Tag: #Gettingitright

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Re-thinking the role of on-site (HR) support

Last week I have shared my thoughts regarding digitalizing the manufacturing and field-sales workforces – or in more general: workforces that do not have a desk and computer to get their work done and that don’t need such skills for their job. One of the outcomes of this was the identification of an infrastructure and enablement support gap for these workforces. 

A look back

In recent years, all support functions, including HR have focused on getting the core job done, but only that – more and more grey areas, activities that could sit in between different functions have been neglected and left unspoken. As long as “someone” was still there to take care of them, it was ok – somehow. But as a next step, more and more functions have outsourced their service provisioning – may it be IT, HR or Facilities. And a key component of outsourcing is that you have a clear and set list of activities agreed with your outsourcing providers and they won’t do anything in addition. This has widened the gap between functional activities, and subsequently has widened the grey areas in between functions – and increased activities that somehow no one picks up anymore. Who is accountable for local on site communication, e.g. setting up banners/ posters or handing out leaflets? Who is responsible for functional agnostic trainings and initiatives? – well, in many cases there is no one anymore who can pick that up. 

Who still remembers the typical outsourcing & process design conversation when an activity could be done like 80%-90% remote, but there was a final, last piece that required on-site presence? May it be handing over a physical device or letter, may it be receiving a physical letter, telegram or whatever it may be. The generic answer of your outsourcing consultant was: I am sure there is someone else on site that can do that – for example the receptionist! … well, the receptionist is gone as well or outsourced. As much as I love digitalizing work, it still has its barriers and boundaries, and if we don’t care for them, the experience will break down. 

So what is the conclusion?

I am making the case to continue to have on-site support in place. But this is a combination of roles and functions. It is not a dedicated HR specialist nor a dedicated receptionist nor a dedicated IT support nor a specialized communications person. I believe that at the same time and for similar reasons that we should consider function-agnostic, general Tier 1 help-desk support (ONE number, ONE contact for all your employee queries, regardless if HR or IT or Travel or …), we should consider a function-agnostic, in-person Experience support on sites where there is not a fully digitalized workforce. There is more than enough work on site – and even if you go for a medium seniority and capability to be able to address the topics mentioned above, I am certain that the time saved for regular employees and managers to not be interrupted at their work, the disruption avoided because a process breaks down at the end with the final step which requires physical on-site handling or the disruption of a process not being initiated as it requires on-site initiation will not only make the experience case, but the financial case work. 

The Experience Function

Employee Experience is about minimizing disruptions to your workforce, engaging your workforce to bring the best every day, to do their core role best every day – and sometimes this requires non-digital support. We in HR are often the last ones to stop physical on-site presence and are therefore often the ones needing to solve for the grey areas – but also at the same time questioned as to why we cannot reach the anticipated and benchmarked “HR to employee” ratio, why we still need on-site presence of “that size”?! Just adhering to it and letting go of on-site presences is one answer – but I believe an answer that will lead to low experience and process breakdowns. At the same time, the on-site required true HR work does often not make the case for a full-time or even half-time HR admin person on site. This is why I believe we need to think bigger and need to think about E2E Experiences for employees and managers. If we consolidate all on-site work that focuses on the experience and requires on-site presence, I am sure we will be able to accommodate at least a part-time presence.  The difference is that this is an Experience resource, not an HR resource and therefore should not be counted in the typical HR ratio benchmarkings. Costs will be cross-funded if you continue to have separate functions.

The alternative though, if you look back to my article “Thinking Further – the Experience Organization” from earlier this year, could be a different direction. We must think broader than HR and become an Experience Function, and as part of such function, all of the above is within scope suddenly. Read the link above for the whole story behind it. I am a strong believer that now is the time to break-up HR and create an E2E Experience Function. What do you think?

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The anachronism of digitalizing your workforce

After a long summer break, this is my first post again. But I wasn’t all lazy – was reading and contemplating a lot, so you can expect a few more regular posts. I have also upgraded the backend of my blog and you can enjoy all posts now with full encryption and better performance.

Today, I would like to focus on a topic I haven’t spent much time on in recent posts but which I am thinking through in quiet times a lot. It is a bit of an anachronism of the digital age I have to say, but it is a real issue I see. It is about enabling your manufacturing and field sales workforce with (individual) digital services. Of course, different companies are on different waypoints at this time, but it is a topic that many of you, I am sure, can relate to.

