Meet Deborah Hartung, HR Thought Leader, Author & Keynote Speaker

Deborah Hartung has been asking uncomfortable questions about the future of HR for over a decade. Based in South Africa, she works as a change consultant, keynote speaker, and author focused on human-centric leadership and what she calls the "new world of work." Her current work is with Kind, an organization built around helping managers, leaders, and HR professionals build workplaces that are psychologically safe and genuinely human. She is widely recognized as one of the most prominent HR voices on the African continent and counts herself among those who believe HR needs to stop hiding behind compliance and start leading cultural change.

Her conversation with AllVoices covers the five common failure modes in employee feedback systems, what it actually takes to build a culture of continuous feedback, and why HR's future depends on becoming the guide and coach the function was always meant to be.

What is the state of the HR industry?

HR is in transition. Hartung describes the tension at the core of that transition clearly: technology is creating space for HR to do more strategic work, but too many HR functions are still spending that space on compliance and checklists.

If I had to simplify as much as possible, I would say "in transition." On the one hand, HR is embracing technology and automation to free itself up to become the advisor, coach and guide that I believe it was always meant to be. On the other hand, HR is still grappling with historical issues of being too transactional and focusing too much on compliance and checklists. Which side of the transition HR is on, in my experience, depends very much on individual HR leaders and the executive teams they form a part of. If you don't want to be a transactional, administrative support function as HR, you need to get out there and influence hearts and minds and you need to make some changes to the way you work, the type of work that you do and your entire outlook on the role of HR and the human experience at work.

This framing is useful for any HR leader trying to diagnose why their function is not getting strategic traction. If the executive team sees HR as a compliance function, that perception was built over time by the work HR chose to prioritize. Changing it requires deliberate effort to show up differently, not just to describe the role differently.

What are the most common challenges in employee feedback and reporting?

Hartung identifies five failure modes that appear in almost every organization she works with, regardless of geography or industry. They are worth reviewing against your own feedback system.

Feedback, of course, is a two-way street. We get feedback from employees, but we are also meant to be giving regular feedback as managers and leaders. HR is stuck in the middle of this minefield as well, because there is a common misconception that this is HR's job — mainly because, historically, HR would coordinate feedback from an administrative perspective and often collate feedback and report to senior leadership. In the new world of work, feedback is everyone's job!

The five challenges Hartung names in organizations she has worked with across the globe:

Time: most line managers complain that they don't have the time to be giving regular feedback because they're too busy "doing their actual job." Similarly, when feedback is invited from employees, they have the exact same complaint! They don't have time to complete lengthy employee surveys. And of course if these things are only done once or twice a year, it's going to be an arduous task and nobody is going to want to do it.

Trust: This one is huge and it is more prevalent amongst employees when they're asked to provide us with feedback. They don't trust that their identities are protected. They don't trust the process. They don't trust that there won't be any repercussions for their honesty. They don't trust that the company will actually do anything about the results of the feedback... The list goes on and on and we can't blame employees for having these very real trust issues. Historically, corporate track records in general, haven't been great, and that's on all of us.

Frequency: This relates to the "time" challenge I mentioned earlier. The less regularly we invite feedback or give our employees feedback on their performance and career development, the worse it is and the harder it is to make any positive changes happen.

Capacity: This is often more a challenge I see on the line manager side. They simply don't know how to give regular, honest and meaningful feedback to individuals on their teams. It's a major gap in the leadership development journey and something HR should be all over.

Quality: because managers aren't competent and confident in giving regular, honest and meaningful feedback, the content of the actual conversations when they do happen, is also poor. So the results are poor because employees don't come away from a feedback session with items to improve or any kind of guidance or tools on what to do or how to do it.

The trust challenge is the most foundational. Psychological safety around feedback means employees believe that what they say will be handled confidentially, treated seriously, and responded to in some visible way. Without that belief, the other four challenges are symptoms of the underlying trust deficit.

What advice do you have for organizations trying to improve their feedback culture?

Hartung's recommendations address each of the five failure modes. She does not suggest tech as the first fix. She starts with the human infrastructure.

