Employee Transformation

Welcome to my fortnightly (ahem!) newsletter on Multi-Sided HR, the artful combination of Strategic HR and People-Centric HR. I've already explained how we can undertake truly strategic HR (see newsletter edition 3) and have started to explain how we can be fully people-centric (in the last edition). This edition of the newsletter builds on my previous suggestions to provide more insight on how HR can be people-centric as well as strategic.

Employee Needs, not just Experiences

In my last newsletter, I suggested that as well as thinking about how employees experience their employment within an organisation, which can provide basic, efficiency value, or value for money for them, we also need to add and create value for these employees, helping them meet their own personal needs.

Doing this moves beyond focusing on employees journeys through business or organisational activities, for example, getting a promotion, but also past peripheral impacts on their own personal journeys, for example, having a new child. Taking this example, receiving some time off, or a team’s congratulations, or having relevant insurance forms updated automatically, would all be useful additions to a ‘moment that matters’ to any employee. However, they don’t really inform anything important about planning to have a child.

Benefits involving IVF treatment, or egg freezing would be much more valuable for relevant employees. Also, the value that is received from these benefits isn't about the experience of how they are provided, but the outcomes they enable. That is, the important thing isn't that receiving the benefits make you happy or provide a positive memory, it's that they help you get pregnant.

These fertility benefits could therefore be examples of creating value for an employee, helping them transform in a way or on a journey that is meaningful for them. Other benefits or personalised support is likely to be less tangible, for example, helping employees develop connections that help them do something, or learn new skills that somehow make a difference in their lives. All these examples relate to core aspects of employees’ own journeys, not just to an organisation’s journey, or the organisational context for its employees’ journeys.

I hope the above shows that, and as I mentioned briefly in newsletter edition 2 (and you can read about in my report on hyper personalisation for UKG), we need to move beyond employee experience to employee transformation. This is about the mass customisation of employee experience.

Experiences to Transformations

Mass customisation is a concept first articulated by Stan Davis in his 1987 book, Future Perfect. This paradoxical concept takes two ideas that could be treated as opposites – mass marketing and customisation – combining them together to deliver personal targeting at scale.

The concept of mass customisation also sat behind Joseph Pine and James Gilmore’s book, The Experience Economy, where they suggest that mass customisation has led to a shift in focus from commodities and goods towards services and more recently to experience. However, since this book was written, experiences have increasingly been commoditised as well, leading to a newer shift towards offering transformation.

Transformation is the mass customisation of experience. In a business focused on selling transformations, the receiving person or organisation is no longer just the customer but the actual product. For example, Peloton does not compete on selling bikes or fitness programmes, or even the joy and exhaustion of participating in a class, but a fitter body. The transformed user is the product the company provides.

The Strategic HR Academy operates at all these levels too - I try to ensure I provide excellent content that summarises other best practice, but also provides new insights you won't find anywhere else (as in this newsletter) - however, this is probably still the commodities part of the academy as content alone won't really help you learn that well. The goods part is the certificate you get at the end of a course, and the services part is the conversations and activities you participate in during a study group. The experiences part is all of this plus personal conversations with me, and especially moments like the introduction you receive when you join the academy, the study group calls, and your 'graduation' at the end of a course. But the academy is really about your transformation - enabling you do to operate at a different level to where you began.

Creating Employee Value through Transformation

The sort of opportunities I referred to at the top of this newsletter edition will result from the mass customisation of employee experience.

Pine and Gilmore also write about this in 'Employment as Transformation' and in a way that also relates quite closely to my own suggestions:

"The very process we outlined in our book, The Experience Economy, for aspiring customers proves equally useful in guiding employee transformations.

Of course, many people have no greater aspiration than earning a wage. But even here, ongoing transformation is needed. Such workers need their skills to keep pace with new processes and technologies. These changes may not be of kind but of degree, as higher degrees of skill become necessary to keep the company competitive and employees fulfilled in their work. Aiming for anything less does a disservice to both parties.

Creating value in the marketplace begins with creating value in the workplace. By supplying positive work experiences, ones that are known to transform employees, organizations can create demand for people to come aboard.

The enterprises that offer truly helpful work for transforming employees will be those which draw in the best talent and leverage that talent to attract yet more talent. ‘Help provided’ will be the sign of such times."

In summary, yes, we need to:

• Deliver HR strategically to enable business success (Creating value: CV)
• Provide positive experiences to help employees be their best selves for the business (Value for money for employees: E-VfM)
• Reduce drag and increase autonomy so everyone can contribute effectively too (Adding value for employees: E-AV).

And we also need to help employees transform themselves in ways that meet their own needs (Creating value for employees: E-CV).

Each of these points demands a progressively closer relationship with employees. As Pine and Gilmore explain: "Transformations aren't produced in a factory or placed on a shelf in a store; they are achieved in partnership with the person being transformed."

An issue in doing this is that people often have very unique needs. Multi-sided HR isn't just twice as challenging as strategic HR, in some ways it's this multiplied by the number of people you employ.

As always, I’d love to hear your own views on the points I've made above.?Please share your comments below. For example, I'd love to know if you've got any good examples of creating value for your employees, or whether your current or a previous employer has helped you to transform?

I look forward to discussing these and broader points around multi-sided HR with you! Also, please subscribe for future insights on this new and important approach combining both people-centric and strategic HR.

Look out in particular for the next newsletter edition in which I'll be explaining some of the practical consequences of focusing on people-centric rather than just strategic HR.

I also invite you to check out my broader insights on both strategic and people-centric HR in the Strategic HR Academy. Learn about the latest thinking and opportunities in on-demand courses on HR and Competitive Advantage; Performance Management Re-engineering and Reward Innovation ; Organisation, Process, Work and Job Design; Strategic Partnering and HR Transformation. Then discuss application within your own organisation with me and other HR practitioners in regularly scheduled study groups.

Kind regards - Jon

#peoplecentric #employeeexperience #employeetransformation

The rather weird hands picture is from DALL-E