HR's New Evolution

Join me every fortnight as I explore what I suggest will be HR's main new focus for the next couple of decades. Subscribe above so you don't miss any new insights.

Welcome to my first issue of People-centric and Strategic HR. I hope you'll find these updates interesting and useful.

HR's main focus during the last couple of years has been on becoming more strategic. This shift goes back at least as far as Dave Ulrich's HR Champions 25 years ago. However, despite all the time (as well as attention and investment) that has passed since then, I argue that most HR practitioners still don't understand how to do strategic HR properly. Don't worry - although people based business strategy isn't the main focus of this newsletter, future editions will describe where organisations are still going wrong with this.

Our lack of progress in making HR more strategic may be one reason that some HR practitioners and teams have moved away from this focus, and are instead emphasising delivery for their people - a trend seen within employee experience, hacking HR, people operations, agile HR, and other areas.

That increasing focus on people is absolutely required, although I worry that much of the effort placed behind it is misplaced. Employee experience is a great example. Everything we're doing around personas, journey mapping, experience systems, etc is appropriate and helpful. But not much of it deals with anything fundamental for our organisations or our people. I call it the lipstick on a pig effect - we're generally keeping the same porcine organisations, just dressing them up a bit more prettily.

But we also need to be both strategic and people-centric, and to do both of these things effectively so they really do impact the competitive performance of our businesses, and the working lives of our people. In this newsletter, I'll explain how we can be truly people-centric, and strategic, and how we can manage the tensions that evolve from combining both of these paradoxical approaches.

Actually, some of you may know that my own (and the Strategic HR Academy's) approach to strategic HR (or HCM) has always been very people-centred. HR practitioners often think that being more strategic requires them to place more focus on their business. However, I argue that this is the opposite of what we need to do, and actually condemns HR to renewed administrative irrelevance. Strategic impact has always mainly resulted from attending to people, their relationships, and their management, development and organisation. Clearly that all needs to be placed in the context of the business, but the main basis for people strategy is understanding people, and the way they can be helped to learn, collaborate and motivate themselves. Not what the business needs people to do.

However, with the increasing focus on diversity, inclusion, wellbeing, experience, etc, developed during and since the pandemic, my earlier suggestions on people-centred HR are no longer enough. It's time to move on to multi-sided HR - the approach that I believe will define our next 25 years just as much as strategic HR has shaped the last quadranscentennial.

This newsletter is going to be practically focused, not just provocative. However, this first edition is really just an initial, general introduction to the topic and I'm going to start sharing more specific advice next time. However, if you want to skip ahead, this new report I've written for UKG and HRZone falls fairly firmly into the space I'm discussing (there's much more too) - and it does offer some guidance on what you can do now.

So although I know I've only just started to describe what I mean by multi-sided HR, I’d love to hear your own views on this and what you think strategic and people-centric HR requires.?Please share your comments below. I look forward to discussing this important new topic with you!

If you enjoyed this article, 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 and Reward; 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 periodic study groups.

Kind regards - Jon