The New HR Playbook

In his work the origin of the species – Charles Darwin in 1859 concluded – It is not the strongest of the species that survives, but rather, that which is most adaptable to change. I would like you to take a moment and think of the last 18 months and how all our worlds were turned upside down. We do know we live in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world and following the meteoric growth of both technology and globalisation it also means we live in a very connected world. The outcome from these connections is that events are not isolated like hurricanes anymore only affecting a small part of the world – many events are now like tsunamis - where we see shock waves travel great distances disrupting everything in their path. Examples that we can observe today that we can see surrounding us are global supply chain issues, chip set shortages, fuel shortages and even more relevant to our role in the people profession – global thinking and expectations around the new world of work.

Global opinions and events that will also make their way into our workplaces as opinions, needs and wants of our employees – cannot be ignored. Events in cultures and countries far from us will now appear in our workplaces – alongside new ways of thinking, expectations and new approaches from different generations.

As the world homogenises - your best practices won’t save you - it’s your ability to keep up with the pace of change.

There is a very famous Chinese curse which reads – may you live in interesting times - Darwin's words are now more relevant than ever. It will truly only be the ones that are most responsive to change that survive.

We know the global shapers – we know the business expectations – we know now more than ever as HR teams we need to do more with less and show our value to our organisations – so where should our HR focus lie ? There is a very simple truth we often overlook – It is easy to copy your product but virtually impossible to copy a culture – and how often do we overlook using people and our culture as a source of competitive advantage?

We can see into the future on some things - Digitization will at some point remove the administration from us - so how do we not get replaced by Robots? – This is where I see the future focus of HR being to support business transformation and this lies in four key verticals - Branding, Performance Architecture, Communications and Data?

If Apple called you today for an interview – you would probably go, I know I would – that’s the power of brands today.

Let’s ask the simple question - why do organisations succeed or fail? - Well it ultimately comes down to talent. To secure that talent today you are going to need to establish a brand that both attracts and retains and it needs to be as good as or better than your competitors.

This is now why we as a profession need to develop our skill set and start to think more like a marketer and combine that with creating great HR architecture that supports the promise we made.

In the case of when we talk about BRAND I think we need to think a little bit more then employee value proposition. What should be encompassing your external brand image is the culture you create – one that is both competitive and compassionate and enables innovation and flexibility. You need to carefully curate and map your employee experience – we create frameworks for our customer journey – why not have the same attention to detail for your employee experience? Encased under the brand heading should be Total Reward – and that is not just the financial aspects but aligning with the new expectations of multiple generations in the workplace – we are talking about lifestyle opportunities, work life balance, our approach to CSR and the environment, diversity and equality, opportunities to learn and grow, a professional and equitable environment and of course involvement in shaping the product or service provided.

We should be working with our leaders to create purposes for our organisations – a mission or vision just won’t do the job anymore – we need massive transformational purposes creating stories that shape culture and culture that then shapes behaviour.?In the future we need to make sure your people are telling the right stories. There is a famous story about a large department store in London from years ago. During a train strike that would have made it difficult for many staff to reach work the managing director greeted every member of staff who managed to arrive at work that day. That gesture grew to a story where he flew in on a helicopter and presented every employee with a bottle of champagne and 500 pounds sterling. As people shared the newer version of that event – it became a story that shaped the culture. The next strike saw 100% attendance from everyone based on their expectations based on the stories shared.

Branding is now more important than ever and it’s something that our new talent want to associate with to complement their own personal brand. Highly effective companies have their employer brand as a key strategic asset. Once this has been established - you need to be working to cultivate your Internet presence – LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Indeed these are all tools that you and your teams should be leveraging to showcase your overall brand and allow talent to self-select.

This is where you also need to think about how attractive your Employee experience is and ensuring that your organisational architecture and HR activity systems support this – by implementing simple checks and balances through regular feedback you can continue to calibrate and adjust when required.

Finally we all know about the importance of the psychological contract. Your brand will support in the establishment of that and aligned Performance Management Architecture will ensure that people are clear on what their organisations expect of them – with a great brand creating the internal alignment to show discretionary effort you are some way on the journey to success

Your Brand will continue to be the most important part of talent attraction, engagement and retention.

