HR! Our work is never done...

Central to any organizational decision or change is the people. And yet HR still doesn't have a strategic seat at the table? Some do though. So Adam and I found 4 of these Progressive People Leaders to find out how they did it. Here's what they had to say...

~8 minute read

The Art of War is a 2000 year old book about military strategy adored by Western business. With advice like, “Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak,” it taps into the kind of dog-eat-dog mentality alleged for business success. But, much to the reader’s surprise, dug into its cold realities is this: “Treat your men as you would your own beloved sons. And they will follow you into the deepest valley.”

So either the Ancient Chinese also got a lot of participant trophies, or caring about your employees is a more generalizable strategy than everyone thought. A win for HR! But how far are companies willing to go for their “beloved” employees? Turns out the answer is labor market dependent. In times of recession it extends as far as providing a job. But in a tighter labor market with more openings than workers and a system that rewards job hopping, organizations need to be more employee-focused than ever. All year unemployment has been about 4%. This means it’s a job seeker’s market and companies need to adapt. 

As an HR/People Ops professional this is our time to shine! As history shows, tight labor markets are when HR gets the most leeway in creating innovative employee practices. Things we now take for granted (succession planning, developmental job assignments, 360 degree feedback, etc) were once revolutionary answers to a tight labor market. Like our predecessors, navigating our organizations through employee centrism is exactly the burning platform needed to rebrand HR. With 3+ million people quitting their jobs monthly (Bureau of Labor Statistics) and engagement’s strong link to organizational performance (Gallup) a CFO will have a hard time ignoring us. And who knows, we might end up getting that fabled “seat at the table” everyone talks about...

Where to start?

Where do I start? For help I went straight to the source. See, People Progressives have already recognized HR’s new found power from the tight labor market. So I targeted four of them and asked them to get real with me. With this new freedom, what are they doing? While our conversation covered specific organizational initiatives, there was something much more. When deciding on an initiative their rationale wasn’t based on the best practice bandwagon. Rather, each person was deliberate in understanding WHY the initiative fit their business. To illustrate how the four People Progressives did this, I’ll be using the example of diversity. 

Their rationale wasn’t based on the best practice bandwagon. Rather, each person was deliberate in understanding WHY the initiative fit their business.

Diversity! But why?

Diversity has been all over the news. Between #MeToo and big companies getting torpedoed in headlines it easily got HR’s attention. While diversity is certainly the humane thing to do, many organizations are resorting to the bare minimum. Things like a mandatory training with perhaps a CEO company address. Maybe an employee blog post.

But what do we expect? Being nice doesn’t have much ROI when pitted against, say, more advertising. At the end of the day organizations are a business. HR needs to treat it as such. So if we’re going to convince a CFO that we want to spend a couple grand more a month for diversity’s sake, we’ll need a lot more than the “employee brand” argument. 

Diversity makes business sense

Diversity’s social status makes it easy to agree with. But that wasn’t enough for Emily Disston, VP of People and Culture at BetterCloud. With a Master’s from Columbia and named a top female leader of the NYC tech community, she knew she needed to also understand why it made business sense. Citing research by the NeuroLeadership Institute, Emily explained to me the true value of diversity. 

“If you study people in diverse groups versus homogeneous there’s more diversity of thought. There’s more people contributing different ideas, not just saying yes to everybody’s same idea. There’s more challenging going on and so people are less comfortable in a really good way.” -Emily Disston, BetterCloud

Emily then extends this to the business. For example, in engineering it can lead to finding new ways to problem solve. Or in sales attracting a completely different customer set. Oh, and the whole “right thing to do” aspect ices the cake nicely.     

The business positives of diversity don’t stop there. If you want to follow in Emily’s footsteps, you can find out even more from this fantastic lit review by Sue Choe, VP People at Petal. Sue aggregated and synthesized the research as well as made some pretty powerful recommendations. Turns out when people feel like a part of the tribe and when management is pushed to be inclusive and thoughtful, teams create better developed ideas. However it doesn’t help if a minority voice doesn’t feel comfortable freely sharing their ideas. As Emily said, we want groups less comfortable in a good way. You can’t just throw a bunch of people in a room and hope they make music. But we’ll get to the how later. First we need to get the exec buy-in.   

