After more than 15 years working in HR and People Operations, I’ve come to see HR as something much bigger than what often comes to mind for people.

I believe HR can be a positive force in our lives, our communities, and society at large. Not just inside companies.

I believe the way we design work shapes people’s lives. It shapes mental health, financial stability, family systems, identity, community, and even our collective sense of possibility. Work is one of the primary ways society is experienced. And because of that, HR carries real influence.

When done thoughtfully and treated as craft, HR is not simply policy administration, compliance management, or the person who joins for difficult conversations. It is those things at times, but it is also systems design, communication, leadership support, culture-building, and experience design.

At its best, HR can help organizations become more human, more adaptive, more ethical, more creative, and ultimately more sustainable.

Borrowing from the concept of prosocial behavior in psychology, I think of this as “prosocial HR.” To me, it means approaching HR with the belief that organizations should create value not only for shareholders or executives, but also for the people whose lives are shaped by work every day and, by extension, the families, communities, and systems connected to them.

It means asking:

What kind of systems help people thrive?

What kind of management helps a person reach their highest potential?

What conditions support trust, growth, collaboration, and meaning?

What actually helps individuals and teams do exceptional work over time?

What does research tell us?

What does lived experience tell us?

And then building people practices from there.

One of the things I value most about I-O Psychology is that it continues to study humans at work with rigor and curiosity. We are constantly learning more about motivation, burnout, autonomy, feedback, belonging, leadership, group dynamics, and psychological safety.

Yet too often, our policies and workplace structures lag behind what research already tells us. Or worse, workplace decisions become driven primarily by short-term pressure, political trends, public narratives, investor sentiment, or the preferences of a very small number of powerful people.

I think HR has a responsibility to challenge that thoughtfully and strategically.

Designing workplaces around human needs does not weaken organizational performance. In many cases, it strengthens it.

When I think about “human resources” in the truest sense, I think about our distinctly human capacities: creativity, judgment, innovation, collaboration, resilience, empathy, care, and meaning-making.

These are not qualities organizations can afford to minimize or treat as secondary to performance. They are often the very things that allow organizations to adapt, solve problems, build trust, and evolve.

Especially now.

As technology rapidly reshapes work, I find myself thinking less about what humans are losing and more about what humans uniquely contribute. I don’t believe the future of work will be built solely through efficiency or automation. I think we will continue to need deeply human capacities to move society forward in ways that feel like progress rather than simple acceleration.

We will still need people who can navigate ambiguity, collaborate across differences, build trust, imagine new possibilities, and care about the impact of what they create.

I know many people have not experienced HR this way. In fact, I hear the opposite all the time. I’m often told this view is simply not how most organizations operate in the real world.

But I also know many HR professionals who believe exactly this. And I know some organizations operate this way because I’ve worked inside them. They are environments where HR actively contributes to organizational strategy by advocating for flexibility, fairness, inclusion, development, wellbeing, and healthier leadership cultures.

I want HR to continue proving that human-centered systems are not separate from strategy.

And while prosocial HR is different from labor organizing or union movements, I believe they share an important truth: work should work for people. Labor movements often advocate for this externally. Prosocial HR has the opportunity to advocate for it from within organizations themselves.

Personally, I do this work with optimism because I genuinely love it. I’m lucky to be someone who finds deep meaning in my work, and I think that’s part of why I care so much about helping create workplaces where other people can experience that too.

I love seeing a leader realize their team performed better because people were given clarity, support, trust, and room to grow.

I love seeing an employee reach a career milestone because they were challenged, developed, and equipped with the resources to get there.

I love seeing teams become more creative and collaborative because they had an environment where they could ask questions, make mistakes, iterate, and build something meaningful together.

Those outcomes do not happen accidentally. Workplace conditions shape them. Leadership and HR shape them.

So I’ll keep working toward a more prosocial vision of HR in my own practice, and I’ll gladly partner with organizations that share that view: organizations that believe supporting people and building strong organizations are not competing goals, but deeply connected ones.