The first most important thing HR can do to prepare for the future of work is to take more of a design-thinking approach to HR and the workforce, he said.

HR has long had the same approach when it comes to the administrative process of managing people, policies, payroll and work, however, these processes have not necessarily been designed with people in mind, according to Averbook.

“In the modern world of technology, given how fast information flows and the expectations of the workforce around communication, HR needs to change its mindset,” said Averbook, who was speaking ahead of SAP SuccessFactors’ HR Connect 2019 event, which will be held in Auckland on 27 May 2019 and Sydney from 29-30 May.

“We need to design for the workforce first, and if we do that HR will have a more engaged workforce and people will also stop seeing HR as the police because HR will be there to help rather than hinder them.”

Value is key here, according to Averbook, who said employees and managers need to see and experience genuine value in using processes and systems in order to use and benefit from them.

“All of a sudden, employees and managers will become advocates for these processes and systems – and this will also provide more and better data for HR as well,” he said.

“So, HR needs to truly leverage the concept of design thinking and ask how they can redesign processes so that they are going to meet people where they are and provide benefit for them in how they really work.”

Averbook, who serves as co-founder and CEO of consulting firm Leapgen, also explained that HR needs to understand people, their personas and how they work – and design accordingly for them.

“That way HR can truly create processes that meet people where they are, instead of trying to get them to engage with them in a way that is not natural for them,” he said.

“Once HR does that, they can make decisions around technology and implementation which truly makes sense – so, the challenge for HR is to think differently about this and realise that it’s not just about implementing technology.”

“It’s not just about deploying a technology solution, but rather deploying a new vision and a new mindset”

A shared digital strategy vision
The second most important thing HR can do to prepare for the future of work is to develop and hold a shared vision around digital strategy.

However, this concept is broader than most HR professionals think: “digital is a mindset, and this encompasses people, process and technology – not just technology,” said Averbook.

“Oftentimes HR might think they can just develop a technology strategy or purchase a HR system, but that’s where they fail.”

This is why a design-thinking approach is important as a first step, as Averbook explained that this is critical to implementing the right technology as an enabler to effective HR and work.

“It’s not just about deploying a technology solution, but rather deploying a new vision and a new mindset,” he said.

“And in order to be prepared for the future of work, that’s what we have to do: don’t lead with technology, but think about the impact on the business first.”

Averbook, who will be speaking about the future of work and HR, observed that HR functions often think that if they buy a new piece of technology, “all of a sudden everything’s going to change,” he said.

“This goes back to the definition of digital, versus the definition of technology.

“Digital is mindset, people, process and technology, so a design-thinking approach to HR and work helps change the old mindset and create this vision.”

Averbook noted that HR sometimes gets stuck on the phrase “digital transformation” as if it is a one-off event that transforms an organisation.

“That’s never the case; instead, HR needs to think about maturity and realise that organisations are always going to be maturing,” he said.

“This has huge implications for HR, because this involves always-on, continuous learning, change and reinvention, and what I call ‘permanent Beta’.

“The future of work that we’re really describing is already here today”

“If the HR function of today is not in permanent Beta, that’s a big problem because the workforce, business and technology are going to continue to shift.

“If we don’t have a permanent Beta mindset, there’s no way to keep up and that chasm is just going to keep getting bigger,” he said.

Learn from the outside world
The third most important step HR can take to prepare for the future of work is to continue to learn from the outside world.

“It’s 2019 outside of work, and people are connecting and communicating instantly using personal devices and apps – which is usually more modern than the technology companies give their employees to work with,” he said.

“If you ask what year it is inside of work, you often get organisations saying it’s Y2K or others might say it’s 2010 – so there is a big gap there in what people are experiencing.”

This is not just about technology, but also other HR processes such as engagement surveys, performance management and compensation reviews, which are often conducted once a year.

“Why can’t they be done in real time just like people do everything else in real time?” Averbook asked.

“HR’s approach is that they have always done things that way, so an organisation needs to be able to stomach change in re-imagining its approach to HR and work,” said Averbook.

Organisations need to be maturing as the needs of workers change, and he said some organisations employ 100 per cent full-time or part-time workers, while others rely heavily on contractors, and others use “gig economy” workers.

