Reinventing the Future of HR With Design Thinking and Agility

Human Resources (HR) as a function is at its most important crossroads ever: either continue doing the things it’s always done, in the same way they’ve always been done; or change itself and become a truly value-creating business unit.

It’s one road or the other. But most definitely it can’t be both.

I think the decision should really be a no-brainer. But I don't know why it's not.

Continuing on the same path HR is today would mean certain death. No serious organization, business leader or employee wants to be around the kind of HR that exists only to hire, pay, fire and enforce policies (the "cost center" kind of HR). Put bluntly, the transactional HR is going to perish sooner rather than later because it doesn’t add value anymore.

The stories of “why everybody hates HR” (a very common headline in business magazines around the world) are not to be ignored. They must be taken seriously because they constitute the urgent call to action for HR to change. People don’t want the old-school HR. Everybody is fed-up with it and the reality of the new world of work and workplace will continue to shatter the idea that HR has the slightest opportunity to survive by remaining the same.

To remain relevant, HR needs to change. It needs to take the path of profound transformation, focusing on the seamless integration of four core elements that I call the “new value proposition of HR”.

1. Putting people first (we can call it Employee or Human Experience at work)

2. Aligning with business goals and outcomes

3. Becoming a truly agile function

4. Leveraging on technology

None of these elements is new for any business. But HR hasn’t truly embraced them as part of its core value proposition, if it ever had one.

The question is how to navigate the complexities, challenges and chaos that come when walking into the unknown territory of the second path described before and embracing these four core values? How can design thinking and agility help HR transition from the old-school, obsolete, irrelevant kind of HR that refuses to finally die, even though everybody hates, to a new, highly valuable, relevant and thriving kind of HR that people couldn’t live without?

Let’s explore

Design Thinking is about doing the right things and Agility is doing the things right.

That is the simplest way to explain what each of those methodologies is about and the difference between them.

To begin the journey of building a new, more valuable HR, the first step is stop the pathetic and terrible practice of imposing one-size-fits-all policies on people and cramming everybody into a stinky box. To do that, HR needs to completely reframe the way it sees its function and the people it is serving.

This requires a very profound mindset shift: from thinking that employees must respond to HR to thinking that HR exists to serve and respond to employees; and, second, from considering employees as a disposable resource that can be hired, fired, punished, to considering employees as the most important HR customer, thus truly valuing every single soul that works for any given company.

Design Thinking is extremely powerful for this, because it starts with empathy and focuses on what people (including business leaders) truly want, instead of forcing them all into a useless box. That would be the real definition of doing the right things: putting people first and aligning with the business.

Consequently, the first step of any serious Design Thinking team would be to truly and deeply understand their customers (employees). Design Thinking offers tools that can help understand people, the problems that affect them, and integrate them into the solution-design, rather than imposing solutions upon them.

Once HR has shifted from “hey you, employee: this is what you have to do” to “now I understand you and the problems that most dramatically affect you at work”, it is time to find solutions.

Agility is offers a basic, yet transformative approach to implement solutions.

There are three essential principles at the core of agility: 1) every proposed HR solution must be iterated until the final product is workable and delivers value, and can be scale from a small testing group to the organization at large; 2) the iteration processes thrive in a feedback environment. No feedback, no iteration; no iteration, crappy process; crappy process, traditional HR. What’s needed is feedback, feedback and more feedback. There isn’t any single company today that can live without customer feedback. Does anybody think that HR can thrive without their customers’ feedback?; and 3) (very relevant for HR) the processes built with agility must be able to change quickly when needed. It doesn’t make sense to build an HR solution using agility to then consider such a solution as written in stone for eternity.

Oh. And very important: don't start any HR transformation process with technology. You can find entire cemeteries full of failed HR transformation initiatives that started with technology instead of people. People first. Then alignment, then process redefinition and finally the tech that will support that. Never the other way around.

In summary, Design Thinking focuses on people, what they need, how they need it, whereas agility move the needle forward into taking action based on what people need.

This is the beginning of the transformation of HR.

Reinventing the future of HR

Using the words of my friend @Paul Cortissoz, I am in a crazy mission to transform HR and help create the best HR that has ever existed. We must reimagine and reinvent the future of HR, starting right now. Continuing on the current path is unsustainable.

HR has historically remained far back when compared to the progress that the rest of the business units have experienced. Today, because of the extremely fast advancements in technology, HR isn’t just lagging behind, but it is being left out at a faster rate than ever before.

I feel a sense of urgency, borderline with anxiety and concern, when I see HR operating in the same old-ways. Unfortunately, there are still many people deterring HR from change. Not because they don’t think is needed, but because they think that their skin is at risk by changing the way their HR operates. One such a kind of HR “leader” could be responsible for the demise of an entire HR department. I call them the “old-system thinkers”.

Now, there are millions of HR practitioners out there willing to get out of the old-school HR cocoon and do something different to create more value and become a truly relevant business unit. If you are a business leader, give voice to those millions of HR change-makers willing to give their hearts, souls and minds to transform HR. The old-system thinkers will sink your organization if you let them.

I believe that HR has the once-in-a-lifetime and extraordinary opportunity to become the real trailblazer and pioneer, propelling companies and people into the future of work. But it will not happen if we continue doing what we do today, in the same old ways. We must change. We must change deeply.

Both Design Thinking and Agility are powerful methodologies to start the journey of transformation. They are not the only ones, but definitely a great first step.

Are you familiar with Design Thinking or Agility?

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About the author:

Enrique is an HR and Tech Evangelist and founder of Hacking HR Forum. Enrique came to the United States from Venezuela as a Fulbright Scholar. Prior to coming to the US, Enrique was the CEO at Management Consultants, a firmed specialized in Human Resources and Corporate Social Responsibility in Venezuela. Before Management Consultants, Enrique worked in the telecommunications sector as a Senior Project Engineer for Telefonica. He currently works in Human Resources at the Inter-American Development Bank. He is also the cofounder of Cotopaxi, an artificial intelligence based recruitment platform focused on Latin America and the Caribbean. Enrique is a guest author in several blogs about innovation, management and human resources. He has over twenty years of experience. Enrique holds an Electronic Engineering from Simon Bolivar University in Venezuela and an Executive Master’s in Public Administration from Maxwell School in Syracuse, New York. Enrique also holds a Design Thinking certification from Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, he is certified Scrum Master and PMP.

The views expressed in this post are Enrique's.