Today’s edition is presented by SelectSoftware Reviews

3 Reasons You’ll Love SSR’s Free HR Software Matching Service

1. 🪙 It’s 100% Free: No cost, no catch, and zero sales pressure.

2. 🧩 Get Tailored Matches: 2-3 tailored HRIS, ATS or Payroll options shortlisted from 1,000+ HR tools.

3. 🫶 HR Teams Love It: Rated 4.9/5 and trusted by 15,000+ HR teams.

Why waste hours researching when you could get tailored results in minutes. Get your complimentary HR software matches today, and make your next HR software choice the easiest one yet.

Howdy HR friends!👋

Hope your Tuesday’s treating you kindly (and your HR tech isn’t crashing… yet).

Let's be brutally honest: if you're still running HR like it's 2020, you're already obsolete. By 2026, the CHRO role will split into two camps—strategic transformation architects who run the business, and administrative relics updating their LinkedIn profiles.

Which side of that divide will you be on? 🔥

👇️ Coming up

In today’s edition

🔄 The New CHRO Playbook: Leading Through Perpetual Change

🛋️ The Break Room: What's your top CHRO priority heading into 2026? (Cast your vote below!)

📚 Human Readsources: Amazon's AI ethics concerns, the productivity hack of body doubling, and preparing for potential 2025 workforce reductions.

💭 Opening thoughts

CHRO Evolution: Master Perpetual Change

With 70% of organizational change initiatives failing and a mere 21% of employees feeling engaged worldwide, are CHROs equipped to face the transformation imperative of 2026?

This seismic shift in business expectations has elevated the CHRO role from traditional HR management to strategic transformation architect, creating unprecedented executive influence for those ready to evolve.

Today's Chief Human Resources Officers must rapidly develop new capabilities that bridge people strategy with business outcomes, transitioning from policy enforcers to drivers of organizational adaptation and growth.

Discover the essential skills and strategic approaches that will separate transformation-leading CHROs from those updating their LinkedIn profiles, and position yourself as the strategic powerhouse your organization desperately needs.

For easy reading

🧠 Let’s unpick

🔄 The New CHRO Playbook: Leading Through Perpetual Change

Let's call it what it is. Most CHROs are drowning right now.

You're juggling succession planning headaches (66% of you say it's your top pain point), navigating the AI revolution without a map, and trying to implement change that actually sticks while your C-suite colleagues expect miracles yesterday.

The traditional HR playbook is being shredded before our eyes, and by 2026, the gap between strategic CHROs and administrative ones will become a canyon.

The truth? Most organizations are terrible at change—with a staggering 70% of transformation efforts failing. And let's not even get started on that depressing 21% employee engagement figure.

The CHRO role is fundamentally transforming from people administrator to business strategist. According to HR Dive, "79% of HR decision makers agree the CHRO role is expanding in strategic influence", yet many aren't prepared for this evolution.

The most successful CHROs are already thinking like operations leaders—treating change as a discipline rather than an event, focusing on middle managers as the true change catalysts (not the C-suite), and engineering belief through evidence rather than PowerPoint decks.

The days of implementing change through town halls and email announcements are dead. What's replacing them? Pattern recognition, experiential learning, and distributed ownership.

So how do you actually do this?

• Start by flipping the script on transformation—begin with your middle managers instead of executives. They're your secret weapon.

• Next, abandon the idea of "friendly" test groups for new processes; instead, test with your most critical audiences first to build credibility.

• Create a network of cross-functional change champions who own pieces of the transformation.

• And perhaps most importantly, stop obsessing over where work happens and focus instead on how work gets done.

The CHROs who master these operational approaches to change won't just survive the coming years, they'll become the most influential executives in their organizations.

The question isn't whether you need these skills by 2026; it's whether you'll still be relevant without them.

You can read more at...

🔗 CHROs Face Evolving Role Amid Succession Planning and AI Challenges (HR Dive) 

🔗 HR Leaders Face Mounting Challenges in the AI-Driven Workplace (HR Brew) 

🔗 How CHROs Can Lead Transformational Change: Six Operational Lessons (HR Grapevine)

🎬 Lights, camera, action!

Takeaway and try

1. 🔄 Forget top-down change management—start transformation with your middle managers who can translate strategy into action and influence teams directly.

2. 🧪 Test new HR initiatives with your toughest critics first instead of friendly audiences; once they're convinced, you'll build credibility across the organization.

3. 🌉 Create a network of cross-functional "change champions" who own specific pieces of your transformation and can drive adoption in their departments.

4. 👥 Stop obsessing over where work happens and redirect that energy to improving how work gets done through better processes and collaboration tools.

5. 🔍 Develop your pattern recognition skills to identify emerging workplace trends before they become problems—this separates strategic CHROs from administrative ones.

👀Too long didn’t read

TLDR

🔄 By 2026, the most influential CHROs won't just manage people—they'll master perpetual change by treating transformation as a discipline, activating middle managers as change catalysts, and focusing on how work gets done rather than where it happens.

☕The break room

What’s your take?

📚 Additional reading

Human Readsources

🤖 Amazon Workers Demand Ethical AI Development Amid Layoffs (The Guardian) - Amazon employees protest AI's impact on jobs, climate, and democracy.

👥 Body Doubling Boosts Focus Through Virtual Work Companions (WorkLife) - Body doubling boosts focus by working alongside others virtually.

📉 2025 Layoffs Surge as AI Replaces Workers (The HR Digest) - 2025 sees highest mass layoff warnings in a decade.

That’s it for today.

Thanks for reading to the end and we hope today’s edition sparked some new ideas for your workplace! 🧠

We know you’re super busy and really appreciate you saving some room for us in your inbox 😀