Improving The "Human Experience": The Ultimate Frontier For HR

A single mother who works three shifts to make ends meet and support her family. A man who has to commute four to six hours a day to go to work. A young, recent grad who’s buried in student loans and credit card debt, living with the parents, with no savings, and worried about whether she will ever find a good paying job. A sixty-something years old guy who’s been forced to retire after working 45 years and doesn’t know what to do now. An immigrant worker who left his family behind in a ravaged country to financially help them from far away. A man whose insurance isn’t covering a sick child or spouse. A woman who was sexually harassed. A gay who was discriminated against.

Some coworkers have had better opportunities than others to progress in life. But a lot are struggling with challenges and stories like the ones above. Stories that very often are invisible to everyone at work, except them. 

At work, we ask everybody to bring their “full self to work” and give their “100%”, but very often most of us don’t have any idea of what’s behind the scenes. We end up missing people's larger life picture and their day to day reality beyond work.

For all them, the concept of “employee experience” is interesting, but somewhat ethereal. They want to be happy at work, they want to deliver their best performance, they want to give their 100% while having the best experience at work, but they can’t let their other selves, their full (and real) selves on the side.

They are one. They are real people, real humans dealing with several challenges outside work that affect their life at work.

From EX to HX

Over the past few months I’ve been talking about the important responsibility of Human Resources (HR) in creating and delivering the best Employee Experience (EX). I’ve called this idea “putting people first”. People before processes, systems, policies and technologies.

But I must confess that I’ve made a huge mistake: in talking about “putting people first”, I didn’t consider that life outside work is way bigger than life at work. And that that fuller, larger real life and its happenings have gigantic implications at work.

Don’t get me wrong, EX is important. Many companies aren’t even delivering an acceptable level of EX. Alas, sometimes they don’t even know what the heck EX is. They do need to work on that!

However, I believe that the real and ultimate frontier of any organization and their HR function is improving the human experience (HX), not just EX, of the people who happen to work at their companies for the time being.

Some might say that this is not HR’s responsibility, let alone a company’s one. They could argue that the personal and professional lives of their employees are two separate instances, and that the company is only responsible for life at work (or a little piece of it).

But if any organization wants to ensure that their people are actually performing at their best, unleashing their creative potential and giving their full 100% at work, they will have to look beyond the life of their employees at work and understand what that life is about, with its successes and failures, its ups and downs, and, more importantly, with its struggles and challenges. From there, the organization and its HR could think what they can do about that life outside work to make it better, more pleasant and enjoyable.  

This next frontier, improving the human experience, isn’t just about HR. It is about the entirety of the organization and its leaders.

But HR has a unique opportunity to become a beacon of hope, change and transformation. It can take the organization to a level where only a few ones have ever been before. It can transform a company from one that is only concerned with what happens to their people inside the company’s walls, to one that is truly interested in their lives as a whole.

In doing so, not only could HR transform the organization and become more socially responsible with their people, but HR itself could become a real “human” role.

How can HR make this real? How does HR improve the human experience?

These are some of the things that HR can do to evolve and improve HX:

Practicing empathy: as a unique human characteristic, a little empathy can go a long way. If HR is only focused on making people comply with rules and policies, it is missing the point of why those people come to HR in the first place. Practicing genuine empathy is powerful. It opens the road to compassion and understanding. When HR really understands what their people are struggling with, they won’t need heavy and intricate policies and rules anymore. Instead, they will be able to craft solutions that are unique to that person’s story and life situation.

Becoming a listener: practicing empathy is great and necessary. And to make it happen, HR must become a powerful listener. For real, nobody wants to come to HR to be told what crap policy X or Y says about this or that. People want to be heard and express themselves and find someone who understands the frustrations and challenges in their life that affect their work. I am not saying that just talking about these things will solve any of those challenges. But knowing that you have someone you can talk to about these struggles, someone who is there to attentively listen to you without thinking in HR gibberish is important to feel validated and heard.

Transforming “total rewards” in “personalized rewards”: ditching the ridiculous concept of “total rewards” and evolving to a fully personalized approach can be more significant for that young recent grad who would rather see his debt go down than a retirement plan that would yield a benefit in 50 years down the road. Or for the guy who commutes four hours a day to go to work, working from home is more powerful than a freaking blue jean Friday. These are small things. But in general, HR has created compensation, perks and benefits approaches following a simple, but very wrong philosophy: that all their people are motivated by the same things and need to be compensated and rewarded in the same way. Today, this is one of the most absurd realities of the workplace. Once HR gets to really understand their people’s stories, they will be able to craft a reward approach that truly speaks to each of them individually, instead of putting all of them in the same bucket. Technology allows HR to do that. All it requires is thinking out of the box, letting go of the obsolete concept of total rewards and truly making a difference.

Reskilling the workforce: anxiety is in crescendo these days. Technology seems to be offering a lot of opportunities for people and organizations, but also a lot of headaches to those who feel they will be left behind. Reskilling the workforce and making sure they understand the implications of the technological transformation we are living in is a powerful way to help them remain relevant. To do that, HR needs to work in changing the competency models.

Making it easier: there are some people who don’t like to work. But they are just a few. The overwhelming majority of all the people I’ve known in my life love working. They especially love doing something valuable and meaningful. Of course, they hate when their jobs turn into the same boring, routinely chore to perform day in and day out. They hate having to come to work to shitty bosses or toxic cultures. They hate being treated like crap when they do the right thing, while seeing others climb the corporate ladder just by kissing asses and playing politics. And, if on top of that, we put the hours that people have to spend commuting, the amount of shifts they have to work every day to make ends meet, the preoccupations of their lives, it is evident that “work” becomes a miserable experience. Why, though? Why would we make a transformative, energizing, creative, potentially enjoyable and transcendental experience such as working in meaningful things a miserable one? Let’s make things easier. Let’s transform our workplaces into places where people truly find meaning in life.

Final notes

Only when the organization and HR can think more comprehensively about the human lives each company touches will they be able to deliver the kind of value that nobody has ever seen before, yet everyone longs for.

This isn’t easy. This hasn’t been done in the past in too many instances. Companies have been mainly focused on making profits for their shareholders while neglecting the lives of those who spend 8-12 hours working for them. But times are changing. And while I understand that organizations are more important than any single individual in the long run, the life of every single employee matters today and always.

Improving the Human Experience means having a progressive and pioneer HR. This is the kind of HR that people would die to have, and not the one they would dread talking to.

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About the author:

Enrique Rubio is a Tech and HR Evangelist. He's passionate about Human Resources, People Operations, Technology and Innovation. Enrique is an Electronic Engineer, Fulbright Scholar and Executive Master in Public Administration with a focus on HR. Over the past 18 years Enrique has worked in the HR and tech world. A lot of his research and work revolves around the digitization of the workplace and Human Resources. Enrique currently works as an advisor of the CHRO at the Inter-American Development Bank. He's also the founder of Hacking HR Forum, an event to discuss the future of work, and Co-Founder of Cotopaxi, an artificial intelligence-based recruitment platform for emerging markets.

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