Meet Murad Salman Mirza, Corporate Management Advisor & Global Thought Leader

Murad Salman Mirza is a Corporate Management Advisor and Global Thought Leader with 25 years of experience in organizational development, talent management, and business transformation. He was ranked #1 globally in HR and Culture by Thinkers360 and holds top-five rankings in leadership, management, and change management. His work has been referenced by institutions including the United Nations, Harvard, MIT, Oxford, and the World Bank.

AllVoices spoke with Mirza as part of the State of Employee Feedback series. His answers identify the structural reasons employee feedback fails, and the leadership practices that fix them.

What is the state of the human resources industry?

Mirza sees the HR function at an inflection point: shedding transactional work as technology absorbs routine processes, while being asked to show up as a genuine business partner. The pressure is real, and the gap between where most HR teams operate and where the C-suite needs them is still wide.

The HR industry is generally going through a period of profound self-reflection while engaging in meaningful transformation as it recalibrates the conventional notions of sustaining a motivated and productive workforce. It is trying to be as lean as possible by embracing relevant technology that can lead to efficient solutions, especially for organizations that are in a 'survival' mode while overcoming the challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Consequently, the operational nature of HR is steadily yielding the way for the strategic nature of HR with raised expectations from senior HR professionals in terms of being business-savvy and not just being functional-savvy.

The shift Mirza describes from operational to strategic HR has continued to accelerate. HR leaders who anchor their value to administrative tasks face ongoing scrutiny. Those who connect people decisions to business outcomes are the ones earning a seat at the table.

What are the most common barriers to employee feedback?

When Mirza surveys his clients' organizations, he finds the same barriers appearing repeatedly. They are not random. They are structural, and most of them trace back to a failure of leadership credibility rather than a failure of feedback systems.

Employee concerns about who gets heard and who gets ignored due to the prevalent organizational politics, nepotism/cronyism and ineffective/stale reporting systems. Employee fears of being labeled as a 'rebel' and marginalized for advocating progressive solutions that are deemed 'too radical' by the senior management, so any 'solicited' feedback is generally given in the form of 'what the senior management wants to hear', rather than pointing gaps and suggesting effectual improvements. Disconnect between the senior management and the workforce as the former is routinely confined to an 'information bubble' and receiving 'filtered' feedback from sycophants surrounding them while the latter is frustrated at their inability to reach the 'right' ears for resolving 'real' problems. The absence of the 'closed loop' aspect in the feedback cycle that can provide the workforce with timely and meaningful information for addressing their concerns to reinforce the notion that they do matter in the bigger scheme of things. Fractionalization of the workforce — generational divide, specific union loyalties, passive resistance from marginalized talent, clout struggles among power brokers — resulting in skewed feedback designed to benefit a certain segment of the workforce at the expense of others.

The "closed loop" problem stands out. Employees who submit feedback and never hear back stop submitting. The loop has to close for the channel to stay open. This is why building a real employee feedback management system means designing the response process, not just the collection method.

What advice should HR leaders follow to improve feedback culture?

Mirza's recommendations prioritize visible, accountable action from leadership over program design. His emphasis on simplicity and accessibility reflects a consistent finding: feedback systems fail when they create distance between employees and the people who can act on their concerns.

Organizational leadership needs to demonstrate with concrete, accountable and transparent actions that they value the voice of the employee, e.g., by sending periodic emails to employees on how they have personally taken ownership of a shortcoming identified by an employee and implemented appropriate corrective action to improve themselves. The feedback process needs to be as simple as possible with different channels for communication — computers, suggestion boxes, meeting minutes, conference transcriptions — for providing relevant inputs. Recognition for being engaged in terms of providing useful feedback should come with a personal note to the relevant employee by the organizational leadership, with outstanding suggestions being shared on the corporate network with the name and role of the associated employee. Compiled results from exit interviews should also be shared with employees to give them the confidence that the organization takes a constructive view of criticism with respect to shortcomings in its corporate policies and practices.

