Zero-based everything: starting with a clean slate to Reimagine Work

Practice “zero-based thinking” in every part of your life. Ask yourself continually, “If I were not doing this already, knowing what I now know, would I start doing it again today?” If it is something you would not start again today, knowing what you now know, it is a prime candidate for abandonment or creative procrastination. Brian Tracy

I’ll never forget the ‘aha’ moment when I learned this lesson. As an HR leadership team, we were faced with the dilemma of too much work on the plate and trying to determine what could come off. On the chopping block was the monthly Business Unit HR reporting package. It was taking our HR Analyst the equivalent of ten days each month to produce, and we weren’t convinced it was being leveraged by our internal clients. So we did a little experiment: we stopped producing it one month. The result: of the 25 leaders who would have received it, only two contacted us to ask where their reports were. Our big aha: we had been devoting half a precious headcount to creating a product that less than one in ten of our clients saw any utility in. So we moved to quarterly reporting and pointed our Analyst into higher-value work. Not a cosmic shift to the HR delivery model, but illustrative nonetheless.

Fast forward to what the average HR department is delivering in August 2020 and I promise you no one is cranking out monthly reporting packages. And they’re likely not chasing down performance review forms, running job evaluation committees, or conducting pension education sessions either. 

Nothing like a good crisis to let you know what your zero-based HR delivery model looks like.

No doubt when we were in the throes of the initial pandemic response, the entire HR team let go of its business-as-usual activities and pivoted to deliver what was needed: health and safety measures, virtual work protocols, layoffs and restructuring, pay remedies, and communication, lots and lots of communication. 

But what about now? Now that we’re past the reacting phase and have entered into what we are comforting ourselves by calling the ‘new normal’, are you still delivering the bare-bones essentials, or have you found yourself pulling tried-and-true business processes off the shelf in an attempt to squeeze in a shortened talent review or performance management cycle before the end of the year, much like the NHL attempting to mount a shortened season?

Are we trying to go back to the way things were? Attempting to resurrect, stabilize and restart last year’s HR strategy? Are we making plans to pick up where we left off with our key deliverables, service standards, and prized KPIs? 

And if we are, who are we doing it for? Now that you’ve taken away the proverbial monthly reporting package, how many of your clients are calling to ask where it is?

Let’s ride the wave of ambiguity and uncertainty a little longer.

Instead of attempting to find that comfortable equilibrium we are all craving, maybe now is the time to continue to ride the wave of ambiguity and uncertainty just a little longer. Maybe now is the time to ask ourselves what our company really needs in order to compete and thrive. Maybe now is the time to put everything from culture to leadership to the HR model through the zero-based planning filter and see what comes out the other side.

Zero-based goes beyond just budgeting.

Zero-based planning got its start in budgeting, but the concept is transferrable to other business processes, including organization design, key capabilities and service offerings. The idea is to wipe the slate clean to create a fit-for-purpose approach within the current context. Arguably the context in which we are operating today is markedly different from what it was six months ago. So it stands to reason that everything from culture to talent strategy, from leadership models to operating models, needs to be reimagined. 

In its 2018 article on zero-based productivity, McKinsey & Company provides key transferrable concepts for applying a zero-based approach, including Survival Minimum and Strategic Optimum. And in its publication on zero-based prioritization, Gartner offers a classification framework through which to sift and sort projects, starting with Mandatory and working up through Transformation, Core Differentiation, Growth and Improvement.

I’ve pulled from (and taken licence with) both to offer the following lens for ‘zero-basing’ the five Organization Dimensions that Mark and I created for our Reimagining Work model:

1.     Start with transparency and visibility.

Take a fresh look at the big picture in front of you. Get clear about where and how the company’s resources are currently being deployed by taking an end-to-end view of structures, teams, processes and key deliverables. In addition to these tangibles, look at all five Organization Dimensions to uncover the key assumptions behind things like what gets valued, how work gets done, and how leaders are expected to lead.

2.     Determine your Survival Minimum. 

What’s required to keep the proverbial lights on? What is mandatory to ensure the organization can continue to deliver value? What capabilities, services and outcomes must be in place in order to meet regulatory, risk and compliance imperatives? The answers to these questions have changed dramatically since the onset of the pandemic, and you likely have a pretty crisp and current view of this. But beyond PPE and medical protocols, have the answers now stretched to include new productivity tools that support virtual delivery and collaboration; new decisioning authorities to ensure business continuity; new leadership and communication routines to realize continued engagement and alignment; even new mental health programs and family accommodation protocols to support the health and wellbeing of employees? Just how much of the human capital strategy has been pulled into the frame of Survival Minimum?

3.     Elevate your gaze to the Strategic Optimum

Here’s where things get interesting. Now we need to consider what’s needed to support Transformation and Core Differentiation. As I talked about in Issue 2, transformation is about planning for an uncertain and ambiguous future, creating something dramatically different, and executing through experimentation and iteration. It’s very likely that all or part of the company’s market strategy and operating model has undergone significant change in the wake of the pandemic. And that’s likely translated into a new set of capabilities required to compete and thrive. What does all this mean for the organization design, staffing, talent development, and reward systems that underpin the new operating model? Do we need new learning and development platforms to build resilience, agility, and innovation? How do we need our leaders to lead in order to unleash the collective talents of a distributed workforce? And if these emerging dimensions are now strategically important, what do we need to shift, let go of, and stop doing in order to make the room and resources for them?

4.     Define new operating principles.

The engine that drives all of this needs to be built of the right stuff: agile organization structures (think spans, layers, and matrixes), smart deployment of technology (think automation and digitized customer and employee experience), and fit-for-purpose governance and planning mechanisms that emphasize agile crisis response, streamlined decisioning, and holistic risk management.

5.     Iterate and iterate some more. But then nail the jelly to the wall!

At their core, organizations are just complex collections of human beings, and human beings are designed to strive for comfort and equilibrium. Too much of it and we get lazy and complacent; too little and we get paralyzed and confused. No doubt everyone deserves the self-congratulatory pats on the back when we reflect on how adaptable and productive we’ve all been in the face of the unthinkable. But a new risk is now creeping in: we are approaching levels of burnout, exhaustion and change fatigue—the adrenaline within organizations has reached a saturation point, and we need to introduce some calming, stabilizing measures in response. The art of the possible is before us, but we’ve got to shift the picture from a Picasso to a Bateman* in pretty short order to provide our team with the needed clarity, direction and tools needed to move the organization forward with continued momentum.

Like I said in Issue 2, the CHRO is the essential player at the business planning table this year. And if you need more colours on your palette, more brushes with which to create a reimagined picture of work in your organization, then do stay tuned for further articles in this Reimagine Work series.

*thanks to my good friend and mentor Geri Markvoort for this beautiful analogy.

This article is part of the Reimagine Work series -- click below for past articles:

Issue 1 - The window to Reimagine Work is closing - but it’s still not too late

Issue 2 - Why is now the right time to Reimagine work?

Issue 3 - Now is the time to Reimagine HR

Issue 4 – The emerging paradigms of work