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The key path
- Traditional HR tech fails because it doesn’t provide actionable day-to-day insights.
- AI must empower managers with context.
HR needs to be restructured. Let me explain.
Over the past decade, HR departments have spent billions on platforms, processes and programs that promise change. Yet in many organizations, the experience on the ground still looks the same.
Managers are overwhelmed. Teams feel unclean. And often, “strategic” HR initiatives fail somewhere between the C-suite and the front line.
This is the “last mile” problem of disconnected HR.
Chief Human Resource Officers (CHROS) and their teams excel in developing strategies and stand-up systems. But HR hasn’t moved the needle where it matters most: enabling front-line managers to drive results through better decisions.
If Crocs is serious about impact, they need to expand their reach and empower these managers by closing the gap between strategy and execution. AI can help do that.
Here’s why HR stands at a crossroads—and how it can fix its last-mile problem.
The last mile is the frontline manager
For organizations serious about results, managers — the people on the front lines, not in HR — are the linchpin.
They have about 70% difference in team engagement. When managers thrive, teams are more productive, profitable and resilient. As they struggle, the immovable org slips through.
And many managers are struggling. Manager engagement drops to less than 30 percent in 2024, while overall employee engagement drops to about 20 percent, costing $8,438 billion.
Why? Managers are being asked to do more than ever before. They now oversee twice as many people as they did five years ago while dealing with hybrid teams and constant change.
The healthcare sector, which my company serves, provides a clear example of this. A large study of frontline hospital managers found that wider spans of control were associated with poorer work-life balance and higher intentions to leave.
Managers represent the last mile of corporate performance – where strategy meets execution. And despite decades of HR effort, they’re in trouble.
Why Dashboards and Legacy HR Tech Can’t Fix the Last Mile Problem
If you look at how HR spends, it’s easy to see how we got here.
A major human capital management rollout, employee self-service portals and digital workflows were designed to make HR more efficient. They were mostly successful, but they did little to improve the quality of managers’ decisions about people and work.
Take performance management systems, which report how employees are doing but rarely produce better results. By themselves, these tools have little impact on how managers hire, coach, allocate talent or respond to signs of burnout and instability.
To be fair, people analytics teams have made strides in getting better data into the hands of managers. Still, organizations that do this well remain the exception, not the rule.
The challenge is that people analytics tools are built for HR, not frontline managers. They don’t reflect what leaders need to make better day-to-day decisions.
Those managers don’t want another dashboard. They want context and trust. This means that the best people know what their options are for decisions, the potential consequences of their decisions, what others have done, and what the leadership team has suggested—backed by hard data, not just intuition.
Static charts and quarterly reports do not provide this.
For Crocs, closing that last mile requires bold action—with a little help from AI.
Step 1: Reset HR’s Northstar
HR departments need a new mission—one bigger than compliance, record keeping, and cost tracking. That North Star isn’t just an impact on talent… it’s business results.
HR should be outward looking. Rather than simply reporting on employee performance, how can it drive productivity? Managers – not HR’s internal needs – must be the focal point of its delivery model. This means working backwards from a day in the life of a manager. What can help them make better decisions of their abilities every day?
Step 2: Rethink HR’s relationship with AI
Today, Kroos has a golden opportunity. AI not only runs their department, but is changing the nature of work itself — and they’re at the cusp of that change.
Fortunately, many Chros get it. In a recent survey of HR leaders on 2026 priorities, using AI to revolutionize their work topped the list.
The key is making sure AI doesn’t become another way for HR to improve performance while staying in its traditional lane. Instead, HR should see it as a true management system that infuses strategic intent into everyday people’s decisions.
Think of AI as a new nervous system for the company, eliminating the “telephone game” that slows talent strategy down from CEO to manager. AI enables the direct flow of insights across the organization.
This gives managers real-time information to make better decisions—for example, contextualizing JIRA or Salesforce data to gauge employee engagement and inform pay and incentive choices.
Step 3: Be a bridge builder in your org
But AI isn’t just a switch you turn on. This requires breaking down organizational and data silos to create a company management system. The CHRO needs to establish a strategic partnership with the CFO and CIO.
When HR, finance and IT work together, companies can connect people data, business data and AI-powered analytics at a real insight level. For example, we worked with a luxury retailer that integrated HR data with a point-of-sale system at hundreds of locations. Leaders can see which store managers training is associated with higher sales and scale that program across the company.
Connecting people and business data is key to improving corporate performance, but this requires overcoming challenges related to privacy, security, governance and work practices.
Ultimately, this moment calls for HR to rise to the occasion – moving beyond management to connect the organization with the data and insights necessary to drive organizational impact.
Step 4: Give managers tools that actually meet their needs, not yours
But of course, insights mean little if front-line managers lack the tools to understand and use them.
Usability and accessibility are paramount. Dense spreadsheets — almost impenetrable to anyone but analysts — aren’t the answer. Managers need on-demand, data-backed, strategy-driven answers.
The latest AI-powered analytics let managers ask plain-language questions—and get real-time answers and recommendations—within Excel, Teams, Slack, and other workforce apps.
Even better, a manager doesn’t need to be a data analytics expert to use these tools. They democratize workforce insights by providing: “Who on my team is at risk of leaving?” Like direct answers to questions, early warnings for tough moments and solid guidance.
By deploying AI to close the gap between strategy and execution, HR can achieve the business transformation that has long eluded it. Ultimately, solving the last mile problem empowers not only frontline managers but CHROS as well. This gives the CHRO a new flag in a world where business results and business impact mean everything.
The key path
- Traditional HR tech fails because it doesn’t provide actionable day-to-day insights.
- AI must empower managers with context.
HR needs to be restructured. Let me explain.
Over the past decade, HR departments have spent billions on platforms, processes and programs that promise change. Yet in many organizations, the experience on the ground still looks the same.
Managers are overwhelmed. Teams feel unclean. And often, “strategic” HR initiatives fail somewhere between the C-suite and the front line.
