Providing Value for Workers

Multi sided HR requires HR to provide meaningful value (not just experience) to employees as well as to the business.

This newsletter is about a new multi-sided model for HR. This is just edition 3 and I haven’t yet properly explained what I mean by multi-sided, or shown you the model, although I have suggested it involves being both truly strategic and people-centric. However, this edition offers some suggestions about important aspects of both sides of the model, so I'm making good progress towards presenting it to you soon.

I’ve been at HR Vision in London for the last two days – keynoting, workshoping, chairing the main conference and moderating the stream on culture and employee experience – so I’ve been busy. However, that’s not going to stop me getting my fortnightly newsletter to you!

I’m going to provide you with some of the content I discussed in my workshop (or ‘thinkshop’) here. This was a slightly challenging session - and actually quite a challenging conference given the train strikes. I was in the main conference room (a cinema) but wanted to create a comfortable and informal (people-centric) environment – encouraging people to the front of the room without making them strain their necks by looking up at the big screen - as I wanted to provide people with insight that we would then discuss and validate or challenge.

In my earlier sessions, I was reminded of a workshop I ran in Saudi Arabia a few years back, which was at a new university for women, and where most of the attendees were naturally women too. Despite this, the conference devoted the huge main auditorium to about a dozen men and squashed a few thousand women into the top circle, several hundred feet up and about half a mile back from the stage (that may be a small exaggeration). I'm not criticising Saudi culture, but am sure most people had a rather poor experience that day. I wouldn’t say that delivering a workshop in that environment was impossible, as I think possibility is based on skill level, but I certainly don’t (yet) have the capabilities for delivering an effective workshop like that.

Now, of course, even if I’d not been done anything else, the HR Vision workshop wouldn’t have been anything like the Saudi one, but I did want to give people a proper chance to get closer. So, I presented using slides within a slide – as shown – which I think worked well.

I’m (over?) sharing this experience just to show that I am encouraging people to act with people-centricity in mind, not just to think this way!

However, on with the thinking…

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Thinking about value

Value is anything that helps meets the wants or needs of other people, organisations, or indeed, yourself. (However, what is valuable may have to be decided some time after its delivery. For example, many business leaders will not recognise the value provided by strategic HR until after this has impacted the business. That doesn't mean that it's not value when it's provided.)

I use a model for thinking about value that I picked up at Penna Crane Davies, and I’ve kept front of mind since. I like models (and particularly this model) as I think they help us think with more rigour, and less sloppiness, about how we can manage, develop and organise people better. I don’t agree that we should be as data and analytics based as other, more objective areas of business. But I do think we should be using models, tools, frameworks, etc, just like them.

This model is called the value triangle, and suggests there are three levels of value that anyone - in any area of life or business, or any group, can provide. Value builds up from the bottom of the triangle, starting with value for money, which is about doing the basics well. Someone asks you to do something, and you undertake the basic tasks that are involved appropriately.

Next up is adding value, and this is more about meeting the specific requirements of a client / customer / other stakeholder. So it’s less about the general best practices of the value for money level, and more about the unique challenges of a particular scenario.

Creating value is going above even those specific requirements to provide more value than the customer knew they wanted ie finding a way to surpass what you’ve been asked to provide.

The big agenda in many arenas, not just HR, is about encouraging people to refocus on higher levels of value, and potentially, to reverse our way of thinking so that we start thinking with creating value and work down from that, rather than with value for money and working up.

Incidentally,

• I think much of the debate about quiet quitting is about people reducing the level of value people are providing. For me, we do want people to focus on creating value - but for that to be the case, we need to focus on creating value for them as well - which is why multi-sided HR is so important now.
• The model is presented as a triangle to reinforce the point that the delivery of value needs to start at the bottom and build up. (Liz Truss arguably tried to create value for the UK, but messed up the value for money piece. The high levels of value don’t matter after that.)

In this newsletter, I'm going to explain how the value triangle model can be applied to 1) strategic, and then 2) people centric HR. Then, I’m going to show you why (as I noted in my last newsletter) employee experience and engagement tend not to work that well, ie that it doesn't make much difference to either individuals, or the company they work for.

That approach means that this will be quite a long explanation, but I need to take you through value in strategic HR to explain how I think it works for people centricity. Also, of course, multi-sided HR is about both people centric and strategic HR, so if you’re interested in this broader concept, then you need to understand value in both underlying ones.

Providing strategic HR value to the business

Value for money in a strategic HR context (VFM) is about efficiency, ie doing things whilst reducing costs, or meeting other basic requirements, such as saving time, meeting the requirements of legislation or regulation, or making HR less clunky. Much of it is what we used to do when we were Personnel, but we still need to things efficiently today as well – it’s just that now there’s more extra need for value too.

