Suggested Role and Structure for the New HR

There has never been a more interesting time to join an HR team. Several revolutions are converging to make this function a key enabler of success for any company.

First thing first: We are now talking more and more about People and Culture. The term People covers any resource contributing to a company. It could be employees, full time, part time, exempt or nonexempt, but also contractors, W-2 or 1099 contractors, service providers, or contributors to the gig economy. And the first observation that we need to make here is that we do not have a unified environment under which all those resources can be tracked. So, a company today has a piecemeal perspective on its workforce, on its people. No doubts, then, that Workforce Planning, or simple Workforce Management is not an easy feat. We will come back to it.

In “People and Culture” lies not only “People” but also “Culture”, and culture is also a broad subject. Vision, mission, values, diversity, belonging, connectivity, community, all those terms, and others, do fit in. by using this world, we recognize that a group of people, dynamically staffed, is unified by a shared set of beliefs, rules, and practices governing relationships, expected behaviors, contributions, and recognition.

Being part of the “people and Culture” team is to enable the realization of an environment reflecting the culture of the company and the optimization of the use of the workforce in order to achieve a shared vision.

Obviously, the People and Culture team can only be an enabler, as work is happening one decision at a time, one contribution at a time from everyone in the company, but the P&C team is the one responsible for advising, mentoring, training, experimenting, and bringing to the company new ways of thinking about organizations, about ways to work together.

So, how do you start defining what should be the contribution of the People and Culture (P&C) team and, as your company grows, its structure? When I was working at Genentech, the HR team comprised more than 300 people serving about 15,000 employees. At Think Surgical, we were 3 full time employees serving about 150 employees. If the ratio was about the same, the skillset brought, the services offered, as well as the legacy that should be managed were different.

My aim in this article is to suggest a couple of principles that could be used when defining the contribution of a P&C team, but it will be up to you to see how they apply to the specific situation of your company and how you would like your team to be structured.

1. Skills Based Planning

The first suggested principle is to be intentional, to plan and prioritize strategic contributions of the P&C team. How novel is this? Well, for a function that was administrative and tactical at its infancy, the strategic dimension of P&C is still a dimension that we are all working to develop. We all understand the cadence of work in manufacturing environments and have studied its evolution. The nature of work today, and what is influencing it, is very different from the past. If we look briefly at the statistics of the Bureau of Labor, the super sectors of today are not those of yesterday.

The level of education needed is also vastly different and the evolution of the number of high school and college graduates during the same period is telling.

We obviously know those current mega-trends, but what are those shaping our near future? Are we building quickly enough tomorrow’s workforce? What about the pressure on low-wage workers to find new occupations and the divide between them and high-wage workers who can better weather the changing landscape of the labor market?

Over the next 5 years, it is predicted that we will see more changes than during the last 25 years. Think about it: In 1995, per the Computer History Museum, the DVD was introduced, the web was beginning to grow, the browser war was launched between Netscape and Microsoft, and Java and Javascript were newly developed. In 5 years, where we are today will feel like in 1995. Someone transported by a time machine from 1995 to now would not be relevant anymore. In 5 years, that’s how we would feel if we do not take the time to reskill ourselves.

To stay current, the granularity with which we need to look at the workforce is not anymore at the level of roles or jobs, but skills, leading, in some cases, to the deconstruction of jobs. New technologies, new ways of doing things will affect the career durability of employees. If the pace of change is accelerating as predicted, the need to identify nascent skills, declining skills, and how it will affect work should be a key aspect of planning and should be informed by the P&C team. Upskilling, reskilling, or cross-skilling strategies should be defined and the right combination of training, mentorship and on the job learning projects should be implemented to execute these strategies.

Planning is a company-wide process and HR has not traditionally been deeply involved in the establishment of the long-range plan. The interface has mostly been to plan for headcount changes per organization, per location, per job and level over the following 12 to 18 months. The most progressive companies are now thinking differently, involving P&C upfront and planning for their organization of work and their talent management processes holistically based on the more granular notion of skills.

How to do it? Fortunately, the right technology is here to help. Farewell to complex competency framework great at t=0 but difficult, if not impossible, to maintain afterwards. AI solutions are now making this new layer of planning possible, and it will quickly become a necessity for companies, small or large, to get such new, skills-based planning processes in place.

By necessity or by design, current jobs should be articulated around tasks or activities requiring evolving skill sets and organizational design will be influenced by the evolution of those skill sets, and the best sourcing strategies for those emerging, adjacent, or declining skills. Think about the power of being skills centric. Let’s take an example. Transitioning to civil life is difficult for veterans. Military job to civil job mapping is hard to do, but identifying skills gained during military time could very much be mapped by AI solutions to civil positions that would have otherwise not been easy to identify.?

