The adage “the only constant is change” has never been truer. But it’s not the same as it used to be. Where once you could count on periods of relative stability between change events – launching a new product, entering a new market, adopting a new business model – that time to breathe has largely disappeared in today’s world – which has important implications for innovation. 

Change is not only constant but its pace has also accelerated. Information and communication technologies have given us access to virtually everything on demand. The expectation is that organisations will be equally accommodating to the needs and expectations of a broader range of stakeholders and even step up to a broader role in society, acting as social enterprises as well as business enterprises. 

So, if constant change is the new normal, does that mean your organisation is in a constant state of disruption? The short answer is “yes” – there is no longer a point where “you’ve arrived” and the period of change is behind you for a while. But, there is an opportunity to shift your mindset: Instead of making change the end goal, make it your goal to be adaptable, to equip your organisation and people to keep up with change as it happens or even stay ahead of it. 

How do you become adaptable? By enabling innovation. Adaptability and innovation go hand in hand, and both have become differentiators for organisations. Here are three ways to foster both. 

1. Create space for adaptability and innovation to thrive. The old mindset where organisations, and HR in particular, strove for efficiency and consistency made more sense when things were less dynamic than they are today. While there’s certainly still a place for efficiency, organisations also need to make room for adaptability. That doesn’t mean the whole organisation needs to adapt, but there should be pockets in the organisation deliberately focused on rethinking how things are done and inventing new ways of doing them. John Hagel of Deloitte’s Center for the Edge explains this idea well in his Scaling Edges perspective. 

Different functions in the organisation may lend themselves more toward efficiency or toward adaptability. For example, functions that handle transactional or high-volume work can be more focused on efficiency, while functions involved in research and development or problem-solving can lean more toward adaptability (see below).

2. Think “work in progress” instead of “finished product.” The rapid, relentless pace of change makes it impossible to accurately predict very far into the future. Even if you set a course for where you think you should be one, three, or five years out, you’ll likely have to change direction, probably more than once. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start the trip. A big part of innovation involves experimentation. So take the first, minimum viable step – release the new product to customers, launch the new benefit program for employees, enter the new market – with the idea that you will continuously build on that beginning by collecting data, ideating, and refining based on what you learn. 

If that sounds too risky, you can temper risk by being thoughtful about the boundaries of allowable risk. Perhaps the risk of getting less than 100 per cent positive feedback when you’re testing a new feature/product/offering is acceptable, but the risk of losing a customer over it is not. Set the appropriate parameters for your organisation, trust people to work within them, and reward them when they do, understanding that you are rewarding innovation and the willingness to try new approaches, not perfection. Leadership is key in this new context, where leaders aren’t commanding and controlling but giving workers the freedom and safety to bring their creativity to work to solve problems quickly and in the moment. 

3. Enable learning in the flow. To be able to adapt to constant change, people have to learn as they go, and organisations need to get a lot better at enabling this type of on-demand, in-the-flow learning. In fact, the evolution toward learning in the flow and continuous reskilling to keep up with disruptions emerged as the top Global Human Capital Trend of 2019.

Notably, 86 percent of survey respondents rated this need important or very important, but only 10 percent said they’re “very ready” to address it. By making learning accessible, personalized to the individual, and relevant to the work being done, you can make adaptability and innovation as constant as change itself. An added value is that by enabling people to learn, be adaptable, and innovate, you elevate their experience at work, making it more meaningful.

Mindset over matter
Change is inherently disruptive, but so is innovation. Why is one seen as negative and one positive? Why not use the constancy of change as an engine to drive innovation and to bring out the best in your workers? Let it push your organisation to become adaptable so you can respond to change as it happens, and enable innovation as a way to stay a step ahead. 

Image source: Depositphotos

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It’s an exciting and challenging time to be in HR leadership. Elemental forces are driving HR out of its long-established functional orbit around the business and pulling it into the core value drivers. Leaders who can effectively navigate this positional shift will have an unprecedented opportunity to bolster business outcomes and worker productivity as well as their own careers.

The forces behind this opportunity include a fundamental shift in the character of companies and a related shift in the nature of work itself. Changing demographics, particularly the attitudes of Millennials and Gen Xers, are pushing companies to embrace and act on purposes that are broader and more fulfilling than profit alone. Witness the rising incidence of employee activism in Silicon Valley and the emergence of the social enterprise.

Digital technologies are not only amplifying the demands of employees (and indeed, all corporate stakeholders), but they also hold out the tantalising promise of a more collaborative and productive workplace. As the tools of data-driven decision-making become more available to employees at all levels, work itself can be reimagined and the role of management fundamentally reshaped.

Instead of command-and-control hierarchies, companies can perform more like symphonies. We are already seeing this trend manifesting in the emergence of what we call the symphonic C-suite, in which siloes are torn down and top leaders play together as a team while also leading their own functional teams, all in harmony.