Enabling your non-office based workforce with digital capabilities is not new, but when you want to scale it in the same way and fashion you do with your knowledge workers, it runs into a few difficulties that need to be resolved. The work set up of these employees is in most cases still fundamentally different from knowledge workers.

Digitalizing knowledge workers

Knowledge workers of today are in many of their work aspects already digital. All of them have a digital device to help them get their work done. This might be a desktop PC, a laptop or a tablet and a smartphone. There are many ways that modern technology has provided to enable them to work digitally. From an HR perspective we can easily build on these to deliver digital HR services – mainly self services for regular employees and managers. These workers also have almost everywhere easy access to print a document or to digitize a document (aka scanning). It is a ready made infrastructure for us to deliver our services. The only thing we have to think of is how to get our services delivered with a superior experience (ok, that is of course not easy but let’s continue the thought process). In addition to this basic infrastructure to utilize, we can rely on two major aspects that make it easier to digitize HR services for knowledge workers – (a) all knowledge workers have a foundational digital understanding and don’t have any barriers to using such technology as well as (b) if anything happens to the infrastructure, your IT department is on the rescue. And this is not because your self services are so important, but because knowledge workers have an almost zero productivity w/o their digital devices. All is set up in a way to minimize downtime.

Digitalizing non-office-based workers

If you now take this and apply it to your non-office-based workers, the story writes very different. In many aspects the work environment of these workers is often not digital. Of course, there are modern factories that are fully digital – but does that make every employee digital-enabled? The fundamental differences that need to be taken into account are (a) the foundational knowledge to build on, (b) the available infrastructure, and (c) the available support.

Non-office-based workers have a very different starting point into their digital journeys. They often don’t utilize “regular” computers in their every day work-life. Maybe they operate highly sophisticated machines, maybe not – in many cases, the only digital device they use is in their private life: smartphones. They don’t operate on a regular basis with PCs at work or at home and many haven’t seen a Windows screen or have utilized a physical mouse or keyboard to interact with their digital devices. So if you want to move them to digital you have to decide if you prefer to teach them (on an ongoing basis) how to interact with mouse and keyboard and PC or you meet them where they are which are touch-based smartphone interfaces with Apps. For me it is an easy decision – you always want to go the path of least friction if you want someone to do something “for you” – and let’s face it, as much as we communicate that self services empower employees and managers, this is not too true for non-office-based workers in their environments.

But once you solved that one topic, the infrastructure comes in the way. Factories were not build with self-services in mind. So having WiFi across each area, having sufficient internet speeds and places where devices for self service can be served is difficult. This is a fundamental topic that requires enablement – and in many cases HR is one of the first ones to require this, and so it is on us to get this going. – especially with the additional privacy and security requirements. You cannot just place devices in spaces that are exposed and don’t provide any privacy.

And once you solve that, the next two topics come into play: For full digital enablement you need to provide scanning and printing facilities. Both is again nothing that by default is enabled or present in a manufacturing environment. And both is again nothing that a regular non-knowledge worker uses on a regular basis. Enablement requires targeted solutioning. Printers by now are easier to enable thanks to being smart enough – a “follow-you” printing capability, enabled with the regular clocking/ entry badge is easily explained and works magic. Scanning on the other hand is not so easy. Where would the scanner be? Where would the scanner scan to? How do you enable simple & private scanning and saving/ filing of the scanned image? – this is a really difficult question. Scanning a document, then finding it, uploading it and deleting it so that the next in line doesn’t’ find it by chance is too difficult and risky. You need to enable webcam/ photo-based scanning, immediately into the App of usage/ the App that requires the upload. That is the only privacy-save way to make it happen. And let’s not forget: What are non-office-based workers used to? – phone-cameras. So this kind of approach is much easier and friction-less than teaching them utilising regular scanners.

And last but not least, the support needs to be in place. IT support needs to be reachable, on site and ready to come to the rescue when something goes wrong. – but where do you have this today still? I guess most IT helpdesks are outsourced and require you to make the effort. Just imagine this situation for a worker in a manufacturing environment. How to reach out to IT services? This is not easy to solve. Your IT helpdesk usually is focused on least human interaction as well as off-shore phone support. Your manufacturing workforce doesn’t have the time to get in touch with them (they only have small breaks before they need to return to their work – and their work is not where the digital device is, and it is not really in their interest to make it work). So either you convince your IT to have a higher on-site presence or you need to find an alternative.