Talent intelligence, the new generic name for the AI Solution and power engine behind skills-based planning, will be a centerpiece necessary to P&C teams and will extend to several other talent management processes, besides planning from promotion to internal mobility, to training, to marketplaces, leadership development, or diversity and inclusion. And this intelligence will apply to all components of the workforce, employees, contractors, service providers or gig workers.

2. The Workforce Experience

Once we understand what skills are required and how to source them, the P&C team must ensure that a strong experience is being proposed to any member of the workforce, starting with prospects and candidates. That is our second suggested principle.

Whether external or internal, prospects and candidates are experiencing the company through its branding efforts, but also through its interactions with sourcers, recruiters, hiring managers, interviewers or simply anyone from the company sharing what it is like to work there. It has to align with the dimensions of your desired Workforce Experience.?

I suggest here to use the Value Proposition model developed by Amy Edmondson and Mark Mortensen [1] where they distinguish between:

-??????Material Offering (Compensation and Benefits, Location Flexibility, Working tools, …)

-??????Opportunities to grow and develop.

-??????Connections and Community (“an energizing culture that allows people to express themselves candidly and engenders a sense of belonging”)

-??????Meaning and Purpose (“aspirational reasons for existing”)

Those four dimensions allow us to think about key aspects of the workforce experience and balance short-term and long-term needs with personalized and collective requirements.?

2.1. Material Offering

The first point, “Material Offering”, has been a traditional area of investment for P&C teams, with everything Compensation and Benefits related, but the reach of P&C has been extended with the pandemic to workspaces (at home, at the office, or elsewhere).?

P&C is not the only organization providing material offerings to employees.?Facilities, finance, other corporate services, or business itself are, but let’s focus here on the P&C contribution.

Compensation and benefits need to be revisited. In a recent article [2]Josh Bersin introduces the conclusion of one of his new research projects and his recommendations are telling: those who do it right will reap the benefit of the right pay equity practices but pay for performance is broken and Benefits are necessary but have grown to represent a budget that could be used differently to increase employee retention.

Total rewards that we thought to be a solid pillar of P&C appears to be fragile given results from the science of motivation, and the relentless and justified push for pay equity. Compensation and Benefits need to be re-thought, be fully aligned with the culture of your company[3], and adjusted to reflect the move to a skills-based organization.?

Bersin gives examples of “best practices" companies raising base salaries uniformly by levels and using bonuses to reflect performance. He says that “level of pay” is important, but pay equity is “13-times more important to employees than the level of pay”. With the progressive deployment of pay transparency, pay equity will have to be monitored carefully, with a validated rationale for pay differences.

In their book, “Scaling Up Compensation” referenced earlier, the authors advocate for a compensation structure unique to your company and reflecting its culture. Whatever you decide to do here, keep in mind that the current economic climate is bringing financial wellness back as an area of concern for a lot of people and compensation may therefore become much more at the core of people’s concerns.

On workspaces, on the definition of a working hybrid model, we are all in a vast experimentation, with pendulum swinging between fully remote and being partially on site, with the appropriate settings to foster communication, collaboration, and connection between members of the workforce. What to say here? Let’s just continue to experiment, exchange, learn from each other and keep in mind the end goal: enrich the workforce experience to better serve the business in a positive and inclusive environment.

2.2. Opportunity to Grow and Develop

For this second dimension of the model proposed by Edmonson and Mortensen, let’s refer here to the discussion in the first part of this article. Growing is not only an opportunity we need to offer to employees, but also a necessity linked to the speed at which current skills may become obsolete. Formal training, mentorship, academies, bite sized learning, on the job development, online documentation, the tools are numerous in this space and their use should be judiciously orchestrated.

Most of all, we need to make sure that a growth mindset is driving behaviors, that every member of the workforce is given the opportunity to build and execute on a growth plan.

2.3. Connections and Community

There is also a lot we could say here about the third dimension of the model, but a critical component of building connections and community is a culture that brings the workforce together. Whatever model of culture we are familiar with, values, expected behaviors, and the enforcement of those are at the core of it.

Like any collective set of people, a company needs to be governed by a set of rules or behaviors, a set of values. Without those elements describing the culture of the company, it is not clear how to interact with others, how to regulate relationships, how to know what is acceptable and what is not.

A culture can be implicit or explicit, but it always exists. Any community is governed by a set of rules. Even at Netflix, which culture has been described in the book “No rules rules”[4], there are acceptable behaviors and non-acceptable ones.

Today, we do pay attention to concepts such as psychological safety or belonging and look for a definition of culture that protects individuals and fosters a healthy environment. Concepts such as the growth mindset, the ability to navigate change or be emotionally intelligent should also be interwoven into the definition of your culture.?

The P&C team needs to ensure that this culture is collectively defined, stays explicit, is alive and evolving to serve the business, and that its regulation (listening mechanisms, adjustments, individual sanctions) is effective.?

