Hack Your Way To Success

A hackathon is an event where teams come together for 24-48 hours to create. Developers are challenged to create software or hardware and many innovative solutions have been created as a result, benefiting companies like Skype, Facebook, Adobe, Sun Microsystems, and more.

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In the spirit of HR leveraging techniques from all parts of the business, what if HR held a hack-a-thon? What would you be able to solve? Where could you innovate? How could you improve employee experience? In what ways could you better enable employees to do their best work? ?

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Our team does this all the time. Over my career, while I’ve hosted traditional hackathons, I recognize that people have preconceived notions on what these events should look like. Therefore, I don’t always use the term hackathon when hosting events like this and instead call them workshops, brainstorming sessions, and use other creative terms so people can focus on the content and outcomes as the priority. In this way, you too can host events like a hackathon that work for your culture and environment. ?

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Most recently, my team worked together with our internal clients to address employee engagement. We host pulse surveys to gather feedback on key engagement topics. Through quantitative and qualitative data, we’re able to get a sense globally of how employees feel about their connection to the company’s mission and goals, their team members, and how we help our clients. While we can see global trends, we asked teams to address feedback locally to ensure their employees know their feedback was heard and considered by their direct managers. In this way, managers are addressing their employees’ concerns hands-on in ways they think will be most meaningful. We stress in these “hackathon” sessions that managers should address topics within their control. Some incredible ideas have been prioritized in these sessions. And a lot of ideas have ended up in the proverbial parking lot, which we don’t lose sight of by keeping a document of these ideas to come back to when the timing is right or situations have changed.

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A few practical tips for successful hackathons:

·?????? Involve non-HR stakeholders as the problems we might want to solve include creating a better employee experience, so why not take a page from product management (as discussed in previous posts) and include a sample user group. This approach also helps with internal adoption of the solution as you will already have champions within the organization. It will also lead to breakthroughs and innovation leveraging the non-HR minds in the creation of the solution.

·?????? Start small with a short four-hour sessions and build your way up to longer events.

·?????? Socialize that you’re hosting hackathons and share the results from each hackathon to generate interest for future events.

·?????? Be open to and celebrate non-traditional approaches.

·?????? However, put some guardrails around what you’re looking for: solutions with business potential, relevance to solving the problem, agile and easy user experience, and completeness of the solution.

·?????? Mix teams so participants can leverage the event as a networking opportunity.

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Perhaps this approach leads to partnerships across teams (e.g. engineers helping HR build a self-service tool, finance teaching HR how to maximize a PowerBI dashboard, and consulting teams improving internal communications.) It also can lead to big wins on tricky topics such as return to office, flexible work arrangements, compensation, and wellness.

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What have you hacked? What do you think needs hacking? What could a hackathon help you, your team, and your stakeholders unlock?

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If you’re interested in this topic, check out hr.hackathon alliance to learn more.