An author on a range of workplace issues says HR is dead.

Writer Jacob Morgan says workers around the world are still seen as capital assets, which is why synonyms for ‘employee’ include: cog, servant, and slave.

He notes that the departments created for managing these capital assets are of course called ‘human resources’, but says this should be changed.

“Companies are dropping the term “human resources” altogether and are shifting towards more “people centric” terms,” Morgan says.

He points to emerging title like ‘chief people officer’, ‘VP of people operations’, ‘head of talent’, ‘chief talent officer’, which are becoming more commonplace as titles such as Chief Human Resource Officer start to fade away.

“Now that the conversation around the future of work has taken centre stage, I’ve seen this transition accelerate dramatically,” Morgan says.

He believes that it is not just superficial, because the way people refer to something really does make a difference.

“I don’t view renaming the department as any kind of solution but I do see it as the first stepping stone for an organization to commit to making change,” Morgan said.

There are a number of examples coming out of generally progressive companies.

Cisco has changed their Chief Human Resources Officer Francine Katsoudas to Chief People Officer; Laszlo Bock is SVP of People Operations at Google; Susan Chambers is EVP of the Global People Division at Walmart; Pat Wadors is the SVP of the ‘Global Talent Organisation’ at Linkedin; Anne Byerlein is the Chief People Officer at Yum! Brands, to name just a few.

“Most of the companies I have been speaking with or researching including Cisco, Glassdoor, Google, Linkedin, and others have all made considerable strides in rethinking what the purpose of traditional ‘HR’ is and all of these companies have moved on from looking at employees as capital assets,” Morgan said.

The author says that i coming years will see more companies shift away from ‘HR’ terminology towards words like ‘people’ and ‘talent’.

But organisations must go further than just changing a few names, actually re-thinking what the roles and functions of employees that are not just capital assets.