Besides culture, another critical aspect linked to Connection and Community is communication and all manifestations of the wholeness of your company. We know companies that are fully transparent (or say so), others which are protecting certain classes of information or share sporadically information. See what is best for you, but know that the more you share, the more you provide context, the better your workforce will be able and willing to contribute. The communication is about institutional information, it is about how the company is performing against its key objectives, it is about the specifics of cross functional initiatives, it is what concerns each project, each open initiative, and should take a different format for each of those purposes: all-hands, organizational or team meetings, stand-ups, etc.

2.4. Meaning and Purpose

Daniel Pink, in his book “Drive”[5], introduced three elements of intrinsic motivation: Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. This last point is what Edmonson and Mortensen are referring to in their model. Is the vision and mission of the company clear? Does it drive the workforce to achieve goals that are bigger than themselves??

Obviously, the process of creating a purpose is specific to each company. It is vivid at the beginning of its life as it drives the founders to work hard and differentiate their work through a unique contribution. It could falter or not be as vivid for employees as HC grows, as the initial message is diluted and not reinforced as new hires come in and are sworn in.?

The P&C team needs to work with the CEO and the executive team to make sure that the purpose of the company is and stays front and center and is used to drive key company-wide decisions.

3. Wellbeing

A slightly different perspective that we could take on the workforce is to think about its wellbeing knowing that it will affect work contributions. That is the third proposed principle.

Several models representing wellbeing exist, but, by and large, sections covered are:

-??????Financial wellbeing (affected by compensation and benefits, but, more holistically by any worth or debt)

-??????Mental Health wellbeing (It is one thing to say that everyone is unique, it is another to genuinely welcome people with autism, bi-polar disorders, PTSD, or other mental illnesses, help them address those or help them face it when affecting other members of their family or close friends)

-??????Social wellbeing

-??????Physical wellbeing (that’s the section we think about naturally when we talk about being well)

-??????Career wellbeing

Wellbeing is not only for individual contributors. It is also for managers and executives.

In a recent online article[6], the head of analytics at Microsoft, Dawn Klinghoffer, mentioned that more than 50% of managers feel burned out. She went on to recommend mitigation strategies, the last one being self-care, but she did not acknowledge the institutional pressure exercised by companies on managers. As P&C, we need to make sure that this institutional pressure is managed.

This notion of wellbeing applies not only to individuals, as described above, but also to teams and organizations. For teams, we would think about wellbeing as the management of positive team dynamics. For organizations, we would look at their dynamics through the lenses of organizational development (OD) frameworks.?

4. Diversity and Inclusion

The last principle developed here, before concluding, is that diversity is a necessity. Now, that is probably not a statement that will be disputed, but there is still a long road for most companies to have a diverse and inclusive workforce.

There are so many dimensions to it, diversity of culture, diversity of gender, race, religion, age, physical or mental diversity. From hiring to retiring, we should be mindful about those dimensions for every component of the workforce.

Diversity and Inclusion is a broad topic, and this article cannot give justice to it, but it should permeate all aspects of the work of a P&C team, starting with the understanding of biases in existing processes and addressing those

5. Potential Structure for a P&C Team?

What we have done in this article is to browse through the key contribution areas of a P&C team. We introduced the notion of the whole workforce as the space that P&C should embrace, we spoke about four dimensions of the workforce experience, about wellbeing and diversity.

In order to serve all of those dimensions, we should think about a structure for P&C that is not the exact cut of the traditional model of HR, with Centers of Expertise (COE’s), Shared Services and HR Business Partners.?

Whether you adopt the Gartner HR model of the future (see below), or another one, the structure of your team should reflect the synergies you want to have between teams and should develop its ability to think strategically and holistically.

6. Conclusion

The workforce will have to grow and develop not only to maintain or develop their employability, but also to develop themselves as individuals in their role within your company.

Adopting a personal philosophy of life that acknowledges our sense of self, is crucial and the environment proposed by your company must favor it, respect it, and integrate it in its DNA for all of its workforce components.

The role of a People and Culture team is critical, and I can only hope that this article will have helped yo

[1] Amy Edmondson and Mark Mortensen, Rethink Your Employee Value Proposition, HBR Jan / Feb 2023.

[2] Josh Bersin, https://joshbersin.com/2023/05/why-do-corporate-pay-practices-feel-broken-because-they-are/, published May 04, 2023.

[3] See Scaling Up Compensation, from Verne Harnish and Sebastian Ross, ForbesBook, 2022

[4] Reed Hastings, Erin Meyer, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention, 2020

[5] Daniel Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth About what Motivates us, 2009

[6] Dawn Klinghoffer and Katie Kirkpatrick-Husk, More Than 50% of Managers Feel Burned Out, HBR May 18, 2023