My own personal definition of culture is – “how we do things around here”. So if we know that then what better way to shape your culture than have great PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT ARCHITECTURE in place. Unfortunately performance management still evokes thoughts of a backwards looking paper based system that is essentially riddled with bias – on both sides and let’s face it adds no value. There is as I still understand it the Jurassic park of performance management – forced ranking still surviving out in the wild. It all needs to change.

Firstly we need to have a system that supports the development of goals that support strategy – my personal favourite is cascading objectives from a ?balanced scorecard. This is of particular importance to HR professionals who can ensure that people metrics gain a centre stage on the company results.

We then need to ensure that we are both aligning our current employees on their targets and providing a system that ensures new joiners have performance expectations set clearly and quickly. KPI’s. OKRs and project targets are clear in what we want our people to do – to shape our culture lets ensure we have behavioural frameworks in place – encouraging behaviours that both align with our strategic goals and differentiate us from our competitors.

Then lets leverage the amazing technology that we have available to us today – we should be making sure our PM systems are in the cloud and available on any device. Weekly or monthly check ins alongside strengths based feedback should be the norm and our performance management architecture should be built around the maintenance of current results – not a long and awkward conversation on things that could have happened a year before.

As we outlined earlier the psychologists tell us what enables, engages and supports the psychological contract and encourages our teams to achieve and enable our businesses. We know that great performance management systems are part of the bundles of high performance working practices that turn the dial and we know that emphasising people’s purpose at work is a key enabler.?These are all the reasons why great performance management architecture should be a key focus of HR departments to ensure we are enabling our organisations.

A phrase for you to all remember - People don’t do what you expect they do what you inspect.

I have started to see a very pleasing trend of internal COMMUNICATIONS being managed by HR teams – if we know stories shape our culture then it makes total sense. What I am advocating here is a little more than just internal communications. I am talking about creating an internal communications platform that drives your culture, celebrates success and ensures that people can interact and collaborate across the organisation.

In today’s online world we share more than we ever have. Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Reddit, Quora all platforms where people publish anything and everything. If these are intertwined in people’s lives why are we not providing the same platforms in the workplace? Information and updates available on any device, anywhere and at any time.

Workplace by Facebook, Google Currents, Slack – the only thing that matters is that you have a platform in place that firmly cements your cultural DNA

If we know that stories shape culture – let’s help people share those stories

Pioneered in the US through looking at sports performance – we are now beginning to see how there is an increasing use of DATA to make better decisions around people

Look how marketing departments segment customers to focus on the better marketing strategies – why don’t we do the same? We should be using data to make better decisions on how we manage people. Data will help us influence the biases of judgement we know exist - data provides an opportunity to help us make better decisions.

People or more specifically their knowledge skills and abilities are often said to be the businesses greatest asset. This is about gathering and analysing data about people in a workforce - using people data offers the opportunity to contribute to the business in a clearer way.

Previously we have always worked on hunches and now many organisations are leading the way in showing us what good looks like. Great examples of People Analytics in Practice?are Teach for America – they track performance of all teachers comparing it to evaluations when hired ?- Google?looked into their interview process and asking if the interviews were worthwhile. Interestingly what they found is that interviews had no predictability to performance – managers were spending too much time interviewing and they decided that no more than 4 managers can hire as it is a waste of time. Credit Suisse?looked at the benefits of retaining talent. To stop loss of productivity – they found people who change jobs internally are stickier, and actioned their findings. Data will help tell us who are our most valuable employees but in a more factual way.

We know that performance measures have many faults and are noisy so if we try and work things out it can be difficult. There is a range of outcomes due to factors outside of the employees control so data can help us with the question what is the difference between skill and luck. The NFL has used data to really work out where improvements in performance can happen it helps us determine skill v chance. Skill persists - chance doesn’t.

Supporting our intuition with fact and separating our fact from fiction

As we automate and there is less dependency on HR teams as administrators I have outlined where I feel the new mandate for HR is and we can add value across Branding, Performance Architecture, Communications and Data.

No company strategy can be achieved without its people and the traditional HR playbook is gone – it is time for HR teams to step up to lead our businesses into the new world of work