Adecco's Barricat: HR Must Shift From Support Function to Strategic Competitive Lever

Iker Barricat, president of Adecco Iberia, sits down to talk about what he sees happening in human resources—and it amounts to a fundamental reckoning about what the function is actually for.

The world has shifted, he says. For years, HR departments optimized themselves around stability: processes, efficiency, the machinery of hiring and payroll. That work still matters. But the ground beneath it has moved. Constant change and uncertainty are now the baseline. Aging workforces, persistent talent shortages across sectors, the arrival of artificial intelligence remaking what skills matter and how work gets done—these are not temporary disruptions. They are the new operating environment. And in that environment, HR has stopped being a support function and become something else entirely: a direct lever on whether a company can compete and produce.

This shift has forced a reckoning about what wellbeing actually means. Barricat observes that companies have deployed wellbeing initiatives with real energy in recent years—programs, benefits, specific actions. That's progress. But much of it misses the point. When wellbeing becomes a separate layer, something bolted onto the side of how the organization actually runs, it becomes compensation for what's broken rather than a fix for the break itself. The real foundations of wellbeing, he argues, are simpler and harder: clarity about what matters, reasonable workloads, quality leadership, and consistency in how decisions get made. The uncomfortable question organizations should ask themselves is whether they're building sustainable high-performance environments or just papering over dysfunction with new initiatives. Stress, the inability to disconnect from work, emotional distance from the mission—these aren't soft issues. They drive absenteeism and kill productivity.

Leadership has to change too. Closeness, empathy, inspiration—those remain valuable. But teams now need something more specific. They need clarity about what's actually prioritized in a complex environment, because ambiguity creates friction. They need accountability paired with autonomy, not autonomy masquerading as the absence of standards. And they need real development, not formal training programs but the daily work of a leader creating conditions for others to grow. Barricat notes that organizations now contain multiple generations with different expectations. They don't just want direction anymore. They want accompaniment. They want leaders who listen, who provide context, who build trust. In an environment of constant change, trust is what allows people to make decisions and contribute.

When asked what message he'd send to the HR profession on its international day, Barricat points to numbers. Last year, Adecco Iberia created more than 144,000 jobs in Spain. The company supported over 50,000 young people in their first employment, facilitated professional transitions for more than 25,000 senior workers, and through its foundation provided employment opportunities to 5,400 people at risk of social exclusion. These aren't marketing figures to him. They're evidence of what the sector can actually do: create pathways to real professional development, autonomy, and stability for people who might otherwise have none.

The challenge ahead is making sure nobody gets left behind in this transformation. That means serious investment in retraining and reskilling, and it means building talent management systems that are genuinely inclusive and based on what people can actually do, not on credentials or categories. The future of work, Barricat suggests, depends on whether HR can help organizations navigate that transition with intention—not just react to it.