Chief Human Resources Officer

Patricia Fors started her career in 1999  at  the gaming industry, working at Automat Gruppen casinos while parallely  pursuing her degree, where she quickly became a line manager. By 2005,she took larger leadership roles managing up to seven teams with about 150 co-workers each. Working as a recruitment consultant  till 2007, she then set her sights on the human resources (HR) industry by joining the IKEA group as Deputy Country Human Resource Manager. Other positions held by Fors include Her other designations include being the Chief Human Resource Officer (CHRO) of the Rosti Group, Global Head of Talent Management at IKEA Group and  Senior Advisor for the Future of Work Solutions group. She is currently the CHRO of Kjell &Company.

In an exclusive interview with H Public Company Europe - CIOReview, Patricia Fors, shares her insights on the ongoing developments in HR technologies, discussing a wide range of topics in detail subjects such as remote working practices, and inter- employee communication softwares.

How would you describe the one day in the life of a CHRO in terms of the tasks and challenges faced in the role?

There is big difference between working for a big organization, to  transitioning to medium to smaller organizations, because I think when I came in from working in IKEA, it is so much different one way or another. it is like one day there is a strategy meeting about how to take the company forward. And next day the subject is how to create a deeper culture strategy with the team. And on the third day it revolves around working with company operations. For a CHRO it involves looking at everything that is part of the system including resolving workplace tensions and working with the team, from hands-on operations to looking at learning to leadership models.

Can you elaborate on how the HR space has changed in the last 18-24 months and what kind of strategies have been implemented in new developments?

In the past 1 and a half year the company was basically looking at how to take the HR along a more strategic route and I believe it was driven by the whole transformation of the market. The pandemic has raises the question of how to get back to things as they were before, how to build things after the pandemic? What is the new normal? The key look into the company now and to build a people strategy based on the cornerstones of future works: a human centric focus. I’ve heard about people leaving their jobs as they were so used to distance working that they  suddenly feel the  shock of commuting again from Monday to Thursday once lockdowns are lifted. I believe we need a strategy that looks at humans in terms of different life stages. For example, people starting to request different things in benefit packages. That compensation or salary is not that important but preferences are given to freedom and auto benefits. We are talking about growing inequalities, maybe we cant get hold of talent but there are like two sides of work for talent that we are going to have a big share of the people being outside of their market because if you can automate so many of the jobs which we have now seen possible, then there is the huge need of new skills coming.

What would you like to emphasize on regarding the situation of organizational inclusivity?

There is a bit of a shift now in 2022, there is more of a focus on building inclusive relations and you can’t build diversity without an inclusive workplace. So I think there is a difference I think a couple of years back, we had diversity come first and then basically you put in the numbers in place, We need to have balanced numbers in terms of gender, ethnicity and other minorities. We need to have the right percentage but it doesn't matter if the culture will not accept those people because if you counter-culture and you feel that you are an outsider and that you are not welcome, the turnover of the people will commence quite quickly. People will be out again. Basically the whole pandemic has created like a new trend in this exponential development that now we are talking really about; humans with inclusivity, we are talking about equality, we are talking about empowerment and those words are not only words.

Any piece of advice that you would like to provide your fellow CHROs as to what can they learn and where should they go as fellow CHROs to create strategies for their companies?

So you need to basically find a model which summarizes this in a simple way. And this is basically what I did modeling a year ago, I actually did a project for IKEA and then I continued with a consulting company and we interviewed about 30 companies from different industries. And we tried to make sense of what the major trends were and we ended up with 10 major trends if you look at those 10 then you will be able to relate with 99% of them, you will be able to summarize, what going on in the market. So I think there are models out there and I need to find you a model which fits you. Not too complex, not too theoretical which is basically summarizing what's going on out there because like it like I said, I am summarizing it in 10 criteria  and it encapsulates human experiences, purpose organizations, network organization, leadership, resilience as an ability for example because  in terms of resilience, we are leaving efficiency for resilience much more now. We are talking about new jobs and skills, new work for talent, and diverse ways of working focusing on equality, inclusion, diversity and people empowerment innovation.

Any newer trends that you are seeing on the horizon which is having an impact right now or would have an impact in the next 18 months regarding the future of HR spaces?

I think one of the topics like which have been on the agenda for many years for the CEO,s, how to structure a model organization and previously it has been talked on here, how you are supposed to turn out the pyramid and then you have matrixes but the new thing is of course how to build a network organization. And how to build a flat organization and how to build a self-leading team. And I don't think there are many companies that have cracked the code but there is some which have proven if you build a flat organization, like a self-leading team when you give people powers, then your profits are increasing.