Your Old Road is Rapidly Agein'

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HRD The only independent strategic HR publication

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HRDIRECTOR

JANUARY 2015 I ISSUE 123

SPECIAL REPORT MACMILLAN CANCER SUPPORT - 750,000 PEOPLE OF WORKING AGE LIVING WITH CANCER AND HALF A MILLION CARERS IN THE WORKFORCE. CANCER IS ON THE INCREASE

THEO CAMURCA, HR DIRECTOR EMEA - BURGER KING

{ FOOD FOR THOUGHT } NERSHIP MENTALITY ALIGNS “ M E R I T OI NCDRI AV CI DYUAANL SD WA INT HO W BUSINESS OBJECTIVES” ALSO FEATURED IN THIS ISSUE RECRUITMENT Deficiencies in science and engineering is choking the UK economy. STEM careers must be more positively promoted

STRATEGIC WORKFORCE MANAGEMENT Hierarchical structures inherited from the industrial age are entirely inappropriate today

www.thehrdirector.com © First published in theHRDIRECTOR publication - Issue 123, January 2015

PENSION PLANNING Highest percentage of opt out rates in auto-enrolment are 22-30 year olds. Engaging the young is failing

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP Buyer beware? Most thought leaders are not attempting to sell snake oil, they believe themselves to be right 100% no paid for editorial


feature

STRATEGIC WORKFORCE MANAGEMENT

STRATEGIC WORKFORCE PLANNING

your old road is rapidly agein’ Bob Dylan once famously urged: “keep your eyes wide, the chance won’t come again”. Admittedly, his fifty-year-old protest song wasn’t written specifically for HR professionals, but the sentiment is still sound. It’s time to “admit that the waters around you have grown”. Nobody seems to know for sure where phenomena like the digital revolution, an ageing population, globalisation and the shift in society’s values will lead us.

ARTICLE BY SANTIAGO GARCIA, MANAGING DIRECTOR - IOPENER INSTITUTE

What we do know is that those trends, among others, are transforming how firms organise themselves, and the dynamics of the employment market. In short; how, where and when people work. However, in many organisations, the HR department is not evolving at the same pace. There is a huge opportunity ahead for HR professionals. But you better start swimmin’, or you’ll sink like a stone. A recent survey by McKinsey found that nine out of ten executives ranked organisational agility both as critical to business success and as growing in importance over time. The message is clear: to survive in an environment where technologies, knowledge and business models become obsolete in the blink of an eye, organisations need to be agile. They must be capable of integrating, building and reconfiguring competences to adapt to rapidly changing environments. The evolution of data

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processing and communication technologies is dramatically reducing transaction costs. As a result, organisations can now get things done by being more innovative, more dynamic and more agile. As Clay Shirky says, “most of the barriers to group action have collapsed, and without those barriers, we are now free to explore new ways of gathering together and getting things done.” However, many organisations stick blindly to rigid workflows and hierarchical structures inherited from the industrial age, designed to maximise efficiency or quality in relatively stable environments. In turbulent times, you need to be more agile. Fortunately, many organisations understand that there are alternative models, more suitable for complex, volatile and uncertain situations. For example, some organisations flatten their hierarchies to bring the voice of customers closer to their

executives, empower their employees to take more decisions and allow employees the chance of customising their work through job crafting programmes. Others introduce social networking platforms to promote collaboration and a culture of transparency. Some make their organisations more open to their environment, crowd-source some of their business processes, or increase the proportion of external talent they work with; tapping into online workplaces to hire and work with the best freelance professionals the world has to offer. And a few organise their teams in co-working spaces where they can breathe fresh air, see the world with new eyes and be disruptive. Of course, not all organisations are equally successful in these initiatives. Inertia is common in larger, older and more hierarchical organisations. Sometimes the blockers derive from the individual interests of leaders not


