People-centric and Strategic HR - Newsletter Overview

Jon Ingham’s newsletter on “People-centric and Strategic HR” aims to anticipate where the People & Culture profession is currently heading, and provide some guidance on moving to where we need to go more quickly and effectively.

Although the journey has already begun, the destination is still relatively unclear, and your help will be critical in trying to shape it. Please read, comment, share and subscribe! Then, most importantly, use your learning to develop a more people-centric as well as strategic HR – or multi-sided – approach within your own organisation.

These are the newsletter editions to date:

?

1: HR’s new evolution

An introduction to the agenda

?

2: Beyond employee engagement and experience

Comparing engagement and experience and suggesting that we should really be focusing on employee transformation and that we do this through hyper-personalisation, although we need to think about this later term in a slightly different way from our marketing colleagues.

?

3: Providing value for workers

Explaining the value triangle, and how value can be increased in any area, particularly those involving intangibles, from value-for-money, to added-value, to created-value, and how this applies firstly to strategic HR, and secondly to people-centric HR.

Value for money in strategic HR is about efficiency – meeting basic needs for saving time and cost, meeting compliance needs, and using best practices. Value-for-money-for-employees (E-VFM) is similar and relates closely to ‘Be Safe’ in Dave Ulrich’s 4 Be, or ‘Protection’ in my 4P model.

This article also shows how the organisation value chain can be used to demonstrate why we need to think about value from an employee’s perspective.

?

4: Employee added value

Adding value in strategic HR is about meeting pre-identified business needs, and this applies to people-centric HR (E-CV) too. Workers have to be able to optimise their contribution to a business if they are to feel fulfilled. Particularly given increasing complexity, organisations need to continually focus on reducing organisation friction / drag / debt, and also…

?

5: Employee added value (part 2)

… by introducing radical, or perhaps just increasing less radical autonomy. This article also describes some of the benefits of providing more autonomy (Dave Ulrich's Becoming or my Progression) for both employees and their employers, and explains why this is becoming more relevant and important currently.

The article also shows how the organisation value chain can be used to illustrate how work takes place in a highly autonomous organisation. Haier’s RenDanHeyi model is provided as an example.

??????????????????????????????????????

6: Adding value through autonomy

Substantially increasing autonomy isn’t all upside – there are some real challenges in doing this, particularly when people are under stress and worried about the cost of living. One option is increasing autonomy slowly and progressively (just as, though this is often forgotten, Haier has done).

The first step may be to move from vertical to more horizontal organisation which then makes it easier for people to act in a more autonomous way – also see my last book, ‘The Social Organization’.

?

7: Creating value for employees

Moving on or up, creating value in strategic HR is about providing new value, opportunity or potential by accumulating capabilities in the organisation value chain. Similarly, creating value in people-centric HR (E-CV) is about an organisation finding and developing potential within an employee.

The opportunities for people value provision can be illustrated in a similar way to the organisation value chain. Taking action to create value for employees may mean identifying new people focused activities to run alongside existing business focused ones.

?

8: Employee transformation

Employee experience is important, as is optimising employee contribution to the business. But the most powerful, highest level value to offer employees is helping them achieve outcomes which are important to them – not just the experience of meeting these. This is about helping employees transform against their own objectives.

Another way of looking at employee transformation is that this is the mass customisation of employee experience. An example is the Strategic HR Academy – the experience is the support you get from me and other HR practitioners in a study group based upon a course but what’s really important is the intended transformation in your performance.

?

9: Employee transformation tech

HR ?tech is influenced by broader technology trends but also the impact of this technology in a business. This means that if employee transformation is the next evolution of HR, that our next techologies should be those that enable employees' most transformational experiences. Three examples are suggested.

?

10: People-centric vs strategic HR

Multi-sided HR means being both people-centric and strategic. However, understanding what these terms mean, and their consequences, may be aided by contrasting the two things. This article therefore compares strategic and people-centric approaches using the example of retention.

?

11. HR’s neo-Copernican revolution

In people-centric HR, employees are not just human resources, or even providers of human / other capital, but are true customers of HR and organisation activities. The organisation therefore orbits both the business and the people, a bit like a circumbinary planet rotating around two stars, such as Star Wars' Tatooine.

Multi-sided HR, which requires us to be both strategic and people-centric understands that people are workers as well as customers and therefore takes a more ambidextrous, paradoxical approach to both requiring and serving employees. Continuing the astronomical metaphor, this adds a quantum perspective in. HR needs to be both circumbinary, treating workers and business as equal status customers. And circumstellar, focusing on the business, enabling people to contribute to this as employees.

?

12. Why we need multi-sided HR

This edition of the newsletter summarises the benefits organisations can achieve from multi-sided HR and explain why this has become more important during and post the pandemic.

The article also suggests that whilst benefits could be substantial, we should probably not focus on them too much, for example by trying to calculate a ROI (unless this is a ROI for an employee). Doing this is likely to pull organisations back towards a business-centric perspective. Instead, there needs to be a belief that people-centric management is the right approach to take, and that doing this will result in positive returns.

13. Company capability and culture

Looking forward to a keynote for the HR Congress on why we need to think about both capability and culture, but address each in a different way. You can read some notes on this here and I will be returning to the topic in 2024.

14. One more time, what is employee experience? (part 1 of 3)

Reviewing Dave Ulrich's insights on employee experience from a recent HXWize conference, which explains why we should see EX as an antecedent of wellbeing.

15. What is EX? (one more time, part 2, on Joe Pine's Experience Economy)

Reviewing Joe Pine's insights on employee experience from a recent HXWize conference, which further explains why we should see EX as an antecedent of wellbeing, and focusing on optimising employee contributions, and meeting their own needs.

16. Four opportunities to extend EX beyond just awful (one more time, part 3)

Summarising my insights on employee experience from a recent HXWize conference, and explaining why our definition of EX informs the activities we undertake, the way we measure them, and how we organise to deliver.

Find out more and subscribe here.

And let me know what you think about these topics below - I look forward to reading about your reactions and own perspectives.