Now you’ve had a chance to explore the new Rewired HR ecosystem, we imagine you have a lot of questions! Next, we will answer some of the key questions you may have when trying to consider how it will work in practice for your organisation and what it means for HR roles and ways of working in the future.
HR roles in the future: What is fundamentally different?
The Ulrich model was a powerful response to the needs of its time. It helped professionalise HR, separate strategic work from transactional activity, and introduce clearer accountabilities. However, it was designed for organisations optimised around predictability and scale, not for constant disruption.
In today’s environment, where Chief People Officers are expected to simplify HR, reduce cost and accelerate value, the Ulrich model too often creates fragmentation. Business partners, centres of expertise and shared services operate with handoffs between them, duplicating effort and slowing decision making just when speed and integration matter most. Our Rewired HR model fundamentally rethinks this structure around flow, intelligence and outcomes. Rather than dividing work by functional specialism, it organises HR around how value is created and delivered.
Click through the slides
Commercial relationship management
Commercial Relationship Management evolves the traditional HR business partner role into a genuinely commercial interface with the business. The focus is no longer on responding to demand, but on shaping it. These leaders connect business priorities to people action by sensing emerging issues, interpreting insights and bringing options and solutions proactively. This directly addresses the pressure to do more with less by ensuring HR effort is focused on what truly drives business performance, not on managing volume.
Workforce transformation
Workforce Transformation then provides surge capability, drawing on deep expertise in change management, organisation design and behavioural science to deliver targeted shifts where the business needs them most. Together, these roles replace static structures with a dynamic system that blends AI efficiency with human judgement and creativity, enabling HR to pivot at the speed of the business.
Value delivery
Value Delivery brings together what were previously split between shared services and centres of expertise. It owns outcomes across the employee lifecycle, from day-to-day operations through to products, tools and complex problem solving. By combining fixed and flexible resources and AI team-mates, it can be rapidly deployed to the highest priority transformation or operational challenges.
Intelligence and insights
At the heart of the model sits the Intelligence and Insights hub, which replaces fragmented analytics, service centres and reporting teams. It acts as the brain and nervous system of HR, continuously sensing what is happening across the workforce, learning from data and experience, and guiding action across the ecosystem. Advanced analytics, AI driven intelligence and digital platforms enable a self-solve model at scale, resolving the majority of employee and manager needs without human intervention, while specialists focus on insight, service excellence and enablement. This creates the integration and agility that legacy models lack.
Service excellence: Who’s on the hook now?
In many HR operating models, service excellence is treated as the responsibility of a single team, often a shared service centre, measured primarily through efficiency metrics. This creates a narrow view of quality and drives behaviours that optimise transactions rather than experiences or outcomes. In our Rewired HR model, service excellence is elevated from a function to a system wide discipline. It is not owned by one team but orchestrated across the entire HR ecosystem.
Click the image to view full screen
This shared model of accountability reflects the reality that service excellence is created at the intersection of insight, design and delivery. Technology provides the scale and consistency needed to operate efficiently, but human judgement remains critical in setting standards, interpreting signals and making decisions about where to invest. By embedding service excellence into the operating rhythm of HR, rather than isolating it in one team, the model creates a resilient, insight led approach that can adapt continuously as business needs change.
Global vs. local: How does the new model address these nuances?
Global organisations face a persistent tension between standardisation and local relevance. Traditional HR models often resolve this by duplicating capability at global, regional and local levels, driving cost and inconsistency. Our Rewired HR model takes a different approach, using intelligence, AI and flexible deployment to simplify the landscape, while preserving what truly needs to be local. The location strategy also needs careful consideration, as a centralised hub may no longer be needed as economies of scale decline and greater need is for scarce skills and talent.
Click the image to view full screen
The Rewired HR model provides a clearer articulation of not only what needs to be done at each level, but which element of the model is responsible for this. The result is an HR function that is globally integrated, regionally responsive and locally precise, able to do more with less while staying deeply human where it matters most.
Mindset matters: What must change to enable the new model?
An operating model alone will not deliver the outcomes Chief People Officers are looking for. The Rewired HR model requires a fundamental mindset and behavioural change in how HR, managers and employees interact. At its core is a move from dependency to empowerment, enabled by AI and grounded in human centred design.
There are three critical shifts required:
Click the image to view full screen
The move needs carefully planned engagement journeys. Each journey needs to build to enable, equip and empower all players to play their part. Demonstrating the right mindset and behaviours creates the cultural foundation on which a Rewired HR can successfully embed and grow.
Click the image to view full screen
Skills and capability: What’s needed to power the new model?
Delivering this model demands a new capability mix across HR, reflecting the shift from functional delivery to value orchestration. At the core are people who can link commercial priorities to people decisions and measurable outcomes.
Click the image to view full screen
Across all roles, the defining capability is orchestration. The ability to synthesise insight, align stakeholders and enable decisions that balance efficiency with humanity is what allows HR to meet today’s demands. Technology powers the system, but it is these distinctly human skills that give it purpose and ensure HR remains a strategic force in the organisation.
Human + AI: How does the teamwork actually work?
Rewired HR assumes a world where AI isn’t in the background – it’s on the field, acting as a true teammate. Want to see how it really works? Stay tuned – the next blog brings it to life.