So, firstly, make two way feedback a part of the workplace culture by moving away from the annual performance appraisal and replacing it instead, with a regular (at least monthly) check-in conversation. Make it a part of everyday life to ask employees how they're doing and if they need any support or assistance. Just be human and have authentic conversations instead of these old-fashioned, structured, one hour performance reviews or feedback sessions. Grab coffee together. Walk and talk. Have a weekly 15 minute check-in with each member of your team and talk about everything BUT their job performance.

A 15-minute weekly check-in that avoids job performance creates the relationship from which honest performance conversations later become possible. Most organizations try to have the honest performance conversation before they have built the relationship. It rarely works. A structured one-on-one practice is the most direct way to build the consistent contact that Hartung describes.

Secondly, teach everyone throughout the entire organization, from the interns to the CEO, how to give and receive meaningful feedback. Equip everyone with basic skills and competence in using the GROW coaching model. This will drastically improve the quality of conversations and the outputs from these interactions.

Dealing with the trust issues is going to require a lot of work to be done at a leadership level and it's going to require some tough calls to be made. If someone is toxic — even if you think they're your top performer — they have to change or they have to go, it's really as simple as that. You cannot build trust and psychological safety in your organization if you don't act on employee feedback and you keep promoting toxic people.

The toxic manager point is the one most organizations refuse to act on. Promoting or protecting a high-performer who creates a pattern of fear, exclusion, or retaliation sends a signal louder than any culture statement. Employees watch what the organization does when feedback exposes someone powerful. That decision is the real test of whether feedback culture is genuine.

Invest in the right tech and tools to support a culture of ongoing feedback and recognition. Modern tech tools in this space are all geared toward collecting quality, data per team or division or geographical location. Of course, the data means nothing if you don't do anything about it, so this brings me back to the previous point around some tough calls that often need to be made and showing employees what the results of their feedback has been and what leadership is doing about it.

The loop between collecting feedback and visibly acting on it is where most organizations break down. Using well-designed employee survey questions generates data. The commitment to communicate what you found and what changed is what builds the trust to use the channel again.

What is the future of HR?

Hartung's view of where HR is heading has been consistent for years and continues to sharpen.

Back in 2017, I did a DisruptHR talk called "HR is dead, it's all People and Culture." I stand by that today still. The future of HR is to actively participate in shaping employer brand, workplace culture and overall employee experience from hire to retire. With the tech we have at our disposal nowadays, it's time for HR to stop hiding behind compliance and checklists and payroll and paperwork. Be the guide. Be the coach. Be the expert. Be the change-maker.

I've never been the "traditional HR manager" type of person — not even back in 2006 when I was first promoted into an HR manager role. For me, personally, I'm a change-maker. I'm a bit of a rebel, a misfit and a maverick and although those terms have so many negative connotations for people, I wear those labels with pride. I have always challenged the status quo and seen possibility and potential. My role is to spark ideas and influence positive change. And honestly, I would say that is the future of HR too.

The practical version of "be the guide, not the compliance officer" is showing up in the data. Organizations where HR leads genuinely honest feedback processes show better retention outcomes, better engagement scores, and better early-warning detection on culture problems. The future Hartung describes is the one that the data supports.

Where Deborah Hartung's thinking stands in 2025 and 2026

This interview was conducted in 2020. The HR function has moved closer to the future Hartung described, though not fast enough for her or for most organizations working through what the function needs to become.

The compliance-versus-culture tension has intensified

The compliance demands on HR have grown significantly since 2020. Remote work created new legal complexity. Pay transparency laws spread to more states. The DEI legal landscape shifted. The temptation to retreat into pure compliance work is real and understandable.

But Hartung's point stands: compliance work is necessary, not sufficient. Organizations where HR functions primarily as a risk-management arm rather than a people development function are the ones generating the most ER cases, the most regrettable turnover, and the most friction at the manager layer. The guide-and-coach function is not a luxury. It is the intervention that reduces compliance risk in the first place.

Feedback culture has better tools but the same human problem

The tools Hartung recommended in 2020 have matured significantly. Pulse survey platforms, continuous feedback tools, anonymous reporting platforms, and AI-assisted sentiment analysis are all more capable and accessible than they were five years ago. According to Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace report, global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, the lowest since 2020. The tools exist. The willingness to act visibly on what those tools surface is still the limiting factor. The human challenge Hartung named in 2020 is unchanged. See how AllVoices helps HR teams close the loop between what employees report and what actually changes.