Now, these are all issues and complications that can be solved – but they are not simple to be solved. I am sure many of you have faced those and hopefully solved them to enable your non-office-based workers. If not, I will provide my view on how to enable this digital journey end-to-end in my next post. Have a great week ahead!

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Employee Relationship Management

I have started my train of thought in my last post referencing that we might need to reconsider what HR stands for and how we as HR best support the success of our companies. I believe we need to take a bit of a sharp turn. In recent years we have reduced our headcount and the higher the ratio of employees to HR was, the better it was – as it meant lower costs for the overall company. But this is not really where the value of HR lies. We are a back-office function, but one that needs to be more than just „service and forget“.

Understanding Marcus Buckinghams‘s research, we have a much higher share in achieving engagement and retention than what we give ourselves credit for. Employees demand us – and not really for solving their specific small administration issues – but for trust, as coach and as partner. Not only senior management, but every employee.

Now, how do we do this? – as I wrote, I don‘t think that the solution is to get back into the HR generalist ancient times, but we need to listen to our employees and the needs they have. Not because we are „Human“ Resources and it is expected, but to make sure our companies can perform and grow. Trust in HR is according to research a very important aspect of an engaged employee. This builds the business case and clearly lays out that HR needs to be more than a pure anonymous service function.

The idea of Employee Relationship Management (ERM)

But how do we do this? How can we be such a partner and coach to employees without going back to the HR generalist times? And how can we build a business case that makes economic sense and delivers more value than it costs? – my answer is Employee Relationship Management. We need to build out a new process of Employee Relationship Management.

Despite the naming, this process would not be a mirror of Customer Relationship Management, but with a similar intent. We would treat our employees as individuals that we need to serve and keep as engaged members of our organization. We don‘t want to sell them anything but we want to make sure they feel that they get from this relationship everything they came for while making sure that they stay engaged and committed to the company’s purpose and goals. It is proactive engagement management. And this can‘t be a telephone number or a chat or an AI – this needs to be a human connection and relation that we need to build. The basic idea is that this human connection would provide a trusted partner to the employee, taking care of the employee and its requirements of (career) development, connection and point of contact for this employee in case of any issues or concerns.

It is though not anything that should be seen as transactional or as rolling back self-services. Only an organized and structured self service offering will enable the financial playing field to make such ERM happen. 

The structure of ERM

So how would this look like? – It is despite the rolling back metaphors actually the next evolution of the shared service model. If you want to build such support in today‘s environment you need to make it human and efficient at the same time. It needs to be built with scale in mind. Therefore, I would not roll back anything you have in your GBS environment and continue heavily with self service and automation – and at the same time take a hard turn.

Build up an infrastructure for an Employee Relationship Management system that can hold all relevant information about your employees from career aspirations, specific future thoughts and coaching needs – similar like a CRM, but more of a Talent Management System on drugs. Next, transform your Tier 1 Service into one area that continues to take regular service calls in case self service doesn‘t work – and a second area that is actually significantly more senior, but also with language capabilities and on top with coaching capabilities. These Employee Relationship Managers will proactively reach out to their population to have check ins, coaching sessions, career conversations – to support the People Manager but also as a trusted partner for the employee that stays with the employee throughout its company-journey. 


This is of course only a rough draft of how I am envisioning the future model and I will provide more details in one of my next posts. But what do you think about ERM? Do you have something like this already in place? Have you considered it? Or do you feel that it is not adding any value?

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Do we need to rethink HR?

I had the pleasure of visiting ADPReThink last week and enjoyed a fantastic presentation by Marcus Buckingham from the ADP Research Institute. You can find his research here. He has shared his latest research about employee sentiment, engagement,  performance and retention. The new twist that I haven‘t seen before is that he also assessed an HR Experience Score which was really interesting to see and understand. I will leave it to you to read more details about it here.

The interesting outcome is that this HR Experience Score is ver strongly related to Engagement and retention – in fact, 51% of the variance of HR Experience can be explained by Engagement. This means that we are much more important as a function than we probably give us credit for. I find this an amazing finding while at the same time it makes me pause and look back to what we did with our function in the recent years.

