How to bring more humanness out of HR and your team
When you hear “HR” what comes to mind?
Do you think of the people who put out fires? Approve vacation days? Hire and fire?
Our common distaste for HR emerges out of how it was traditionally positioned in the organization. Typically, HR is a department beneath the C-Suite who handles policy and punishment, and left out of company-wide strategic planning. As a result, HR is positioned to react (retroactively) to people breakdowns, instead of creating systems for people’s growth (proactively).
ELEV^TE is a venture studio, not a Dev Shop building apps or platforms. This means our success relies not only on our product results, but our teams skills to create products. At the company’s inception, we saw that while our collective skills in UX, engineering, DevOps, Business Development, and Operations are incomparable, without elevated collaboration skills, we’re dead in the water.
When used strategically, so-called “resources for humans” can be a transformational force for organizational success — helping all people in the organization grow and develop.
However, to lump all people operations into an HR title colors our perceptions about such possibilities.
To explicitly distinguish between traditional HR that deals with past breakdowns, ELEV^TE opted to separate People Development(a.ka. “People Dev”) from Operations’ people tasks. People Dev weaves proactive and conscious team skills into long-term strategy.
While traditional HR may intend to spark growth culture, we make people development distinct from operational policy and compliance to assure our team’s connection and cohesion are not lost in conflict management.
We’re not here to manage humans. Rather, our focus is on measuring, redefining, and fostering diverse thinking. Using E^’s very own development process of agile, scrum, and product management, we develop scalable tools that excel leadership and organizational effectiveness for the infinite game of business success.
As a result, daily and weekly, we cultivate humanness as the highlight of our company and the effectiveness of our team.