Workers have already moved on in how they work, with increasingly decentralised and remote practices, and Averbook said the way people work is very different to what it has been in the past.

Worker expectations have also changed, and they no longer want an organisation to employ, train, develop or retain them for life.

“People simply don’t enter the workforce thinking that; they are happy to work remotely, or from a WeWork or from their favourite café,” he said.

“So, the question for HR is how to manage and engage employees in a way that helps them get work done.”

Averbook concluded by saying that the most important thing to understand about the future of work it that it is an “overused cliché”.

“The future of work that we’re really describing is already here today,” he said.

“It’s just that it’s not evenly distributed and every organisation is at a different stage of the future maturity curve.”

Averbook will be speaking at SAP SuccessFactors’ HR Connect 2019 event, which will be held in Auckland on 27 May 2019 at the Hilton Auckland and in Sydney from 29-30 May at the Hyatt Regency Sydney. Other speakers will include Tina Lundkvist (GM People Analytics, Fonterra) and Clinton Berryman (GM Global HR Process & Systems, Fonterra) as well as Jessie Hommelhoff (Head of Enterprise Improvement HR, BHP Billiton) and Carly Brown (GM Human Resources, Ruralco Holdings). For more information or to register please visit the SAP SuccessFactors’ HR Connect 2019 website.

Image source: Depositphotos

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The first key driver of innovation within companies is leadership, and it is important for organisational leaders to frame innovation from the top when it comes to innovation strategy and mission, said the director of UTS’ Advanced MBA, Dr Natalia Nikolova, who has conducted research into effective strategy, innovation and leadership.

“To foster innovation, you do need some direction from leadership. It’s not about innovating blindly in all directions, so companies do have to set some directions for innovation” she said.

“Be very clear on the key areas where you can create value for clients and customers; these are the key areas you want to focus on.

“This direction for innovation is really important, because otherwise, innovation efforts can be too scattered and won’t lead to a real agenda for change.”

Nikolova, who recently spoke at an Oracle HR innovation series breakfast event in Sydney, said the second important consideration for HR in fostering innovation is communication.

Leadership has to communicate the importance of innovation, and Nikolova said the CEO, senior executive team and the Board need to be clearly aligned in this process.

A research project Nikolova undertook with colleagues from UTS Business School and partners 2ndRoad and SpencerStuart in 2016 has found that some Australian companies have a risk-averse attitude towards innovation.

It is therefore extremely important that CEOs and chairs align their agendas and communicate their support for innovation both internally as well as externally to the market.

Similarly, organisations need to have appropriate governance structures in place to support innovation.

“Many companies have an innovation director, but it’s not enough to have one or a few people who are working out of a centralised innovation unit”

“An innovation council, comprising senior leaders, including the CEO, is very helpful in providing both oversight as well as a show of support, because you need a proper governance structure to direct innovation efforts,” said Nikolova.

In this process, it is important to think about what drives innovation from a governance perspective and carefully consider the composition of innovation councils, company boards and senior leadership teams.

“For example, when it comes to company boards, there is a big issue with diversity,” she said.

Research published in Harvard Business Review in 2013 as well as 2017, and studies by McKinsey have clearly shown that boards that are more diverse in age, gender, cultural background and including individuals with backgrounds in the technical and digital space, are much more successful in fostering innovation.

Nikolova cited a US study which demonstrated a clear connection between diversity and innovation, and she explained that this link is often not considered when it comes to governance and the composition of boards.

Structure and processes are also key drivers of innovation, and in addition to innovation leaders, companies also need “innovation champions”, she said.

“Many companies have an innovation director, but it’s not enough to have one or a few people who are working out of a centralised innovation unit.”

A good starting point is to negotiate with managers across different business units for team members to fully engage in innovative activities one or two days per month.

Nikolova said this should be recognised as part of their workload, performance and career aspirations, and these people should also be supported by dedicated innovation leads or champions.

“You do need some dedicated roles, but you also need to encourage and engage everybody to innovate,” she explained.

There are a number of processes that can be employed to encourage innovation, and Nikolova said that many companies are starting to use design thinking to drive innovation because this process is user-centric clearly connecting innovation to customer value.

“A lot of large organisations who have become successful at innovating are adopting the so-called lean start-up methodology”

Starting with the user needs, and building back to the technology, design thinking is changing the way teams deliver value, organise work and find solutions.

