diginomica 2016 - Janine's choice
- Summary:
- Janine takes a walk down through her top ten HCM and talent management focused stories of the year.
Don't be a process slave - get out more.
(1)Get out of your bloody office! Talent management must be led by the business, so you’ve got to be in the business
Why? Because when we’re so focused on the amazing things technology can do and the benefits of streamlining HR processes, sometimes we need a reminder that sorting out technology and processes alone is not enough.
Technology is helping transform HR, and most companies combine a technology change (inevitably to the cloud) as an opportunity to rejig their HR processes.
That’s all well and good, argues Henley Business School’s Nick Holley, but HR needs to watch out that it doesn’t spend too long tackling individual processes and looks at the bigger picture. And that means getting out of the office and talking to the business.
- http://diginomica.com/2015/11/27/performance-management-the-soul-sucking-monster-of-hr/
- http://diginomica.com/2014/10/21/hr-professionals-deliberately-sabotaging-potential-analytics/
- http://diginomica.com/2016/03/31/hr-equal-partner-or-weakest-link/
(2) Bureaucracy is clogging the arteries of productivity.
Bureaucracy must die
If ever there was a sentiment that deserved a round of applause, it’s this one from management expert Gary Hamel.
Poor productivity has become the scourge of western business growth. Despite technology seemingly making work easier and freeing up time for more strategic work, somehow this has not translated into higher levels of productivity. In fact the opposite is true.
One of the chief culprits of this productivity drain is the fact that companies and individual workers spend too long fiddle-arsing with bureaucracy and this, according to Hamel, is ”clogging the arteries” of productivity.
Companies tend to become bureaucratic as they grow and age and layers of management are added. So naturally, the antithesis of the bloated bureaucratic organization is the start-up, where entrepreneurialism, creativity and autonomy abound. Hamel offers up some intriguing case studies of big companies that have managed to strip out bureaucracy and try and create and organization built upon agile start-up lines.
(3) Technology is not the answer.
We are way, way, way, way behind when it comes to data. And it’s not bad, it’s just a rallying cry. We have to realize that data is sexy….Data is power and data is the capital of the future.
Those in HR that collect data, ask the right questions and ultimately provide business with the answers it needs are going to be the successful companies of the near future. This is just one of the areas where HR expert Jason Averbook believes HR needs to step up its game as it faces the biggest challenges – and opportunities – in its history.
In many ways, Averbook is singing from the same hymnbook as Holley. Like Holley, Averbook is keen to stress that HR must not see technology as the answer to this challenge. And processes are not the only answer too. Until you know what the business needs HR to focus on most of all, HR should not make a technology buying decision. Similarly, the consumers (employees) must come first: focus on what they want and make sure all HR processes work together rather than individually to provide them with what they need.
(4) Brain training.
The brain can deal much better with bad news than no news.
Why? The fact that the brain prefers bad news to no news is one of the findings from neuroscience that is changing the way we manage staff and manage change. Our brains don’t like uncertainty – brains use up about 20% of our energy and uncertainty causes an error alert to make us ready for fight or flight and gives us less space for thinking, planning and emotional control.
Organizational change expert Hilary Scarlett shows how neurology is helping improve our understanding of change management.
(5) Tinker or transform - what are you going to do with social media?
The staff already have a social media strategy and if you’re lucky they’ll have included you.
Why? Social media has changed our personal lives. No question. But equally it is changing the business world, but as ever, many businesses are slow or uncertain how to react.
Long-time social media pundit Euan Semple outlines some of the profound ways it is changing work. For one thing it is helping flatten out organizational structures as it enables employees and managers at all levels to be in contact more easily and share ideas.
That not only makes employees feel included and empowered, but just as importantly it provides leaders with an amazing source of knowledge. Why pay consultants an arm and a leg (and probably something else as well) when your employees can tell you how it really is?
- http://diginomica.com/2016/11/22/think-harder-share-better-get-creative/
- http://diginomica.com/2015/12/09/hr-and-opening-up-to-social-media/
(6) Happiness counts.
You have to move away from seeing wellbeing as a cost.
Why? Wellbeing has been getting a lot of airtime in the last year or two. Here Professor Ivor Roberston looks at some of the hard evidence that proves why employee wellbeing alongside engagement should definitely move from a business perk to a prerequisite for companies wanting productive and committed staff.
(7) The new rules of HR
For years we’ve been following a manual which has been very prescriptive about everything: you recruit this way, you manage performance that way and reward behavior that way and actually the rulebook has been torn up.
Why? Lucy Adams argues the case for putting the human back into human resources. It’s time for HR to stop tinkering with processes and maintaining the ‘command and control’ traditional company structure which snuffs out the very precious commodity that all companies need to survive: innovation.
That means companies treating their employees like adults and trusting them, and also treating them like consumers; trying to find out as much about them as possible, what motivates them and what makes them tick.
So this is a shift away from focusing on technology decisions – which performance management system to buy, for example – and thinking about things from the opposite perspective: what would ensure the best possible employee experience.
(8) Transformation revamp.
I think this can go much faster than I can drive it, I need to learn to drive faster.
Why? The first wave of HR cloud adoption is over, but that doesn’t mean that those early implementations have necessarily lived up to their promise.
Many of those early adopters, according to KPMG’s Mike DiClaudio are finding that they aren’t getting the most out of their HR cloud investment – they’ve bought the equivalent of a fast car, but don’t have the skills to drive it.
Part of that problem is they haven’t changed their mind-set from the ‘break-fix’ mentality of old-style technology transformation to one of continuous improvement.
KPMG’s research is a reminder that cloud is not a destination. For HR to be transformed from the transaction-focused “steward and operator” of the business to the “strategist and catalyst” it needs to continuously evolve.
- http://diginomica.com/2016/11/30/hitting-hr-highs-digital-transformation/
- http://diginomica.com/2016/07/29/tactical-focus-clouds-vision-for-hr-transformation/
(9) All for one and one for all.
The team is the center of the company and if the team works, the company will succeed.
One of the biggest effects of digitization is its influence on organizational design. The old hierarchies of cascading levels of management are being broken down, because people don’t work like that. They work in teams who will come together for specific projects and then join other teams.
Organizations in the digital age are networks of teams, argues Josh Bersin. That realization needs companies to rethink how their organization is run, how they reward performance, how they manage career development.
- http://diginomica.com/2016/11/07/hr-tech-addiction-is-greater-than-its-productivity-enhancement/
- http://diginomica.com/2016/03/23/its-hr-team-rules-ahead-as-organizational-structures-tumble/
(10) There's more than one key to unlock engagement.
It’s tempting to see employee engagement as a single issue that can be fixed with a single software tool. The reality is that disengaged employees have multiple reasons for their attitudes and companies need multiple solutions to tackle them.
Brian Sommer’s article is a sanity check on engagement – people are complex and so is engagement.