The problem

We basically reduced ourselves into an operational arm that focuses on efficiency and effectiveness in delivering HR services and a business partnering arm that partners with senior leaders to review and define (people) strategy as well as help managers bringing this strategy into practice. – ok, we also have the CoE arm, but this one plays anyway behind the scenes and a regular employee only sees the results of this through the HR services and the business partnering.

But…what Marcus found is that in fact, employees want more than just services delivered. They look for much more in HR – and if they don‘t get this, the HR Experience is low and with it Engagement and retention. Employees want support from HR, want to have a trusted partner in HR, someone that cares about their career, well-being, performance and progress – outside the direct work environment that is manager controlled. Wow, employees want an HR person that knows and cares about them. Now that I write it, it is not so absurd. But still – did anyone consider this in recent years?

Reconsider what HR is about

This epiphany let me reconsider how we should think about HR and how we should reconsider the actual tasks we want HR delivering – and HOW we deliver these tasks. Don‘t get me wrong, I don‘t want to turn time back to the heavily staffed HR department of generalists. I still believe that these times are over. But I believe we need to reconsider a new role in our set-up. We should one more time look at other functions how they treat and care for their stakeholders, their consumers, their customers. The one that comes to my mind particularly here is sales and how they care about their customers and prospects.

ERM – Employee Relationship Management

We should install a new process of Employee Relationship Management. A process where we are not reactively delivering a service that an employee wants or has a need for, like requiring a verification letter or an update to their personal data, but a process that is part pro-active and mainly future focused. A process where we as HR create a relationship with our employees built on trust and common goals. Different from what we built in the past, we need to be again a function with a face, a function with a clear go to person for each employee. And this person should be a familiar name to the employee – and not the „next agent that is available“.
We need to change our approach and approachability. But not through installing local, F2F HR generalists that are again available for each and everything an employee wants – but something new, something different in line with our current aspiration as I believe this is a twist and not a reinvention of what we have been doing. I will talk about it more in my next post. – but what are your thoughts?

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Ambient HR – the next revolution of HR Technology

In today’s world, the challenges and requirements towards HR are manifold and changing on an almost daily basis: Customer expectations, our social and cultural environment, technology – everything is changing more fast paced than ever. And that of course has a big impact on companies well. HR has to find the right answers to this changing environment – of course. But today I would like to write about a very old topic that is still very much present in our daily business and HR lives: The actual connection between HR and the business – or in more concrete terms, the connection between the people or line managers (at all levels) and what HR has to offer them to support.
There are many different areas of potential connections of course, and one specific connection that is especially frustrating and truly very rarely working seamless. The administrative pieces of people manager work.
I believe we all as HR professionals understand and advocate for people managers to be the owner of the people relationships and people management – and this ownership means that they should manage their teams and employees end-to-end. This actual accountability is today not really a big debate anymore. It is understood and accepted – but the debate starts where the act of actual management of people, the conversations, decisions, recommendations have to be turned into action – the act of initiating a pay raise after the conversation with your employee, the act of initiating recruitment after you have reached agreement with your manager about that role. This is where it often gets clunky.
Of course, modern HR systems like Workday or SuccessFactors make it easier than ever before and also very often straight forward. But: As a people manager you still have to:

  • Log-on to the system
  • Find the right process/ action
  • Understand what needs to be done
  • Fill in all required information (hopefully you have them or know where/ how to find them)
  • Send the request off… and wait