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willing to stray from their comfort zones, and sometimes from compensation structures that are often designed to reward short-term achievements rather than the development of organisational agility. Some organisational setups and people management practices are the result of isomorphic forces such as trotting out standard responses in an uncertain environment because there’s no clear best option, conformity leading to professionalisation, or the imitation of what managers consider best practices best practices that don’t exist in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environment. But for a world in permanent beta, a good solution for one organisation may not work when implemented in a different organisational context. It could even have a detrimental effect. Many managers become prisoners of cognitive frames of their own building. These have been developed throughout their professional lives as a result of the education they have received, the behaviours they have copied and the solutions that may have worked for them in the past. But it is madness to believe that applying these cognitive frames in a radically different context will achieve the same results. The world has changed and today’s leaders need to balance apparently contradictory priorities such as control and agility, efficiency and flexibility, security and resilience. We are heading towards a future where leaders cannot have answers to all the problems. Nor can they have everything under control. We face a future where organisations cannot be managed as machines, but as complex adaptive systems whose behaviour cannot be explained as the sum of the behaviours of their components, and where cause and effect relationships are not commonplace. This brave new world of work is made up of complex roles where the difference between the contribution of a top performer and the contribution of the average employee is much wider than for the simpler roles of the past. A world in which organisations and countries are fighting a global war for the best talent. Talent which is less dependent on organisations for employment, is looking for meaningful jobs and has ready information about what working for a specific organisation is like. We are in the era of the "Knowmads", a term coined by John Moravec to refer to a new class of knowledge professionals who, thanks to technology, can work with anybody, anytime, anywhere. It is also a world in which organisations require employees to have more than just technical expertise, loyalty and obedience. As Gary Hamel, founder of Strategos once said: “In a world where customers wake up every morning asking, ‘What’s new, what’s different, and what’s amazing?’ success depends on a company’s ability to unleash the initiative, imagination, and passion of employees at all levels”. And since most people act under the influence of their emotions, it is a world in which organisations need to pay more attention to another important element: employees’ “psychological capital” - how happy people are at work. We have to remember that

ORGANISATIONS STICK BLINDLY TO RIGID WORKFLOWS AND HIERARCHICAL STRUCTURES INHERITED FROM THE INDUSTRIAL AGE, DESIGNED TO MAXIMISE EFFICIENCY IN RELATIVELY STABLE ENVIRONMENTS. IN TURBULENT TIMES, YOU NEED TO BE MORE AGILE

people are not like technologies, processes, or business strategies that become obsolete at an accelerated pace and can be easily copied. An organisation’s human, social, and psychological capitals form a highly complex social system developed over time. This is difficult for competitors to observe, analyse, understand and imitate. Everything suggests that we are moving towards a future where people - and people management may become the ultimate source of competitiveness for more organisations. This situation offers HR professionals the opportunity to contribute to the competitiveness of their organisations. And therefore truly be “strategic”. Their privileged perspective means they can leverage to help their organisations gain self-awareness, question their past patterns of behaviour and develop a suite of human competencies that sets the organisation apart from its competitors. For instance, the HR department can enhance the potential for innovation within an organisation by implementing diversity programmes, fostering a change in attitudes towards failure or mobilising the talent of a greater number of people through collaborative work and knowledge management initiatives. In terms of adaptability, HR can of course facilitate the assimilation of new technologies and other changes. But beyond that, the HR department may stop being the voice of Orthodoxy and start being a function that enables the organisation to be a little less structured, hierarchical and rigid-minded. For example, let HR be the voice that challenges decisions that benefit the efficiency of the organisation at the expense of its resilience; or question exaggerated investments in risk prevention that in the long run leave people underprepared to deal with adverse situations. HR professionals can also help the leaders of an organisation abandon the culture of control and distrust on which the governance structures of many organisations are still based, embracing a vision of the organisation as a community of people. A community whose leaders, rather than being controllers and decision makers, act as architects and catalysers of relational contexts in which people come and go and work autonomously. And last but not least, HR can contribute in ways that transcend the boundaries of the organisation: playing an active role in the regeneration of moral values within their organisations; recovering a climate of trust that, in many cases, has been lost, and helping people to develop their employability in a context of longer professional lives, but in which organisations die younger.

FOR FURTHER INFO www.iopenerinstitute.com

JANUARY 2015 thehrdirector

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