This 'more' is adding value (AV) – really understanding the needs of a business and supporting it by providing qualities / outcomes / capabilities in people and their organisation, which is then done by delivering appropriate HR activities and interventions. Many practitioners mistake this level with strategic HR because it's more business-like than personnel was, but it’s not – because it’s about supporting a business, and if that’s what we’re doing, we’re still just a (more effective) support function.

Creating value (CV) is being truly strategic. Offering a business more potential by providing enhanced outcomes or capabilities in people or the organisation. Directly connecting with competitive advantage by developing and implementing not just a people strategy but a 'people based business strategy'. I'll add discussing how you can best ensure that business leaders understand the value of truly strategic HR to my list of future newsletters!

(I've also talked about 'creating value plus' - CV+, which is about creating an environment in which employees can create value for themselves. However, I've since realised that the best way of doing this is to provide value to employees, hence multi sided HR.)

Being truly strategic should have been HR’s main agenda for the last 20 years, but as many organisations have confused this with adding value, not all organisations have been doing it. If that’s the case for you, I’d suggest starting this before moving on – but don’t take too long, as our agenda is continuing to evolve, and you really want to be doing everything listed below, and in future editions of this newsletter, as well.

Providing value to workers

I’ve already suggested, in my last newsletter, that we’ve tried to provide value to employees via engagement approaches, and more recently, through employee experience. But these terms are often unclear – in fact, more than one of the speakers at HR Vision suggested there had just been a change in terminology but that they were still undertaking much the same types of activity.

As I’ve already told you, I think there are actually clear distinctions between these things. This difference is often perceived to be about experience acting as an antecedent of engagement. Which it is, but I don’t think that’s the critical thing. This is that engagement is a business-centric view of motivation (the bottom value chain in the slide above), whereas experience is people-centric (the top chain). The important build in adding experience to engagement is that we should always try to take a worker’s perspective on what we do within organisations, as well as the business’ one. Experience is part of that, but the critical shift isn't actually to focus on experience, it's to see things as an employee. I’ll come back to this again at some point too.

However, I hope the key questions you're asking yourself now, even with this perhaps only slightly nuanced build on experience and engagement, are:

1) What does value look like for employees?

A large part of this value is the core intrinsic motivators from self determination theory: autonomy, competence and relatedness. This theory was shared most effectively in Dan Pink's book, Drive, albeit mangled into autonomy, mastery and the addition of purpose, replacing the original theory's focus on relatedness. I believe all four motivations are important, and like the way these have been summarised by Dave Ulrich as 3B's: believe, become and belong, as shown below.

In the slide from HR Vision which I've included below, I've added some 'basics' to Dave's 3B's. It's interesting that Dan Pink's latest thinking seems to reinforce the importance of these 4B's too, as he lists people's regrets (for not having met their motivations) as foundation (basics), boldness (become), moral (believe), and connection (belong).

UPDATE: My 'basics' includes things like psychological safety, and I think this relates well to Dave's addition of a 4th B for 'be safe' (see his comments to this article below).

However, I think there is more nuance to what motivates people than is shown here too. People are all different, and they have different needs and motivations too. Multi-sided HR isn't just a shift from one to two stakeholders, but to as many stakeholders as there are employees (plus one).

2) What level of value are we currently offering our employees?

I think much of what we’ve been doing around experience, engagement and people-centricity has only been value for money for employees (E-VFM). As I wrote last time, most people don’t come to work for the experience of work, so we shouldn’t be too surprised that they’re not shouting from the rooftops about the wonderfully compelling experience we offer them these days (even if we manage to do that, of course).

Combing both of these points together, the key motivations at the employee experience / E-VFM level probably relate to the basic requirements show in the slide. All these basics / 'be safe' points are important, but there's clearly a lot more value we can provide on top, especially as they haven't yet really got into the core intrinsic motivators of self determination theory,

Beyond Experience and Engagement

If we want people to be really motivated in their work, we have to offer value that is more meaningful for them. We have to add and create value for them too.

I’m going to move on to addressing these levels of worker-perceived value in the next two newsletters (my HR Vision workshop did largely validate my thinking around these). But I’d be interested in you think I’ve got the value for money piece right – and what you think the next levels of value might involve?

I’d love to hear your own views on the points I've made above.?Please share your comments below. I look forward to discussing these and broader points around multi-sided HR with you! Also, please subscribe for future insights on multi-sided HR.

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 (The 'Work and Job Design' study group is starting now!).

Kind regards - Jon