This does not feel right in today’s world. And this is where Ambient HR as an idea comes to live.
HR processes should only be there for two reasons:
(a) to support the business in what it needs to achieve
(b) to adhere to local legal regulations
(b) is something we cannot really change. But (a) is something where HR technology and processes need to seriously upgrade to toady’s technology possibilities. I imagine Ambient HR as a way to overlay the actual work that people managers are doing with the required HR actions. Let’s take the above cases.
A pay increase for example, should be initiated based on a conversation between people manager and employee. Ambient HR is connected to all systems people managers use in their daily work and so also to the calendar account. It notices that the people manager has set a career conversation with his/ her employee and automatically does two things:
(1) before the conversation happens, it pops up on the people managers computer and asks what this career conversation is about (e.g. new job, performance improvement, promotion, etc.) and based on the people manager’s choice, provides on the spot, just in time support (e.g. what needs to be taken into consideration, how the process works, how long it takes, what exactly needs to be done by the people manager  – all in context of the employee the manager is seeing) and recommendation (e.g. how high a pay raise could maximum be).
(2) after the conversation, the people manager receives the next pop-up window, asking for action with a pre-completed form based on the employee the manager has seen as well as the choices the people manager took in the first step (e.g. it is a promotion conversation). The manager just has to review and send off. All work done.
With such an integration, the administrative part for the people manager’ job to set in action what he/ she has discussed or decided to do becomes a simple, not time consuming and effective process. And similar integrations are possible with other systems at work like Time & Attendance, like your Sales System, etc. – and because of AI, contextual information and actions are easy to realise – it is like Google Now for work. Ambient HR is immersive in your day-to-day activities, not a nasty add-on, but an integral part of how you work – you don’t have to remember what, when how – it will tell you. And it will learn throughout your work day to be better every time it supports you.
Of course, you need to trust this system as it has access to all your data – but hey, you trust Google or Amazon or Facebook at home with your private data and at work such a system already houses your most sensitive data: people data. So why shouldn’t you trust it to listen in to your daily activities as a people manager?
Ambient HR is the future of HR Technology and it needs to start today.

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Digitalisation of the workplace – further differentiating our workforce…and society

The future is bright and shiny – AI, RPA, IoT will make our lives easier and will help us getting into a more balanced way of work and life. – does that sound familiar? Right! The same claims were made with the introduction of computers into our (work-) lives and later with the online economy. And what was the result of both? – you know it: even more work and less freedom for those who still had a job – and an even more growing number of people w/o jobs. Sure, each revolution has also created new jobs – but not for everyone. Each revolution created jobs for a smaller and smaller talent pool. Why? – the skills, the requirements, the capacity one needed to have to fulfill these new jobs were more and more difficult to have or build. Many employees were just not able anymore to learn these new skills or to even think in the new categories that these new business models required.
At first – during the early revolutions, this was dealt with by early retirements – but this gets more and more difficult as employees need to work longer to be able to have a life as retirees, as well as there is a growing number of middle-aged employees too far away from retirement that cannot meet the requirements.
Don’t get me wrong – I am all in for the digitalisation of the workplace. I am a big fan of digitalisation and the chances it opens up at the workplace (and in private lives). But we need to change the way we handle the implementation of such revolutions.
In the past, businesses, the econcomy as a whole had always the same reaction: “Way we work”-revolutions led to new employees that can fulfill the demands of faster and more (let’s face it – besides many great outcomes, the recurring theme is that with each new revolution, workload increased, turn-around times decreased) while many old employees were squeezed out (and old not necessarily being used for age, but for long-standing). Companies used the easy way out. The pool was big enough and the outcry of the ones squeezed out was sufficiently small. Now, my thesis is that we are reaching an inflection point where this way of working – the way we actually do business is coming to an end.
Let me tell you why:
(1) More and more western countries are starting to have social uproars, to a great extent due to rising unemployment and increased social jealousy – the haves and the have-nots
(2) Even the part of the population that still has a job (the “Haves”) is struggling – struggling because of workload, increasing speed and required new skills.
(3) Job related illnesses that are psychological/ mental nature are raising and have surpassed physical illnesses (see here). Psychological triggered missed-work-days are having a higher negative impact in companies than physical triggered missed-days.
The next revolution of digitilization is quickly approaching and the populare opinion on what needs to happen is the usual: work faster, build up new skills. Problem is: Humans are NOT bots, cannot just as easily be reprogrammed or get a new, father processor. As after each work-revolution there will be loosers – just that this time I am afraid the added loosers will bring the system to the tilting point. The part of the workforce that will still be able to follow and be the winners of each revolution will be too small to stabilize the system – a system where the average age of employees in western countries is rising. And with rising age, adaptability and speed are decreasing – this is fact. Another key message from last years INSEAD “The Global Talent Competitiveness Index” reads “Low-skilled workers continue to be replaced by robots, while knowledge workers are displaced by algorithms”  (see here for the detailed analysis of our global workforce). – another group of losers. Also, just look in many of today’s boardrooms (and let’s leave the Silicon Valley out for a moment) – how many boardmembers are truly immersed in today’s ways of working? Social Collaboration, Social Media, “Appinization” – these are for many of them interesting concepts, but that is it. There is still a very large number of senior leaders that ask there assistants to “print their emails” so that they can “reply”. And they are supposed to lead us into the next revolution? – but this is a different story for a different post…
My statement is that we need to drastically change the way we do business from “employees that serve the company” to “companies that serve the society”. The solution is not to stop the future (although this is currently very much a popular theme in Trump-America), the solution is though to actively shape the future in a way that it serves society – and I mean each and every member of it. And not how we did it in recent industrial-revolutions: In a way that it serves the Shareholder alone. We must understand this now – or we will face the consequences of the path we are on – and although I am repeating myself, the signs are more evident than ever: Brexit, Trump-America, Alt-Right and other popular extremists on the rise.