The above developments are people-centered, and that’s why HR is being pulled into the core of the business. To be able to successfully occupy that space, HR leadership will need three important capabilities that have been revealed and confirmed by Bersin’s high-impact HR research.

“Elemental forces are driving HR out of its long-established functional orbit around the business and pulling it into the core value drivers”

1. Highly-effective HR leadership provides vision and direction
The ability to provide vision and direction not only within HR, but also as an indispensable member of the symphonic C-suite will be essential to the effectiveness of tomorrow’s HR leadership. Our Three Capabilities HR Leadership Needs Now research finds this ability is strongly correlated with organisational performance: 85 per cent of HR leadership in high-performing organisations are effective or very effective at providing vision and direction vs. only 26 per cent of the leaders in lower-performing organisations.

HR leaders must not only be as conversant with the strategic direction of their companies as any other member of the C-suite, they also must contribute to strategy formulation, especially as it pertains to culture, talent, and overall fit. They are the keepers and caretakers of the vital link between people and strategy execution.

In addition to the organisation at large, HR leaders must provide a North Star for the HR function to follow. They need to reframe the function’s mandate from intervention to integration. HR won’t act on the business; rather, it will be embedded in the business. Performance management, learning, rewards, and other HR offerings will need to operate in a manner that reduces or eliminates the frictions that diminish their adoption and constrain employee and team performance and productivity.

2. Highly-effective HR leadership persuades and influences a broad array of stakeholders
To realise their vision, HR leaders will need to become highly-skilled persuaders and influencers. Again, the Three Capabilities HR Leadership Needs Now research found a strong correlation with high-performance: 85 per cent of the HR leaders in high-performing organisations are effective or very effective at persuading and influencing stakeholders vs. 26 per cent of the leaders in lower-performing organisations.

“AI has the potential to transform performance and productivity, yet many HR leaders are sitting on the fence. Instead, they should be leading the charge”

The success of the social enterprise hinges on team-building prowess, on the development of a welcoming culture of collaboration, and on the digital transformation of key HR processes. Without the luxury of the command-and-control, HR leaders will have to rely on their ability to persuade and influence other people – from the C-suite to the customer-facing frontlines and into the broader business ecosystem – to embrace change and act.

For many HR leaders, the ability to convince others also will hinge on a more courageous approach to risk. In the past, HR leadership was often called upon to provide an expert opinion in go/no-go decisions, but they rarely had to fully shoulder the risk of business bets. Now they will have to find ways to navigate the people-related risks associated with disruption while maintaining progress towards business imperatives.

3. Highly-effective HR leadership is an agent of change
The more courageous new approach to risk needed to support the ability of HR leadership to persuade and influence will also be critical to their success as change agents. Once again, our research establishes a strong correlation between this capability and organisational performance: 81 per cent of the HR leaders in high-performing organisations are effective or very effective at driving change and innovation vs. 21 per cent of the leaders in lower-performing organisations.

Tomorrow’s HR leadership will exchange information and ideas, experiment with work-related technologies, and explore new ways of working. They will lead the effort to create and nurture the organisational culture of innovation, experimentation, and open-mindedness that will be needed to drive outcomes in social enterprises.

This capability will be especially valuable in the realm of technology. Take the outsized promise of artificial intelligence (AI). There is no doubt that AI has the potential to transform performance and productivity, yet many HR leaders are sitting on the fence. Instead, they should be leading the charge.

The beginning of a new year is a natural time for reflection. This year, the most effective HR leaders are preparing themselves and their organisations to drive business growth. Are you among them?

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Thanks to the increasing sophistication of analytics; data and algorithms can inform and improve management, business, and HR decision-making throughout companies. But, the tools of data collection and decision-support algorithms are only one element in the quest to attain the full potential of analytics.

Another is the ability of employees at all levels to use these tools, a challenge that will require a broad-based upskilling of the workforce. And, there’s an additional element – the willingness to employ analytics to make decisions. Compounding all of this is the fact that organisations today are becoming social enterprises, where the ability to manage social, environmental and governance concerns are as important as financial returns. In this environment, workers have more influence than ever. Their voices are amplified through social media and other means, meaning errors made by an organisation can have far-reaching consequences.

The role of organisational culture
So, what does all of this mean? To create a willingness to use more data and unbiased decision-support algorithms, a mindset of data-driven decision-making should be embedded in the organisational culture in a way that benefits employees in their work as well as other stakeholders. The need for a data-driven culture is important and shouldn’t be underestimated.

In fact, this need is one of the top findings in Bersin’s High-Impact People Analytics research, which revealed that a company can fully utilise people analytics only if – and when – using data to make decisions becomes part of the culture, or “how we do things around here.” In fact, the research determined that organisations that have achieved the highest levels of people analytics maturity are three times more likely to have such a culture than organisations at lower maturity levels.

