Will HR Stop Being the Deer in Headlights?

This post is one of a series of powerful, eye-opening interviews from Jensen’s ongoing research on Leadership into the Future of Work, as well as from the study by Ultimate Software/Jensen Group: Reimagining HR for the Augmented Era. 

Courtney Harrison is Chief Human Resources Officer at OneLogin. OneLogin is a unified access management platform for enterprises.

HR’s Disrupted Future

“Each individual disruption is not that big of a change. But when you overlay one on top of the other: What does workforce planning look like? With robots figured in? With new boundaryless organizations? With lots more freelancers, gig workers? Should we get rid of our organizational chart? Should we use virtual reality for learning? Should we reinvent training and development?

“When you layer each disruption on top of each other, so many HR leaders are like deer in the headlights. Frozen. Just doing what they’ve done before. Each change is manageable by itself. What’s scary for HR is all of them together.

"My fear is that HR executives will implement all disruptive solutions independently, without integrating them. They must step back and look at the patterns within all the changes. Elegant solutions do exist — if you see the connections and patterns in all the changes, and then focus on the one or two things that are most critical for your situation.

“HR execs tend to fall into one of three categories, based on their personal reactions to all the disruptions. 1. Deer in Headlights. Overwhelmed, fearful. 2. Passively Interested. ‘Tell me more.’ But not driven to disrupt how they do things. 3. (The smallest group): This is the best time ever to be in HR! The future is this empty white board, where we can create whatever we want. 

“If I had to pick the biggest disruptive change that matters most, it’s the design of work. Because that begins with rethinking organizational structures. It’s so overwhelming to most executives because it’s so different that what we’ve done for the past hundred years. 

“Even for new leaders, who aren’t tied to the way it’s always been done, it’s still scary. Because the new solutions still leave the leader exposed to risks, uncertainty, ambiguity, chaos. 

“The future of work makes it so much harder to mitigate risks. 

“Truly changing the design of work is the hardest change because nobody has a silver bullet. Creating the new future of work is experimentation, at best. It’s not for the faint of heart. The days of incrementalism are over.

“Decisions around integration and making everything work together has to involve entire systems, but within that, you can experiment in small ways and see what happens. Like: ‘Let’s let people work out of a WeWork space and see if it’s not as scary as we thought.’ But then loop in cybersecurity people, and learning and development, and analytics.

“The source of so many of HR’s problems is that it has tied every damn thing to the Org. Chart. Putting people in boxes affects how every single HR function works. Compensation. Talent planning. Leadership development. Training. Evaluating performance. Everything. So you’re not just throwing out one construct. You’re pretty much reinventing everything. 

“HR must answer what value it adds in a very disruptive, non-org-chart, un-boxed future.

Leadership in a Disrupted Future

“Leadership issues usually come down to fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of chaos. Fear of not controlling the outcomes. But when they realize that what they were fearing isn’t that scary and unpredictable, they go “I can actually lead in this space!”

“Leaders who can let go of their fears of radical transparency and of making the invisible visible are the kind of leaders we need for the future of work.

“Most every organizational issue boils down to trust. But that’s such a scary intangible that most leaders don’t know what to do fix it. 

“Curiosity outweighs fear. If I can get leaders out of their chairs looking at PowerPoint, and go out and talk to people and learn, suddenly you can’t stop the good ideas. 

“Leaders have four performance roles that they own: 1) Hire the right people, 2) Observe them on a regular basis, 3) Give them feedback on how they’re doing, 4) and then Do something about it. (Promote them, teach them something new, leave them alone, or get rid of them.) That’s a leader’s job. Yet somehow it’s been outsourced to HR. 

“If HR didn’t exist, leaders would actually have to do their job.

“The future of HR, if it has one, must be how the all the components of rapid learning — space, technology, information, curation, relationships, social networks, fun, energy, passions, tasks, and goals and objectives — are fully integrated and are magical experiences.”

On Creating Shared Purpose and Meaning

“Most companies still treat their Gig Economy workforce like contingent workers. That they’re short-term expendible and that you don’t have to invest in their experience, learning, or cultural fit. This has to change.

“Will every, or even most, giggers need to be part of their shared vision and purpose to do their assignment well? Probably not. More importantly, shared purpose and meaning will be understandable and scalable in how you onboard people, how you assign projects, and in team communications. How you treat people and the experience they have working for you needs to feel the same, whether they work for you for a few days or a few decades.

“Shared purpose and meaning must be created within each and every employee’s and gigger’s experiences they have working for your company. 

“The future of work means creating on-demand cultural environments and experiences, every day, all the time, for every person.

“We’re moving from shared purpose and meaning to shared life experiences — where people have deeper conversations and more vulnerability around how we all get on the same page and work towards shared goals. Especially as the disruptions, volatility, uncertainty, and chaos increases. We’re going to have to do much better at helping each other. 

“The conversation that needs to happen is about shared purposes in life and society that, oh yeah, happen to also happen in how we work.

“There’s never been a better time to achieve shared purpose and meaning, but it’s bigger than a company’s strategy and vision. We’re getting better at moving away from experts and moving towards sharing experiences with each other and learning from each other.” 

Hard Choices Leaders Need to Make

“The number one toughest choice is that they organization must be run as an interdependent entity.

“Senior execs must start demanding a lot more interdependent solutions from their people. Not for everything, but for the key strategic work. Yes, it’s much easier to assign and approve one-off initiatives. But those just create more complexity downstream, closer to the frontlines, because somebody’s got to make them all work together. 

“With all the information overload that we have, too many people are still not talking to each other — really talking. Eighty percent of work today is collaborative. It’ll be 90% by 2020. Leaders must truly understand how people share information, and how they’re not. The future of leadership is ensuring collaboration leads to meaning-making and sense-making, which leads to shared actions. 

“After that, senior execs must get serious about learning. Most every HR exec I talk to says 'I’m so sick of my company saying that learning matters, learning is important, there’s no budget to back that up.' We’re trying to offload the cost of learning, trying to get employees to do it after their working hours. 

“We’ve got to get serious that learning must be wrapped around every task, every day.”

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Jensen Site, Twitter, FB. Bill’s upcoming book, The Day Tomorrow Said No, is a powerful fable about the future of work. A fable specifically designed to revolutionize conversations about the future between leaders, the workforce, educators, and students. Go here to download a FREE copy of the final pre-press draft of the book.