A New Way to Make The Workplace Work: A New Breed of Human Resources
In my previous article of “A New Way to Make the Workplace Work” where I covered digital transformation, I mentioned that any organization willing to take advantage of digital transformation needs to develop two core competencies: agility and people-centricity. Interestingly enough, despite both competences having to be corporate-wide, they tend to be nurtured and developed by two specific departments: IT and Human Resources.
This article focuses on the new mindset and skills Human Resources departments need to develop to help their organizations embrace people-centricity.
People Centricity
You probably have heard about customer experience, or making organizations become more customer-centric, and all that is right… well, partially right. Why only partially? Simple, this approach misses a crucial element of any customer experience: your employees.
People-centricity implies that to deliver a stellar customer experience you also need to take into account your employees’ experience.
If you wonder why you should care about your employee experience, let me share with you the following three facts:
- Your employees play a crucial role in the customer experience because they either develop the products and/or digital experiences that your customers consume, or they are a big part of the services and/or products your customers buy or use. More importantly, it has been proven that nurturing/having satisfied employees is positively related to performance in terms of profitability (ROE) and value (Tobin’s Q). For further details check here.
- Attracting and retaining talent is still a battle for many industries but the hardest battle of all is to make sure that your employees don’t become zombies. Here is an article from the World Economic Forum to explore in more detail this concept that is related to disengagement, stress and huge backlogs.
- Salaries are at the top of the list of almost any company’s operating costs. Hence, making sure your employees are satisfied and have the necessary resources to perform well should be one of your key priorities.
Now that it’s clear your employees play a huge role in the customer experience and, consequently in your ability to make or break your revenue targets for this and the following quarters, then the question is, what does it take to be a champion of people-centricity? The answer is a change of mindset.
A New Breed of Human-Resources
To become a champion in people-centricity, human resources need to question if the way they are organized is the best one to deliver value to the business.
Is it by focusing on operations, and managing one of the major costs — if not the largest — in a company: their employees? Or would it be by focusing on business outcomes, and managing the most valuable asset a company may have, namely its talent? To become a champion in people-centricity, the right answer is the second :)
But how do you do it? Well, according to Dave Ulrich, the so-called father of modern HR:
It is paramount that human resources develop the following four roles: business partner, employee champion, change agent and admin expert.
By developing these four roles human resources will not only gain a seat at the board table, but it also will become a champion in people-centricity. Let’s see what each of these roles mean and imply.
The first one, becoming a business partner, should be understood as aligning human resources policy with the business strategy to make sure that the right people are hired, and the work conditions are appropriate to encourage success, both for the business and for the employees. The second role to develop is to become an employee champion. This role implies proactively listening and responding to employees’ needs. The third role is to become a change agent. As such, human resource departments need to develop future orientation practices to help the business to forecast and anticipate impacts and needs. Finally, the fourth role is that of becoming an administrative expert, by improving existing organizational processes and delivering basic human resources services.
Now, while business partner and administrative expert are pretty clear on how to articulate those roles, it is not the case so much for employee champions and change agents, as they demand specific skills that are not normally called for in the usual job roles that you find in a human resources department: service designers and futures thinkers.
Service designers are not human-resources professionals, they are designers that use a particular approach to create news services. They use design thinking methodology to bring service strategy and innovative service ideas to life. This methodology is characterized by being human-centred, collaborative, evidence-based, experimental and outcome driven. Service designers can help human resources to understand the employee lifecycle and build on top of it, based on the data and gaps detected, the employee experience that would help them to become employee champions.
Future thinkers are not people gazing into a crystal ball, but professionals that specialize in tracking weak signal trends, mega-trends and black swans that will impact the life we see today and transform it in 10, 20, 30 years from now. Knowing this in advance allows the creation of scenarios from which companies can articulate strategies to take advantage of those trends, or prevent their impact, in the case of black swans, which are rare, hard-to-predict developments that have a large, game-changing impact on peoples, companies and countries’ interests.
So here is the recipe for a new breed of human resources, one that focuses on outcomes, on business value, on people, customers, and employees. Welcome to the people-centricity era.
To learn more, you can read this article from Forbes or you can read the fresh-out-of-the-oven report from Mercer, or you can keep up to date by following the HR leaders Podcasts of Christopher Rainey.
