questions about algorithmic bias, electronic monitoring, and how people decisions are made. CEOs are once again saying they expect HR to be a strategic business partner. And HR is once again being told to “come back” to the boardroom table.
The whiplash is real. One year, HR is the hero of hybrid and wellbeing. The next it’s back to headcount and policy. Now it’s supposed to save the organization from AI risk and yet another engagement crisis.
So, what does “Take Two” look like if we’re serious?
If you work in HR, the job now is to stop hiding behind programs and start acting like the only people in the building whose full‑time job is to understand what the evidence actually says about people and work. That doesn’t mean reading every paper; it means knowing where the credible bodies of knowledge are, knowing your own data cold, and being willing to say, “Here is what we know, here is what it costs us, and here is what each lever is likely to do.”
If you’re a CEO or part of the C‑suite, it may mean admitting you’ve been asking HR to do two incompatible things: protect the organization from people risk and protect leadership from hard people truths. You can’t keep giving people “Head of HR” titles with no real authority, treating every human as a line item on the P&L, and then wonder why HR never shows up like a business partner instead of an overhead cost. If you want evidence‑based advice, you have to hire for it, fund it, and tolerate the discomfort that comes with it. HR doesn’t need another pilot; it needs permission to change the underlying deal and the authority to act on what the data already tells you. In the leadership teams I work with, the inflection point is always the same: someone has to decide they actually want HR to bring them bad news early, not late.
And if you’re an employee, it’s fair to read all of this with a raised eyebrow. You’ve seen engagement campaigns come and go. You’ve watched HR be rolled out as the face of decisions it didn’t make. You’ve learned to treat big culture promises as a warning sign, not a comfort.
“HR at the boardroom table, Take Two” only matters if the version of HR in that seat is different this time: less theatre, more evidence; fewer perks, more basic fairness; fewer announcements, more honest math and follow‑through. Otherwise, it’s just another round of the same game, with the same people paying the price.
This is the anchor I’m betting my work on as a search partner: HR has the richest evidence base in management and is still largely operating like a trend function. That is a waste – for leaders, for people, and for the business. The organizations that will come out of this next cycle in one piece will be the ones where HR finally becomes what it should have been all along: the part of the system that insists on listening to the evidence, even when it cuts across the story everyone would rather tell.
If you’re an organizational leader who wants HR to operate as an evidence engine instead of a trend function, that’s the conversation I spend my time in – linking what the research says, what your data shows, and who you hire to change the deal, not just the story.