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What if HR Were the True Drivers of Change in Business?

What if HR Were the True Drivers of Change in Business?

Recruitment, training, generational shifts, soft skills, digitalization… The challenges are many, but Human Resources today have the opportunity to reinvent their strategic role. In Switzerland, this transformation is already underway — and it often begins with constructive self-reflection. A better-equipped, more conscious HR function can become a decisive lever for organizational growth.

An HR Role in Full Redefinition

For a long time, HR was seen as a support service — ensuring administrative processes and compliance with labor laws. Today, that model is reaching its limits. Current challenges go far beyond compliance: it’s about building a culture, supporting transformation, and bringing a vision to life through talent.

In Switzerland, faced with a shortage of qualified labor, digital transformation, and evolving social expectations, HR must become strategic partners. This requires a new posture: more proactive, more influential, and more connected to human realities.

Recruiting in the Era of Invisible Skills

Recruiting today means navigating uncertainty. Career paths are no longer linear, experiences go beyond resumes, and behavioral competencies often outweigh technical skills.

But how do you detect emotional intelligence, adaptability, or resilience in an interview? How do you avoid confirmation bias? Many recruiters feel alone facing these issues.

A structured approach — based on observation, role plays, and the right questions — helps secure hires while respecting each candidate’s uniqueness. This expertise doesn’t come by chance: it’s developed through practical, directly applicable training.

Teaching Is No Longer Improvised

Technical knowledge alone is no longer enough. In a constantly changing world, effective knowledge transfer is a strategic challenge — to quickly onboard new employees, retain critical know-how, and support internal change.

Yet many experts are suddenly made trainers without pedagogical tools or guidance. The result: uninspiring training sessions where attention drops quickly and real impact is hard to measure.

Learning to become a trainer means acquiring concrete methods to structure a session, engage an audience, and assess learning outcomes. It also requires a mindset shift: more learner-focused, more impact-oriented. In a learning culture, this is a powerful lever for Swiss HR teams.

Generations Y and Z: Challenge or Opportunity?

Intergenerational dialogue can be tricky in the workplace. Younger employees expect flexibility, feedback, autonomy, and purpose. Older colleagues value stability, expertise, and long-term loyalty. Each often thinks the other “doesn’t understand the world of work.”

Rather than oppose these views, we can build an inclusive culture that values complementarities. But this requires deep insight into generational behaviors, needs, and motivational drivers.

Targeted training can help decode these differences, adapt management styles, and foster trust. After all, every generation seeks recognition and usefulness — just in different ways.

Can Digital Tools Support the Human?

HR automation is progressing rapidly: AI-powered sourcing, digital onboarding, performance platforms, LMS for training… These tools are not neutral. Poorly used, they dehumanize; properly integrated, they free time for what really matters.

Yet many HR professionals are still poorly supported in adopting these solutions — or they experience them top-down, through a technocratic lens.

Learning about HR digitalization doesn’t mean becoming a technician. It means understanding the stakes behind the tools, choosing the right ones, and integrating them into a people-centered strategic vision. In Switzerland, where management culture still values human connection, this hybridization is crucial.

Equipping HR Is Equipping the Business

HR training is not an end in itself — it’s a lever for transformation. It gives professionals the tools to navigate uncertainty, better understand the people they support, and contribute actively to business strategy.

In Switzerland, companies that invest in upskilling their HR teams also invest in the sustainability of their culture, the quality of their recruitment, and the smoothness of their internal transitions.

Public Speaking: The Forgotten Skill in the Digital Age?

Public Speaking: The Forgotten Skill in the Digital Age?

We talk a lot about digital transformation, agility, and artificial intelligence. But we talk less and less… about how we talk. Literally. Public speaking — this fundamental human capacity to structure and convey ideas to a group — seems to have disappeared from the list of professional priorities. Should we be concerned?

 

Orality, sidelined by digital writing

The proliferation of written communication tools (emails, instant messaging, collaboration platforms) has pushed live speaking into the background. Most workplace interactions now take place through interfaces where the voice is absent. Even meetings, often held over video calls, reduce oral expression to the bare minimum: we speak to “walk through slides,” not to embody ideas.

This evolution raises questions. Orality is not just one communication channel among others: it’s a mode of thinking, a way to build connection, exercise authority, and keep a culture alive. What isn’t expressed through speech often remains abstract, cold, or inert.

 

Public speaking: the benefits beyond expression

Teaching professionals to speak in public is not about crafting a “great speech.” It’s about helping them structure their thoughts, clarify their intentions, and find their place within a group.

The benefits are many:

  • Stronger leadership: managers who express themselves clearly create a presence that fosters trust.
  • Strategic alignment: a well-articulated idea is more easily understood — and more effectively implemented.
  • Team cohesion: shared speech creates bonds where written communication can divide.
  • Personal development: overcoming the fear of public speaking builds confidence and assertiveness across many aspects of work.

 

Why is this skill in decline?

Several factors explain this erosion:

  • Tech-based interaction: digital tools reduce the need for direct, in-person communication.
  • Time pressure and efficiency culture: it’s perceived as quicker to write an email than to prepare a clear, impactful talk.
  • Lack of structured training: many organizations still see orality as an innate talent or a soft skill, not something to be rigorously developed.
  • Personal discomfort: fear of public exposure remains high, even among experienced professionals.

 

The return of presence in a world of avatars

As communication becomes more virtual, embodied, spontaneous, vibrant speech paradoxically gains value. In a world flooded with AI-generated or templated content, hearing someone speak “for real” — with pauses, hesitations, emotion — becomes rare and powerful.

Some companies have understood this: they are bringing oral formats back — internal talks, participative seminars, team forums — and are training employees in these new rituals. Not to “perform,” but to create meaning, direction, and engagement.

 

A new kind of leadership — through a voice?

Speech is not merely a communication tool. It is a gesture of thought, a lever of influence. In a world increasingly dominated by fragmented messages and standardized content, it is essential to restore orality to its rightful place in professional life. The point is not to oppose speaking and digital tools, but to recognize — with clarity — that public speaking remains a powerful vector of meaning, clarity, and leadership.

 

At Swissnova, we see public speaking not as an accessory skill, but as a core lever for transmission, clarity, and impact. Training this ability isn’t about reassuring or freeing up expression — it’s about helping professionals master their influence with intention and purpose.

Our approach avoids communication tricks. Instead, it focuses on deeper work: refining intention, adjusting posture, articulating thought. It’s not about “speaking well,” but about making ideas move — in a living, structured, engaging way that resonates with others.

 

So the question isn’t just “How do we speak better?” but:

“What becomes of an organization where no one speaks anymore?”