Harvard Business Review: Recommended Articles for HR Employees

I’ve read >500 Harvard Business Review articles in my lifetime. While I strongly recommend subscribing to the site, it would be unrealistic to expect every reader would want to do so, or that you would want to read all of my >75 article recommendations. I am therefore curating my recommendations into 10-20 articles for different employee groups. This one is for HR employees (for folks of any level or sub-discipline).

How did I choose these articles? 

I reviewed the 80ish HBR articles that I’ve read that actually inspired real improvements in my own work, and then I filtered for those that specifically impacted HR programming. I then loosely organized them into 3 topic areas.

As always, feel free to contact me if you have any questions about how to translate an article into concrete HR strategy or programming advice. Please enjoy.

Topics: Performance, Accountability, Metrics, and Organization

1. When Should you Take Action on an Employee’s Performance Issues

2. How to Actually Encourage Employee Accountability

3. What Makes Leadership Development Programs Succeed?

4. Use OKRs to Set Goals for Teams, Not Individuals

5. Research: How Different Fields Are Using GenAI to Redefine Roles

6. Work in the Future Will Fall into These 4 Categories 

7. How to Make Rational Decisions in the Face of Uncertainty

Topic: Driving Culture and Cultural Intelligence

1. 7 Metrics to Measure Your Organization’s DEI Progress  

2. A Survey of 19 Countries Shows How Generations X, Y, and Z Are — and Aren’t — Different

3. Research: How to Build Trust with Business Partners from Other Cultures 

4. Coaching the Alpha Male  

5. The Innovator’s DNA

Topics: Employee Engagement and Retention:

1. The 3 Essential Jobs That Most Retention Programs Ignore

2. Why Great Employees Leave “Great Cultures”

3. Financial Targets Don’t Motivate Employees

4. Rethink Your Employee Value Proposition

P.S. If you run out of free HBR articles, you could theoretically open a new incognito window to read additional ones.