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The societal impact: Shared Services 4.0

One of the big themes and big discussions today is Industry 4.0 – what is meant is the next industrial revolution via IoT (Internet of Things) and further integration, communication and automation of machines. You can read more about it here. It will for sure have another big impact on worklife, culture and society.
What I would like to talk about today though is Shared Services 4.0 – which I believe is going down a similar route like Industry 4.0 – and therefore the same naming convention 😉
Shared Services 1.0 – 3.0
When you think about Shared Services from its origins in the early 90ies till now, it was about the following themes:

  • Process standardization
  • Process rationalization
  • Self-services
  • Near- or off-shoring of work

And subsequent near- or off-shoring of jobs. Because of Shared Services, many former colleagues in HR (or in any other (back-office) function) have lost their job, were in need to find a new job. Some of these colleagues had luck and found a new job – some of them for longer, many of them for short periods only. Why that? – quite frankly it was not one company that implemented Shared Services, but many – and with it 10.000s of jobs, all the same kind of jobs were near- or offshored. And only some former employees of these jobs understood it right and found their work-future in upskilling towards jobs that could not (at least for a period of time) get near- or offshored. A big majority though did either not understand that “rule” of life-long learning or – and no offense – were not capable to perform the next higher-level job. These former colleagues have lost contact and access to their job market – they are the lost people of globalization, being not unhappy anymore, but angry – don’t see any perspective other than turning back time. And as we all know, you actually cannot turn time back (at least not yet ;)) – and even if, there are sufficient people that don’t want to do that. In any case though, there are winners and lost people that now rather fight against each other than try to repair what has been damaged for the greater good of all.
If you think in broader terms though and at a global scale, you must admit that the majority of the jobs were not made redundant, they were just relocated. And so, the Shared Service economy has born new winners – countries like India, Costa Rica, the Philippines, a big portion of the Eastern European countries have “received” 1000s of jobs and with it managed to catch up with western countries, created new middle classes and brought young people into great starting jobs – with big potential for international careers.
Shared Services 4.0
The new waves of innovation and thinking in the shared services industry though will have different effects. Nothing will really change with the losers of the first waves – except that the distance between their knowledge and capabilities and the job requirements is growing. It is more and more unlikely that these former colleagues find a new job similar to their old one – they either stay unemployed or go for 2-3 parttime jobs which still cannot feed their family at home.
What is worse though is that the winners of waves 1.0-3.0 will turn into losers as well. – and the upskiled colleagues from the first rounds will lose their jobs, too. RPA and AI are the keywords.
Robot Process Automation (RPA) will slowly but surely eat away the lower qualified jobs in Shared Service Centers. Robots are getting sufficiently smart to execute without break, without mistake most of the standardized work within centers. Recent studies show that by now 80% and more of standardized work can be transfered to bots. And in turn, 80% of new colleagues will lose their jobs.
But it does not stop with RPA – AI, the next evolution is already on its way. Today mostly too expensive to replace low-cost country colleagues, but tomorrow (and it is almost literally tomorrow) this will change and not only standardized work will get automated but even more complex work where situational assessment and decision making are required. I know that most of the readers cannot wait to have AI in their life – me, too – but in their private lives, not at work. At work, this will lead to the next “let go” of colleagues – now though again in both western countries as well as low-cost countries. New losers of globalization are created.
 