“A data-driven culture won’t take hold if employees have to stop working to get the insights they need”

However, just making the decision to implement a mindset of data-driven decision-making into an organisation’s culture won’t work. In an analytics-friendly culture, data-driven decision-making isn’t an afterthought, an add-on, or a justification; rather, it is a shared mindset in which:

• Everyone recognises that data and analytics are essential to sound decision-making;
• They use data and analytics in their decision processes for all aspects of the enterprise including financial, social and environmental well-being;
• They use data and analytics to monitor – and adjust – decision outcomes to ensure desired results and to prevent bias.

The final bullet point is a key element because it supports the kind of organisational innovation and agility that many companies are seeking to cultivate while managing important social concerns. Instead of a command-and-control approach in which marching orders come from above and everyone else moves in lockstep, the leaders of these companies want to make the strategic decisions and push the execution decisions. This involves continuous sensing throughout the organisation and its environment, along with adjustments to ever-changing conditions and outcomes.

Communicating and modelling the mindset
As with everything related to organisational culture, HR plays an essential role in creating a shared mindset of data-driven decision-making. The HR team, often with the help of a dedicated communications specialist, should craft strong and frequent messages about the importance of data and analytics, and then support those messages with incentives. HR also needs to enlist senior leaders to deliver the message – not just in words, but more importantly, in actions and in engaging the workforce.

Before these communications are pushed out, leaders should take care in sensing how their workforce feels about the initiative and what their expectations are, through open conversations, pulse surveys, and other listening channels. By having a clear understanding of where the employees stand on using data to make decisions, leaders can tailor not only their communications plan, but their overall strategy as well to have the best chance at adoption and satisfaction with the initiative.

“HR must be careful not to over-rotate on analytics – creating a culture in which analytics trumps human judgement”

Environment supports culture
Another of the key findings in Bersin’s High-Impact People Analytics research is that strong data-driven decision-making is enabled by the delivery of actionable and scalable information. In other words, the data and analytics tools that employees need must be at their fingertips. A data-driven culture won’t take hold if employees have to stop working to get the insights they need.

That means that analytics can’t be siloed in HR or elsewhere; they have to be embedded in the work across the enterprise. It also means that the data needed to fuel analytics must be understandable to employees. In addition, the more mature a people analytics capability, the more sources of data are tapped. The data mix must include qualitative data as well as quantitative data. This approach enables workers to consider a number of perspectives and to make the best decision for the company, its stakeholders and its environment, as part of regular workflows.

A final nuance
While Bersin research reveals that a mindset of data-driven decision-making is a key ingredient in overall analytics maturity, our in-depth interviews with people analytics practitioners and thought leaders surfaced a significant finding: analytics are not a replacement for human judgement; they augment human judgement.

One of the world’s largest e-commerce sites also provides a notable example of this finding. Recently, it scrapped a talent acquisition analytics project that its engineers had been working on since 2014. The company had hoped that the program would rank job applicants – producing a shortlist of the top candidates for any particular job without the need for HR professionals. The only problem? The program showed a bias toward male applicants and the engineers couldn’t eliminate it.

Accordingly, HR must be careful not to over-rotate on analytics – creating a culture in which analytics trumps human judgement. Machines don’t think in the human sense, and a company is a social enterprise. Thus, the role of human judgement and experience cannot be completely replaced. It must be woven into a data-driven culture.

The promise of analytics is one that every company should embrace. To make the promise a reality, however, HR must work to ensure that a culture of data-driven decision-making permeates the organisation and encourages the aspects of the new social enterprise. Without that, returns on investments in analytics will be limited.

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HR is undergoing a fundamental shift. The rigid, policy-driven programs and processes of yesterday, which were primarily focused on compliance, efficiency, and conventional approaches to talent management, are giving way. Leading HR practitioners are replacing top-down programs and processes with more agile, worker-centric offerings – offerings that are personalised for employees and that are informed by a robust understanding of work and workforce segments – and design thinking can play an important role in this process.

Bersin research backs this up, and high-performing HR organisations are 3.5 times more likely to focus relentlessly on user experience when designing HR offerings than lower-performing organisations. This is a significant finding: High-performing HR organisations are also associated with a host of positive business outcomes, such as meeting or exceeding financial targets, improved processes, greater responsiveness to change, and enhanced innovation. It is also why design thinking is becoming an essential HR capability.

A design thinking mindset can drive results
Design thinking is more than a set of rote practices. It requires a mindset composed of three elements:

• User-centered design, which places the employee at the heart of the design;
• Human-centered design, which ensures that the design speaks to the emotions of users;
• Soft systems methodology, which ensures that multiple, divergent perspectives are incorporated into the design process.

