Origin

During a 2021 meeting between SHRM President & CEO Johnny C. Taylor, Jr. and the Secretary-General of the International Organisation of Employers (IOE) Roberto Suárez Santos, an idea was born to create a shared, human-centered understanding of how workers and employers can thrive, now and in the future.

Together, SHRM, IOE, and Seyfarth Shaw aim to improve the lives and livelihoods of all workers by creating data-driven policy recommendations and best practices for policymakers worldwide. We invite you to join us in this mission-driven journey.

Our Work

In 2022, SHRM and Seyfarth Shaw partnered to develop global worker personas with the hope of building a universal language or a lexicon of different types of workers. They developed 30 different worker types based on factors including wage structure, e.g., hourly or salaried; eligibility for worker’s compensation; and eligibility to receive benefits, among other attributes. SHRM and Seyfarth Shaw, each with a global presence, were able to leverage experts from different parts of the world to develop the personas.

SHRM is currently developing first-of-its-kind research on the true needs and desires of different types of workers to ensure its policy recommendations and best practices are supported by data. Much of today’s research is focused on the worker’s experience with a workplace’s culture, but not on the actual needs and desires of a worker, let alone different types of workers.

Consequently, today’s labor laws are outdated due to a lack of understanding about what workers currently need and may result in a one-size-fits-all approach that causes tension in the worker-employer relationship. The SHRM research will concentrate on the different types of workers today and tell the stories of what they need to thrive in the modern workplace. The 2023 research will focus on the United States, Canada, Mexico, and the U.K.

Research planned for 2024 will focus on all regions of the world.

Global Worker Summit (July 2023, Geneva, Switzerland)

A global convening to discuss the tectonic shifts within the workplace, the event will focus on today’s workers as exemplified in the 30 global worker personas developed by SHRM and Seyfarth Shaw. The event will convene experts, researchers, global leaders and workers to discuss the humans at the center of work, their needs, their desires, and how global business leaders, civic organizations and policymakers can work together to secure the lives and livelihoods of todav’s and tomorrow’s workers. This event will also celebrate the workers who are creating our future, recognizing who they are and the many ways they contribute to the global economy.