Of course, this is great for the bottom-line of a company’s balance sheet and maybe for its Shareholders. But what about the rest of the country? rest of the world? – it will only further grow the difference and distance between the “haves” and “have nots” and it will further spur societal conflicts that are already on the horizon – or already in our lives like Trump and Brexit.
It is on us to change this, it is on us to make sure that we take everyone with us on that journey. Again, it is not the solution to stop time, but it is time to stop spreading the difference between winners and losers, generating more losers than winners. It is on us – we in HR are the ones closest to our workforces. We need to listen and come up with a plan.

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Trade-off – Efficiency and Effectiveness: Do we have the right focus?

In my last post I pleaded that HR for once should stay ahead of the curve and not blindly follow any trends. I am still 100% behind that and would like to support it today with some additional thoughts: The trade-off or conflict between being efficient and effective.
As an HR Consultant there is one slide that is one of the most important when it comes to making the case for change/ making the case for an HR Transformation. It might look different from consultancy to consultancy, but each and every HR consultant has that in the back pocket with the same message. The pyramid or small square in a big square – the message that the true value of an HR Transformation is not really in HR, but in the workforce, realized by easier HR interactions, faster HR transactions. Don’t get me wrong, I still believe in that slide – have used it myself multiple times. But have also seen multiple times that the consequences of this slide were not taken when actually transforming HR. And this is the target conflict, the trade-off between efficiency and effectiveness – not in HR, but in transforming HR.
Why is that so? – when designing a new HR Organization, companies and consultancies tend to design it as lean as possible, as specialized as possible and as rigid as possible – with global standardization, global technology, global processes, etc. – and all of this is necessary for a lean and efficient HR organisation. But what about effectiveness? Yes – the CoEs will be designed with a bit of slack so that they can drive HR effectiveness and all is well. But is that so?
Coming back to the original “slide” that I was referring to: The real deal, the real business case is outside of HR which in turn means that we need to make sure with every HR Transformation that this part of the company, the overall workforce, the business stays effective! This is the effectiveness that we should watch out for, this is the actual conflict and trade-off we need to discuss and align. Because lean HR in 9 out of 10 cases means:

  • Standardized processes with one size fits all – no special treatment of any business unit or employee group, regardless if it is needed or not
  • Self-service for initiating any people related transaction
  • but also self-service for employee or manager education on HR policies and procedures

And of course, this is necessary and completely normal for transformed HR organizations with Shared Services. Some are even more rigid and only allow self-services – no personal case resolution or handling or intake anymore. The people manager or employee has to fit into the pattern of self-service possibilities and policies published. If not, too bad.
The question is: Is that the right approach? – sure, this is the right approach if you want lean HR. But it is not the right approach if you want to achieve the complete business case of an HR transformation. Don’t get me wrong – I am not against self-services or publishing of policies. But what happens in many cases is that this is focused on HR and not on the consumer of the service. Companies are slowly understanding this. In fact, I had a conversation last week about self-services vs. telephony support for employees and managers. A company has changed its approach on how to take requests in – from a focus on self-services, short call turnaround times and mass-handling to an open menu for the employee or people manager: Take the contact method that you feel best fit for you for your specific case today. – result was that significantly more calls were coming in to HR now than before and that call handling times have almost doubled. But employees/ people managers came less often for the same request – could receive a satisfying answer and action earlier. In total, employees and people managers had to spend less time searching for the right answer to a complex case/ question online before starting a self-service request which triggered multiple back and forth between HR and the requestor due to incomplete information, misunderstanding, etc. They now had the chance to call in immediately for complex cases and got help through a conversation (another change) rather than scripted call handling, which was much more effective for the requestor. Now it seems that this would be less efficient for HR – but preliminary results show that the total handling time of a single request was reduced due to less back and forth and having all necessary information. Let’s see how that plays out in the long-run.
At the end it seems that there maybe isn’t even a target conflict, but we will only find out if we not only during the business case, but also when designing and implementing the transformed organization, processes and systems focus on the holistic picture and the company as a whole, not only HR. And in coming back to my plead of the previous post: Don’t go all digital, allow for analog conversations to happen in real-time (sure, it does not need to be phone, can be chat as well – but let’s face it we as humans are much more efficient in telling our case/ issue/ request than writing it) and make these human interactions with a conversation – not scripted – to achieve best outcome.