When HR practitioners operationalise this mindset, they can achieve impressive results. Witness one of largest companies powering prosperity, use of design thinking to re-engineer its candidate assessment and selection process. The online financial solutions company’s redesign produced a 14-point increase in quality of hire (with almost two-thirds of new hires now receiving the highest quality rating), reduced average time to fill 12 days (or almost 20 per cent), and boosted new-hire net promoter scores by 14 per cent year over year.

A global leader in consumer transaction technologies used design thinking to address high rates of employee attrition, especially among new hires and key worker categories, such as customer engineers. It developed and used its new employee experience model to rebuild its onboarding process. The result: the volume of new hires who left dropped by 22 per cent, resulting in a savings of $7 million. In addition, turnover within the critical customer engineer segment fell from 34 per cent to 10.9 per cent.

Three working principles
Once HR has begun to establish a design thinking mindset, it can turn its attention to implementation. Design thinking is not a set of concrete steps followed in a specific sequence; it’s better understood and approached as a set of working principles.

1. First, seek to understand your employees and the problems they face
A key tenet of design thinking is the ability to empathise with employees, that is, to share their experiences and feelings. Design thinkers use observation and interview techniques to achieve this. Then, they develop personas (representations of the qualities and characteristics of typical users) and journey maps to better understand user populations.

2. Second, generate a variety of options and shape them into potential solutions
One of the pitfalls of problem-solving is rushing to find a single “best” idea. Instead, design thinkers seek to identify a variety of alternative solutions. This can increase the chances of discovering robust and innovative designs, especially when the options are generated by diverse and inclusive teams.

3. Third, test potential solutions with employees and refine them with data and feedback
Design thinkers don’t put all their eggs in one basket. They test solutions in the real world and collect both qualitative and quantitative data on the results. This allows them to deepen their empathic connection with users, define problems more precisely, and refinement solutions before committing to them.

A certain mystique has arisen around the design thinking, but there really isn’t any magic to it. HR professionals who develop the right mindset and put these three principles to work can soon reap the rewards of this essential capability.

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In Deloitte’s 2017 Global Human Capital Trends survey, an overwhelming 90 percent of the respondents – 10,400 business and HR leaders across 140 countries – told us that creating organisations of the future was “important” or “very important” to them. In fact, they identified building new organisations as their most important challenge. Agility and agile teams play a central role in the organisation of the future, and as companies race to replace structural hierarchies with networks of teams, they are looking to HR for capacity and support.

Agile teams – nimble, entrepreneurial, cross-functional groups of employees that are already becoming ubiquitous at every level of organisations – are an essential component of tomorrow’s workplace. Fast-acting and purposeful, agile teams can not only navigate the vagaries of the marketplace, including volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA), but also mine them for opportunity.

Inside the makings of agile teams
What do agile teams need to achieve the empowerment necessary to operate at their maximum potential? They require a supportive culture and high levels of trust, inclusion, and accountability. When teams are imbued with trust, their members are better able to identify and act on opportunities for improvement, development, and innovation. Employee inclusion, both in teams and in the company as a whole, engenders an overall sense of belonging that helps enable employees to better connect with one another and to share their best ideas. And, high levels of accountability are necessary to help advance organisational strategies, with each successful encounter encouraging team members to seek out and accept more responsibility for their work.

“As companies race to replace structural hierarchies with networks of teams, they are looking to HR for capacity and support”

What can HR do to create agile teams
HR leaders can best support the empowerment of agile teams by thinking of employees as customers and expanding their focus on employees to include teams. This approach to enhancing the employee experience in agile teams can be accomplished by adopting a design-thinking mindset, creating personas, and mapping the employee journey.

• Design thinking helps HR leaders to more intently focus on improving the experiences of team members – a fundamental break from the function’s traditional emphasis on compliance and processes. Design thinking studies the behavior and working scenarios of employee segments and then designs solutions that enhance their work lives. Design thinking is powered by empathy. By walking the proverbial mile in employees’ shoes, HR professionals can better understand, engineer, and deliver positive experiences.
• Personas are constructed narratives that portray a typical employee’s experience on any given workday. Originally conceived by consumer marketers, personas give HR professionals a better understanding of what team members do by bringing their work to life through story. HR can use personas to identify and improve key attributes of effective teamwork that are embedded in employee attitudes, expectations, work habits, and goals.
• Journey maps provide a step-by-step graphical depiction of the different aspects of a team member’s journey. They can be used to identify key moments in the work processes in agile teams. In turn, HR can use the insights derived from mapping those key moments to create experiences that maximise the engagement of team workers.

As companies strive to transform themselves into organisations of the future, HR is uniquely positioned to help.  Through the adoption of a employee-as-customer mentality and the tools of design thinking, HR leaders can better design the programs and solutions that agile teams need to become more engaged, more empowered, more challenged, and ultimately, more successful.

Image source: iStock

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