Reward insight
technology will continue to streamline and offer cost savings to the role of HR which presents a real threat to the profession. However, it is technology that will provide the competitive edge for people leaders to get closer to their internal customers, mirroring the change we have seen in the way marketing departments have got closer to their external customers. User-friendly efficient and accelerated communication and management tools are changing the face of HR. These solutions are only feasible due to changes in consumer behaviour, led by technology pervading every aspect of our lives and subsequently impacting our behaviour at work. These changes include a propensity to share, the importance of mobile, and comfort with cloud-based data, as demonstrated by the adoption of social media. Streamlining of HR continues through an increasingly self-service model. Managing leave and sickness online is a game changer. Coupled with intelligent software that can map resources to demand, the functional work that used to live within HR is shifting to a more automated and employee driven transaction. We see intelligent learning software that can match the needs of the labour force to the seasonality of demand, to both reduce the administrative burden of managing shift workers and improve a business’s ability to service customers. The behaviour is already there from the way we all use our mobile devices that employees are more than happy to log in, to set their availability, and to self-manage shift swaps. Though enterprise social media has crossed into mainstream, it is still being held back from meeting its potential due to the dominance of email. New tools such as collaborative software and the digital workspace (the evolution of the intranet) allow teams to break email dependency as well as function with increased indifference to location and timezone. The workflow that comes with effective execution of collaborative software, and the streamlining of project updates, allows time together to be reserved for debate, for bonding, for challenge and for taking projects further, faster. Harvard Business Review makes the argument for the triumvirate of leadership, elevating the chief human resources
officer alongside the chief executive officer (CEO) and chief finance officer as leaders of the business. At an operational level, so too the changes brought about by digital deserve part sponsorship from the HR perspective. With sufficient consideration for the organisation’s cultural capacity to adapt to change and adopt new tools and systems, many barriers can be reduced and pain reduced. HR needs to be championing a more customer centric approach to projects and involve the internal customer in ways to help deliver the return on investment that was expected.
surveys the business on a weekly basis in three minutes, tracking motivation and the top three challenges of that week, people leaders are now able to support their decision-making with data. The job can shift from appeasing and resolving to one of proactive intervention. By identifying which teams are tracking rises and falls in motivation, and pairing with the concurrent activity, leaders can now bring a new sense of conviction to their recommendations and use language such as “the data tells us that…” An ‘open door’ policy is a lovely idea and a positive message, one that brings a range of value. However, when the offer is taken up, the risk is that the view of the organisation narrows to reflect that single employee’s needs. Despite best intentions, the sentiment for the business can easily be influenced by the loud minority (those with sufficient reason to approach for support or to give feedback). While marketers relish talking to their customers, they are wise to respect statistical relevance when valuing data. As change is constant, a workplace culture which embraces change and thrives on generating new ideas forms a considerable part of a sustainable feeling responsible for the future of the organisation. People are rewarded for their contribution to a synergistic environment at work; the team wins as a team. If you think this is all a bit far-fetched, remember that the future of work is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed. The technology company that drives a quarter of all websites is distributed across fifty countries. The Brazilian group Semco ran 3,000 employees with effectively no HR department. HR will continue to evolve away from governance and functional tasks to a position of stewarding an environment where a culture of trust and empowerment allows people to be productive and feel tied to the future and direction of the organisation. If culture is determined by the CEO, it is HR that will feed back to the CEO on how, where, and when proactive behaviour is needed to have the biggest impact on the workplace culture. This will be where HR can deliver unprecedented value to the organisation today and into the future. n competitive advantage. Employees are empowered and trusted while
...the future of work is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed
By embracing new consumer behaviour as an opportunity to collect data, HR needs to demonstrate some of the skills typically owned by their peers in marketing. Marketers have done amazing things with digital behaviour, such as crowdsourcing new product development (see ideas. lego.com) and celebrating the customer as voice of the brand (see Taco Bell’s twitter feed). Similarly, HR needs to be more aggressive in its expectation of what digital can do to serve the changing needs of the organisation. Less the function of personnel and management, more a function of trust and empowerment, stewarding an environment that accelerates the employees in meeting their potential. By actively listening and responding to customers’ needs, new degrees of customer intimacy are possible. Of course, this is only made possible and efficient due to a range of technology, and an evolving social paradigm that exists in a permanent state of ‘blurt’ (never before have so many been so interested in instagrammed photos of the meals of so few). But it is this behaviour that is enabling HR to listen to their people. If HR is to realise the opportunity enabled by digital, it needs to acknowledge that data is king, and the bi-annual employee engagement survey does not meet the grade for what we call actionable data. Through the use of a mobile app that
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Issue 23 | Septemer 2016
| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward |
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