For example, Oracle’s design thinking team in ANZ works with HR leaders to help build out human-centric approaches to every stage of design, which is helping deliver fast prototypes and quicker, tighter paths to innovation.

Providing resources is “absolutely critical” in the innovation process, and Nikolova explained that this does not need to be an expensive or large exercise.

“In fact, a lot of large organisations who have become successful at innovating are adopting the so-called lean start-up methodology,” she said.

“They start experimenting, trialling innovative ideas, products and services with a very small budget, and see how it goes.

“If you fail, you start again. If you succeed, then you put in more money. You don’t have to make big bets where you put a lot of money in at the start.

“In fact, in many cases, companies put in anything between $10,000 to $50,000 to test a new idea, and then if it is proven to deliver value, they continue to prototype development by increasing investment in the idea.”

Innovation obviously requires funding, and Nikolova said that clearly communicated financial commitment not only enables the process of innovation but also signals serious organisational intent and support for innovation.

Metrics also play an important role in the process of innovation, however, innovation takes time and she said expectations on quick returns on investment need to be managed.

“You cannot expect the people who are engaged in innovation to deliver short-term return on investment benefits,” said Nikolova.

“If you fail, you start again. If you succeed, then you put in more money. You don’t have to make big bets where you put a lot of money in at the start”

“You have to give them time – normally, three to five years at least for an innovation initiative before it starts delivering something back.

“In some cases, if it’s radical innovation, it might take much longer, so a long-term orientation with metrics and how to measure the success of innovation is absolutely critical.”

Executives and boards often look for short-term outcomes as a result of market pressure. However, Nikolova said, there is a way to communicate with the market to show clear conviction and commitment to innovation and to justify investments in innovation which will deliver long-term results.

“As long as you can demonstrate that you are obviously hitting some of your short-term targets, then you can communicate long-term goals as well,” she said.

The last driver of innovation is talent, and Nikolova said this is where HR leaders have a particularly important role to play.

“Think about talent as an ecosystem of different capabilities. It’s not just your internal talent; think about people who are external to the organisation but who can actually play a part in innovation,” she said.

Established partnerships between companies or a very important group of individuals who bring ideas into an organisation could be considered here, while crowdsourcing is also assisting organisations with the creation of more innovative ideas and solutions.

“However, with this approach comes risk and the potential loss of IP or loss of innovative ideas,” said Nikolova.

“When you manage these external relationships, there also has to be a very clear management or even contractual agreement on how you manage questions around IP so that you don’t lose it.

“To build a culture of innovation, you first have to build a culture of employee satisfaction and wellbeing, where people really feel that they’re nurtured”

“Nevertheless, if you’re just worried about losing IP and don’t engage with the outside world, you’re not going to be as successful, because innovation now is created as much internally as through open sources,” she said.

Nikolova explained that some companies have started developing a formalised external innovation strategy which sets out criteria characterising key partners that they’re willing to work with in order to minimise IP risk issues in the short-term.

Lastly, in relation to talent, recognition and reward are critical to the process of successful innovation as people need to be motivated accordingly.

“Quite often, this is not happening in organisations,” she said.

“People are ‘punished’ if the innovation initiative doesn’t go well, so they have to carry the responsibility for why there has been a failure, but they’re not properly rewarded and recognised if there is a big success.”

“If this is the case in your organisation, your people are not going to be open to innovation so it’s really important to think about building a culture of innovation in which there is no fear of failure.”

A company’s culture needs to genuinely support innovation, Nikolova added: “All of the above elements come together into building an open, supportive culture,” she said.

“People are not going to innovate if they feel insecure in their jobs or if they feel that they’re pressured all the time to meet short-term financial targets, with no support and no understanding of their needs,” she said.

“To build a culture of innovation, you first have to build a culture of employee satisfaction and wellbeing, where people really feel that they’re nurtured.

“HR leaders need to focus on helping to creating cultures and environments where people feel that they’re supported and that their specific needs are understood, and this will help them be more open towards being more innovative.”

For more information on the Oracle Design Thinking for HR initiative, contact nicole.carlaw@oracle.com.

The post What does it take to drive real innovation and intrapreneurship? appeared first on Inside HR.

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.

The post Why design thinking is now an essential capability for HR (and how to adopt it) appeared first on Inside HR.

