Every once in a while, and more often that I plan, I find myself at industry conferences, hobnobbing with the best-in-business. These are great days, spent among practitioners who are working in the trenches, taking on with interesting challenges, innovating and creating best practices that are in turn setting in motion a wave of change in HR practices across the globe.This year I had the honor of being the Chair for the CHRO summit in Singapore, also doing a keynote at Asia’s largest HR event attended by more than 4000 people and also speaking in the world’s largest virtual HR conference hosted by Glassdoor attended by 30,000 plus professionals. So what are the themes I am noticing…?
Shift the lens: Traditional HR roles will soon be a thing of the past
Statisticians, data-analysts, programmers – meet the new HR team in your office! Surprised? Well not really, if you ask me.As roles across organisations bring in data, analytics and leverage both to innovate their practices, HR leads from the front. It is time to say goodbye to traditional profiles, effectively highlighted the stark difference between how we view ourselves as HR professionals as people focussed primarily towards recruitment or L&D and how our consumers – the employees – view us as means to learn, work and succeed with the company. IBM is now enabling its HR teams to make that happen by being more agile and data-centric, using their flagship technologies like Watson. Hiring of non-traditional HR profiles will be on the rise. So HR better pull its socks up and reinvent itself.
Bring ‘trendy’ back: Making Tech work for HR
Yes, gamification is old news. But making it work for you isn’t. While a lot of progressive companies experiment with gaming, I loved how Rakuten had seamlessly integrated the physical and digital world, taking its employees on a journey through a variety of apps (Since I work extensively on corporate storytelling, this example was quite intriguing!). The best part? They were able to achieve this with a lean team. This reiterated my belief that technology can help us scale really quickly, provided we know how to leverage it effectively. While talking about technology we can’t be too far from the topic of big data and analytics. While getting more data is good, analyzing and applying it is even better. Data for the sake of data can’t be the objective. And sometimes the best data can come out of a simple excel sheet. Update your data habits before investing a fancy system.
Let’s not pretend to be perfect: Learning from failures
We as HR professionals put humongous effort in designing different initiatives; several times their implementation does not meet expectations or even fails. I strongly believe that we need more of these genuine, behind-the-stage views to be discussed at HR forums to understand that transitions can be chaotic. The right way to deal with them is to stop pretending that we can always get it right in the first go Else we will keep reinventing the learning curve. It is easy to stand on stage and pretend like we have our act together. No one does. So let’s be real. It is all in the ‘moments’: Starting the conversation around employee experiences With organisations across the world focusing on improving the overall employee experience and using tools and analytics to measure and refine it, the list of career moments, HR moments, life conditions and everyday touch points curated. Of course, we are just getting started. Technology still rules the roost here, heavily defining how employee experiences are being crafted. While there is still some thought to be given around the emotional aspects and policies around these ‘moments of truth’, defining and highlighting them, is a great start point for all organisations that are looking at crafting better employee experiences.
Staying relevant: How to reinvent the Brand of HR
All these discussions and sessions tie in quite well with the session I have been working on which has to do with reinventing the brand of HR, a concept that is core to driving change where we are. A strong brand for HR is tied closely with our ability to transform an organization, our relationship with stakeholders, gaining trust of the employees and even raising our budgets! And internal brand is quite tied with the external brand. Using ‘land of the brand’, a game I have designed,. I am now creating a one-day session on the topic. So if you are looking at more insights on how to brand-build for your internal HR teams, do get in touch.
The sessions I attended, left me convinced that what we are seeing now is a transitionary phase, beckoning a transformative phase that will come later. For some (and fairly so!) this perhaps may seem transformational, as it breaks new ground in a variety of areas. However, much of this could have been done earlier.
I believe the transformation of HR will be beyond the adoption of AI, bots and analytics and we are in the middle of a transition which will ultimately transform us. While we move from being generalists to specialists, true transformation will come in only when we become custodians of talent in our organisations.
So, what do you think? I would love to know your thoughts on this. Are we transiting or transforming?
