This HR Blind Spot Is Costing Results — Here’s How to Empower Managers to Fix It
If human resource personnel are serious about business impact, they should take these four steps to help frontline managers make better people decisions.
Over the past decade, HR departments have poured billions into platforms, processes, and programs promising real transformation. Yet walk into most organizations today, and the day-to-day reality looks remarkably unchanged.
Managers are buried under pressure. Teams feel disconnected. Strategic HR initiatives often evaporate somewhere between the C-suite and the frontline.
This is HR’s last-mile problem—the persistent gap between well-crafted strategy and actual execution on the ground.
Chief Human Resources Officers (CHROs) and their teams are excellent at building strategy and deploying systems. But the real impact happens (or doesn’t) through frontline managers. If HR wants to move the needle on business performance, it must extend its reach and empower those managers to make better daily decisions. Artificial intelligence is the tool that can finally close the gap.
Here’s why HR stands at a critical crossroads—and how it can solve its last-mile problem once and for all.
The Last Mile Is the Frontline Manager
In organizations that care about real results, frontline managers are the linchpin.
Gallup research shows that managers account for roughly 70% of the variance in team engagement. When managers thrive, teams become more productive, profitable, and resilient. When they struggle, disengagement spreads like wildfire.
And many managers are struggling.
Manager engagement dropped below 30% in 2024, while overall employee engagement hovered around 20%—costing the U.S. economy an estimated $438 billion in lost productivity. Managers today oversee twice as many people as they did five years ago, manage hybrid teams, navigate constant change, and often do it with minimal training or support.
The healthcare sector illustrates the problem vividly. A large study of frontline hospital managers found that wider spans of control directly correlate with worse work-life balance and higher intent to quit.
Frontline managers are where corporate strategy meets reality. Despite years of HR investment, they’re still in trouble—and that’s the last-mile disconnect.
Why Dashboards and Legacy HR Tech Aren’t Enough
Look at where HR budgets have gone, and the pattern is clear.
Massive human capital management implementations, employee self-service portals, and digital workflows improved efficiency and compliance. They were successful at what they were built for—but they did almost nothing to improve the quality of people decisions made by managers.
Performance management systems tell you how employees are doing, but they rarely help managers hire better, coach more effectively, allocate talent smarter, or spot burnout early. People analytics teams have advanced, but even the best organizations are still the exception.
The core issue? Most analytics tools were designed for HR professionals, not frontline managers. They deliver static charts and quarterly reports—nice to have, but not what managers need when making daily decisions.
Managers don’t want another dashboard. They want context, confidence, and clarity:
- What are my real options for the best people decisions?
- What are the likely consequences?
- What have others done in similar situations?
- What does leadership actually expect?
Static reports and spreadsheets don’t deliver that level of insight. Closing the last-mile gap requires something bolder—and AI is the answer.
Four Steps to Fix HR’s Last-Mile Problem
1. Reset HR’s North Star
HR needs a bigger mission than compliance, record-keeping, and cost control.
The new North Star is business results.
Shift the focus outward: from reporting on employee performance to actively driving productivity. Start by working backward from a day in the life of a frontline manager. What tools, insights, and support would actually help them make better talent decisions every single day?
2. Rethink HR’s Relationship with AI
AI isn’t just another efficiency play—it’s a chance to redefine how work gets managed.
Many CHROs already recognize this. In recent surveys of HR leaders’ 2026 priorities, harnessing AI to transform their function consistently ranks at the top.
The key is to treat AI not as a bolt-on tool, but as a new nervous system for the organization—one that eliminates the “telephone game” where strategic intent gets diluted as it travels from CEO to manager.
AI enables real-time, direct flow of insights up and down the org. Imagine managers getting contextualized data from Jira, Salesforce, or other systems to better assess contributions, inform pay decisions, and spot retention risks—all in the moment.
3. Become the Bridge Builder
AI doesn’t work in isolation. Turning it into a true management system means breaking down silos between HR, finance, and IT.
CHROs must partner closely with CFOs and CIOs to combine people data with business data. When these functions collaborate, powerful insights emerge.
One luxury retailer we worked with integrated HR data with point-of-sale systems across hundreds of stores. They could finally see which managers’ training programs correlated with higher sales—and scale those programs companywide.
Blending people and performance data is essential for real impact, but it requires overcoming privacy, security, governance, and cultural barriers.
4. Deliver Tools That Actually Serve Managers
Insights are useless without usable tools.
Managers need on-demand, conversational access to data-backed recommendations—inside the apps they already use (Excel, Teams, Slack, etc.). They shouldn’t need to be data analysts to get value.
Modern AI-powered analytics let managers ask plain-language questions like:
- “Who on my team is at risk of leaving?”
- “What’s the best way to allocate this project?”
- “How should I adjust incentives based on performance trends?”
These tools deliver early warnings, concrete guidance, and strategy-aligned answers—democratizing workforce insights for the people who need them most.
The Payoff: A Stronger CHRO and a Better Organization
Solving the last-mile problem doesn’t just help frontline managers—it elevates the CHRO’s role.
When HR moves beyond administration to connect people, data, and strategy in ways that drive measurable business results, the CHRO gains new credibility and influence in a world obsessed with impact.
The opportunity is here. HR has the chance to reset, embrace AI as a management system, and finally close the gap between strategy and execution.
The last mile isn’t a problem to manage—it’s the opportunity to transform.