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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Around 70 per cent of change management programmes fail, according to research by Deloitte, which found that the reasons for failure suggest a broad array of causes. Almost all research acknowledges employee acceptance of change as an accurate predictor of success. Put another way, employee buy-in goes a long way toward change acceptance and, ultimately, its success.

A March 2018 poll of Frontier Software webinar attendees found that around 50 per cent of respondents saw employee resistance as a barrier to change management success. Additionally, a lack of consensus and a lack of buy-in from management were offered as other reasons. Combined, this data supports the wider research and reinforces the importance of people in the change management equation.

Traditional methods of change management adopt a common-sense and logical approach to the process, which typically follows four stages.

Firstly, the reason for change is explained to those who will be impacted. Then, the management team must be seen to model the desired behaviours that will bring about the change. Thirdly, process and practices must be re-engineered to incorporate and reinforce the change. Finally, the staff affected by the change must be trained to develop the skills required to embed the change across the organisation. The entire process is supported by frequent communication sessions.

Design thinking: an entirely different view of the same process
Design thinking has been around in many guises for some time, but has quietly emerged as a discipline over the past decade. In its simplest form, design thinking is a mindset, the primary focus of which is to develop an understanding of the people for whom a solution is being designed. Design thinking is often referred to as “human-centric” because its focus is on the affected people; their feelings, knowledge, beliefs and attitudes.

“Failure to engage the affected parties at the very beginning of the process ensures resistance to change and the potential failure of the change programme itself”

This alone challenges the more analytical approach to change management that has traditionally applied. It is a process that is iterative in that it seeks to devise multiple solutions to a single problem. Testing and refining seeks to identify a single solution that satisfies all aspects of the human-centric mix. It has traditionally enjoyed great application in the design of actual, physical objects, so how can it be applied to change management?

Design thinking suggests that failure to engage the affected parties at the very beginning of the process ensures resistance to change and the potential failure of the change programme itself.

Design thinking recognises that people impacted by change have the best and most nuanced view, not only of the solution, but the actual problem itself. When design thinking is incorporated into a change management programme, practitioners are able to get a deep understanding of the problem from the perspective of all affected parties. Subsequently, the same people can devise a solution that satisfies the needs, feelings and attitudes of all, be they management who recognise there is a problem or the people who will ultimately action the solution itself.

Design thinking has many schools of thought and many process models. Below is a 5-step model devised by the Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University. The model they propose is as follows:

 1. Empathise: walk in their shoes
This step requires the change management leaders to put aside their own assumptions about the problem in order to deeply appreciate the experiences, knowledge and beliefs of those people impacted by the change. Immersion in the physical and process environments of these people helps all parties to fully understand the environment within which change is being designed. This process generates enormous amounts of information and should take some time.

2. Define: derive a consensus on what the problem really is
The information gathered during the first empathise stage is collated and analysed to produce a problem statement on which all must agree. The statement should be put in human-centric terms. To illustrate, rather than saying, “The call centre abandoned call rate is 45 per cent”, try “How can we restructure our processes to ensure greater call resolution and reduce abandoned calls”?

3. Ideate: go outside the box
This stage requires the team to generate solutions. There are many techniques available, including Brainstorming, mind-mapping, storyboarding or role-playing.

“Practitioners are able to get a deep understanding of the problem from the perspective of all affected parties”

4. Prototype: to start creating solutions
This stage is iterative. Solutions generated then need to be fleshed out. Depending on the problem, you could be detailing a process or building prototypes. The aim of the prototyping stage is to explore the options generated in the ideate stage as possible solutions to the defined problem.

5. Test: will it work?
This stage requires the end-users to test the prototypes developed. This step enables the end-user of the solution to test the new ideas in real-world scenarios to determine whether the problem is actually resolved by the devised solution. If not, more solutions may need to be generated.

It is important to note that the five stages are not always sequential. They do not have to follow any specific order and can often occur in parallel.

Starting with your people
Design thinking places the people element of change management at the very beginning of the process. The employees affected by the envisaged change are involved in defining both the problem and the solution. By doing so, one of the major contributors to project failure – resistance – is largely overcome as the change is both defined and resolved by the people it most directly impacts. Other steps employed in more traditional change management programmes could be applied after the design thinking process has concluded.

