HR is Ready for the Raging 2020s; These 7 Actions Prove it
Far be it from me to speak for all of my colleagues in the Human Resources profession, but I think this is a good time to share a few observations that should reassure all of us that - Yes - HR is ready to take on what I think will be the Raging 2020s. As the future of work unfolds, our organizations and by extension our HR profession will experience what Erik Brynjolfsson calls "the growing pains of a radically reorganized economy." Hopefully our collective memories of the transactional personnel office we talked about in business school will fade, and be replaced by people systems designed to support increasing organizational complexity. HR pros recognize that preparing for the future of work is serious work and we are ready to do it! Here are seven ways I believe we are stepping up.
We are now used to perpetual change.
Short term or long term; it really doesn’t matter. We, in HR, know that change is here to stay. While we devote much time and energy to helping others in our organizations change, we have realized that we must build the stamina to visit and revisit our own HR processes, evaluate our own assumptions and manage our own innovations as we go. We have learned to manage the disruption resulting from innovation and know how to help our people plow through changes while minimizing risks and managing organizational stress. We have learned to be in tune with the needs of our leaders during change while being mindful about the experiences of our employees. We relish our role in the middle and are equipped to stay engaged with both sides through change.
We are reengineering our HR reputation.
We acknowledge that “MeToo”, “Microaggressions”, “Whistleblowers” and “Inclusion” have been big buzz words in the last few years. Used often as bludgeons to dampen the effectiveness of HR, we are acknowledging that we have heard you. We get it. Each of these buzzwords shed light on what HR may or may not be doing right in the eyes of workers. At anytime we know that we can find any number of national news stories discussing what is perceived as HR’s failure to fully handle internal cultures that seriously impact employees. Feamley, almost three decades ago, put it this way - “HR reflects the collective evaluations of the character of a company’s philosophies, policies and practices.” Yes, we use barometers such as “Best Places to Work” and Glassdoor sentiments, as rough indicators of how we are doing, how welcome our employees feel and how engaged they are; how our team members are growing professionally and how leaders are shaping our culture. But we acknowledge that listening more and putting our people first is a winning strategy. In the face of all these public stories, HR is stepping forward to own our role in silence sometimes and fix our collective reputation where necessary. We encourage others at every level of business to do the same.
Talent scarcity is helping us prioritize employee experiences.
As a follow up to the previous item, we know that a big part of our reputation is wrapped up in the experiences of our employees. We realize employee experiences matter and we shouldn’t start paying attention only when new hires sit at their desks on their first day of work. The news here is that how our employees are treated while they are candidates in the talent acquisition pipeline is an important part of that experience. How potential workers are approached or appear to be included or not in our plans are part of the conversation. Moving forward, the date of hire (work start date) will only be one of the data points we consider as we evaluate employee experiences. We are refocusing on our job descriptions, vacancy announcements, recruiting materials and hiring communications via every modality through our entire talent acquisition workflow and making sure all connection opportunities leave potential candidates and employees with the authentic perception that we care about their experiences and how our organizational culture impacts their well-being. We get it. If we don’t care, why do we work here? In an IBM Values survey, 68 percent of C-Suite executives expect to prioritize customer experiences over product in future business cycles. We can only hope that executives would see equal value in prioritizing employee experiences over products as well. HR has a role to play here and we will take it seriously.
We are embracing data analytics and artificial intelligence.
As we enable our organizations to remake workplace models, we recognize that we must embrace HR technologies including data analytics and artificial intelligence. The research suggests we might not be moving quickly enough. According to the 2017 Deloitte Human Capital Trends report, “companies are rethinking HR as an “intelligent platform” and embedding analytics into their entire workforce management process and operations.” My experience shows that although it is happening slowly, quality relationships between HR and IT departments are emerging because of the collaborative work required to manage successful change projects and technology adoption. Increasingly, HR leaders are coming to the table with current and future data and technology needs. HR already generates much of the people data within organizations anyway and so we are becoming more adept at talking about its value, gathering it, interpreting it and using it rather than relinquishing that ownership to other units.
Our HR silos are crumbling, and we are excited about that.
Whether we are on global HR teams or running solo practices, we are working to create more collaborative pastures. You can’t spend a few minutes in the Twitterverse and not see HR professionals collaborating and learning from each other across industries and specializations. We are more aspirational about what HR can be to our organizations and we are revisiting our siloed values in light of contemporary organizational practices and workforce needs. We are removing the impressions that all leadership is going to come from the top and we are moving towards communicating a broader understanding of our own discipline and how it intersects with other disciplines. We understand in competitive spaces, for example, training and development could have ideas that impact recruiting or vice versa. Benefits and compensation teams could learn something from labor relations and employee engagement is all of HR’s business, no matter where we sit. HR silos will neither continue to slow us down nor restrict our collective value to our organizations.
We are into agility and prepared to be uncomfortable through ambiguity.
As we help guide our organizations through changes brought on by automation and other competitive forces, we are eager to discuss how our human intelligence and people systems are going to work with our artificial intelligence tools as effectively as possible. As HR steps up to lead projects that change both inside and outside of HR, many are embracing the Agile approach to project management. Copying from the software development discipline, the practice of breaking down projects into increments to improve implementation success, is catching on in HR. Sometimes this presents a higher level of ambiguity than we have traditionally been used to. However, with more projects than time, we are getting more astute about recognizing the difference between doing transactional work and transformational work. This means we are leaning into our organizations, learning more, leading more, managing risk, communicating more and deciphering trends that matter for us. We are environmental scanners who are ready to act.
We are building our business skills.
I can’t tell you how many HR professionals I spoke with in 2019 who talked about the aggressive merger and acquisition strategies afoot in their companies or across their industries. These mergers mean cultures may converge or diverge, talent may stay or go, teams may expand or shrink. HR is all up in how we manage the business through these consolidations and changes. In discussing the role of the HR Business Partners (HRBPs), Neel Ghandi says that “despite decades of trying to focus these HRBPs on strategic issues, many of our clients voice a common refrain that a great HRBP is quite hard to find.” We know that broad business knowledge is now a foundational element in effective HR and so we are thinking more like business leaders with strategic intent. Strengthening business skills deepen our organizational understanding thereby placing HR in a pivotal role as organizations scale and change. HR pros have the advantage of a broad view of our organizations, touching every employee in every nook and cranny and gauging the pulse of our businesses. Developing the business skills needed to become more in tune with the rhythm of our organizations, is helping us add sustainable long term value.
I am sure there are other areas where HR practitioners are making moves and significant contributions relevant to their specific industries. However, these seven commitments, I believe, cut across all industries and are foundational to HR success in what I believe will be the potentially tumultuous “Raging 2020s.”