How to drive the change

Now that we’ve done our homework to understand why diversity makes business sense driving change is next. We do this through exec buy-in. Matt Hoffman, VP of People at Digital Ocean, helped me understand where to start this process. Having spent 3 years driving innovative people practices spotlighted in HBR, he’s no stranger to C-suite negotiation. The first thing to consider? Taking the time to think about what it means to actually live our organization’s values.

It’s easy for everyone to say, ‘Yes of course we believe in diversity in principle. But if, for example, it takes you longer to actually hire via a diverse pipeline in practice, are you willing to make that trade-off because you believe in diversity and its benefits? If you’re not, well maybe it’s one of those values that are not actually that important to you. The intentionality of action when values come off the wall is what drives meaningful change.” -Matt Hoffman, Digital Ocean

In a perfect world diversity will always be top of mind to an organization. But reality rarely offers that luxury. There’s good news though. Matt told me that if we are upfront and intentional about the initiatives we choose, pushing for exec buy in gets much easier down the road. The catch? HR needs to break out of the service provider role by not fearing the difficult conversations. That’s how we help our company grow!

Meet your organization where it is

Breaking out of the service provider role is easier said than done. While being intentional in pursuing value-aligned processes is a big part of it, Meredith Flynn, Director of People Operations at CB Insights, explained another. Having a Master’s Cert in Strategic Change Leadership and moving on to scale the People department of her 3rd early stage company, Meredith provided the following insight: 

“You need to meet your organization where it is. And if they want to move quickly there’s going to be a trade-off. So building a strategy with leadership for making tough trade-offs early on is really important. You need to strategically think about what you’re willing to sacrifice in order to build cultural infrastructure. That's why working with People Operations to have a framework grounded in core values can help make the tough decisions easier.” -Meredith Flynn, CB Insights

Back to Matt's engineer example, are they willing to hire slower for the positives of diversity mentioned by Emily? To answer this question it can’t be a dumb thing to ask why diversity matters to them. This question is the kind of thing that helps execs understand what they are sacrificing by dis/agreeing to new processes. More importantly, it helps guide the difficult conversation you have about why diversity is worth hiring slower. But as environments become more dynamic setting aside time to ask these questions becomes more difficult. That's why it's so important for the leadership team to create a framework that helps guide the most important company decisions with HR. 

Knowing what to sacrifice

Birthed from compliance, I find that HR thinks that there’s no such thing as sacrifice; they must get everything done! The thing is that as HR’s workload is getting bigger, majority of companies are keeping steady or decreasing HR budget and headcount! So how do we work with our organization to make sacrifices? Cheryl Roubian, Head of People at Greenhouse, shared some great advice. After all, achieving the #1 spot on Glassdoor’s “Best Places to Work” has taught her a thing or two about sacrificing “right”. 

“Having a 'seat at the table' means understanding the needs of the business. It means looking at the whole picture, making choices—sometimes really hard choices—about what to prioritize. And then tirelessly helping your leadership and stakeholders understand the 'why' behind what you're doing and where you've chosen to focus.” - Cheryl Roubian, Greenhouse

Sometimes we still won’t win though. Following with our diversity example, if a larger program around diversity can’t be triggered, HR still has more power than it realizes. We can affect the org at a macro level through people processes. While it will take more time than buying software or instituting an organization-wide initiative, it still brings our company closer to diversity than we were before. Cheryl told me that diversity work doesn't have to happen in big, sweeping changes; you can make a lot of progress by building small nudges into your processes. Two examples are reminding interviewers what the most important attribute is for a particular role or asking them to provide examples to illustrate their assessment of a candidate.

Why initiatives fail miserably

Taken at face value, this article may at times make it seem like diversity is a “nice to have”. I assure it’s not. Diversity is extremely powerful for any organization. What the actual takeaway here is that we need to be more strategic. If the basis of our argument is predicated on who’s doing x, NOT why does my org need x, our initiatives will fail. Miserably. When it comes to choosing an initiative we first need to do our homework and then align the initiative to our org values. Next we need to meet our org where it is by helping them understand the trade-offs of implementation. Lastly we need to consider the whole picture when allocating resources.

If the basis of our argument is predicated on who’s doing x, NOT why does my org need x, our initiatives will fail. Miserably.

But if you find compliance and administrative minutia are keeping you from addressing some of these progressive practices… let’s talk! The way of HR is Strategic People Leader. Adam and I’d hate to see you left behind!  

**All opinions expressed in this post are my own.**