The detail about sharing exit interview results publicly is worth attention. Most organizations treat exit data as internal documentation, which means it never reaches the employees most affected by what it reveals. When HR teams publish themes from exit conversations, without identifying individuals, it builds credibility and signals that feedback changes decisions. The same logic applies to getting honest feedback from direct reports: people share what they believe will be taken seriously.

What does the future of HR look like?

Mirza's long-range view points to a function that is less siloed, far more distributed across the business, and increasingly defined by partnership with AI rather than displacement by it. The titles may change faster than the underlying work.

HR will continue to become more and more strategic with the transactional nature of its conventional processes becoming a permanent part of its technological suite. The lines between an HR professional and a peer from another function will become increasingly blurred as organizations will rely on multi-talented individuals to take up the reins of various functions. Additionally, many of the conventional HR responsibilities will be transferred to functional heads and authorized representatives since they are the direct beneficiaries of the new talent, and primary responsibility will be given to them for the growth and development of their team members under broadly defined HR policies and practices. Functional terms like Talent Management, Employee Experience and Organizational Development/Effectiveness will likely be more widely accepted successors to provide a more meaningful incorporation of 'human' talent within the corporate hierarchy in partnership with AI-driven entities.

This prediction has aged well. The CHRO title is giving way to Chief People Officer, Chief Employee Experience Officer, and similar framings that signal a broader mandate. The core insight holds: HR's authority will be measured by business outcomes, not by how many policies it administers.

How do you see your role evolving over the next few years?

Mirza's vision for his own work as an advisor describes what the best HR practitioners are already building toward: less prescription, more capability-building, and a deeper fluency in the human dynamics that no AI system can fully replicate.

My role will increasingly take the form of an HR evangelist who enables professionals within the HR departments of my client organizations in becoming better at proactively managing employee needs and expectations with enriched experiences that galvanize them to enhance their organizational citizenship behavior. Some of the relevant steps include the astute use of the most appropriate technology for operational efficiencies, broadening channels of DIBE (Diversity, Inclusion, Belonging, and Equity) to augment core competencies of the organization, exhibiting a keen embrace of the 'human factor' in the refinement of business processes, and cultivating leaders who are futurists — focused on the dynamics of the evolving ecosystem surrounding the organization — and not just confined to being visionaries focused on taking the organization to a higher level.

His distinction between futurists and visionaries is worth keeping. A visionary imagines a better version of today. A futurist maps how the environment itself is changing. HR leaders who only vision-cast without tracking demographic shifts, regulatory changes, and workforce behavior miss the work that actually protects the organization.

Where Mirza's insights stand in 2025 and 2026

This interview was originally published in 2021, during a period when most HR teams were navigating pandemic-driven disruption. The structural tensions Mirza named have intensified since then rather than resolved.

The closed-loop problem remains the defining failure point

According to Gallup's ongoing workplace research, only about one in three employees globally reports feeling engaged at work. A primary driver of disengagement is the perception that feedback goes nowhere. The tools for collecting employee voice have multiplied since 2021: pulse surveys, anonymous reporting platforms, continuous feedback channels. The gap is not collection. It is follow-through. Organizations that close the loop, communicating back to employees what changed as a result of what they reported, see sustained engagement. Those that collect and archive see declining participation over time.

AI is reshaping the HR function faster than Mirza predicted

Mirza forecast that transactional HR work would migrate to technology. That shift is now accelerating faster than most anticipated. AI tools are handling resume screening, scheduling, benefits administration, and aspects of performance documentation at scale across large employers. The role this creates for senior HR practitioners is the one Mirza described: enabling line managers to build capability rather than doing the compliance work themselves. Tracking the right employee relations metrics is one of the areas where AI is creating real productivity for HR teams that would otherwise spend hours on manual case tracking. See how AllVoices helps HR teams manage employee voice at scale.