Business environments are undergoing rapid and continuous change. Survival requires review, adaptation, and a shake-up of existing processes and a greater engagement of the entire workforce. Senior managers can no longer afford to initiate and launch major initiatives only to see them fail. New frameworks and mindsets are needed that are less overtly analytical and that engage the human resources above all else.

Design thinking offers a solution and is rewarding early adopters with great successes, although reports are anecdotal in nature. Despite the lack of empirical evidence to support the success of the approach, more and more companies are adopting design thinking as a flexible, holistic approach that is delivering repeatable results with little resistance. Some have even been so bold as to suggest that design thinking will eventually supersede change management entirely.

For further information regarding change management processes, download the free e-book, Change Management – The only thing constant is change or visit Frontier Software at www.frontiersoftware.com. Image source: iStock

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A new Bersin by Deloitte report suggests that HR will face 10 major talent management challenges over the coming year – one of which will be to focus on improving the work experience for employees while driving productivity.

“HR leaders will have to work harder to understand what drives results,” said Josh Bersin, principal of Bersin by Deloitte .

“New digital technologies, increased transparency in employment brand and work practices, and the need to compete vigorously for talent are all disrupting the workplace.”

Bersin predicted that organisations will be challenged to design a more engaging and productive workplace if they want to attract and retain employees in the new always-on, hyper-connected world of work.

As such, he encouraged HR leaders to focus on bold, inventive HR strategies that can help drive bottom-line impact.

These strategies were outlined in a new Bersin by Deloitte report, which made a number of predictive trends for the coming calendar year:

1. Digital HR arrives, changing the way HR organisations design and deliver employee solutions. Instead of allowing digital processes such as online learning and communications to overwhelm employees, HR and learning and development organisations will focus on designing digital applications to improve the way employees are served and supported.

2. The stampede to replace dated HR systems will accelerate. As HR organisations strive to build true “systems of engagement” (versus systems of record), ease of use, integrated data and analytics will drive a massive transformational shift – away from traditional licensed HR software to a new breed of integrated HR and talent tools in the cloud.

3. New models of talent management breed a new generation of talent management systems. For example, the redesign of performance management to an often rating-less model is driving the need for talent management software built around feedback-centric systems.

Similarly, aging applicant tracking systems used in recruiting are being replaced by new integrated recruitment platforms that include smart sourcing, candidate relationship management, interview management, applicant tracking and smart analytics.

4. The rush to replace and re-engineer performance management will accelerate globally. Many organisations around the world are moving away from top-down annual performance processes.

Now is the time to test pilot more continuous, developmental and empowering performance management and feedback processes to get the details right and aligned with an organisation’s culture.

5. Engagement, retention, and culture will remain top priorities as new feedback tools come to market. As the competition for talent remains fierce, the topics of culture and engagement will remain high on the list of concerns. New tools, techniques and analytics methods to encourage and collect employee feedback and help leaders understand where culture and management should change.

6. Global leadership development, coupled with career and talent mobility, will take on a fresh new focus. Mentoring and coaching will grow rapidly. Bersin by Deloitte’s high-impact talent management research shows that coaching and mentoring are the most valuable talent practices to develop in an organisation.

These activities should be built into an organisation’s culture, rewarded and include the use of technology tools to bring in external coaches.

7. The revolution in corporate learning will continue as a new model evolves. The most effective learning involves education (formal training), experiences (developmental assignments and projects), environment (a culture and work environment that facilitates learning), and exposure (connections and relationships with great people).

Organisations that think about those four functions will likely be ahead of the curve in learning in 2016.

8. Diversity and inclusion will move beyond compliance and become a strategic part of business and talent management. Organisations that align diversity and inclusion practices to business objectives are more likely to perform well on financial outcomes.

Benchmarking existing diversity and inclusion programs against key areas including age, culture, gender, nationality, ethnicity/race, and mental and physical status are good steps to prepare with.

9. People analytics likely will evolve to become a mainstream program in the HR function. Using new data streams coming from mobile, engagement, and feedback applications and network analysis, organisations are building valuable databases about what people are doing, their history, experiences at work and career progress. Increasingly, this data likely will be used to identify specific solutions to business challenges and to drive business results.

10. The HR profession leaps forward as a new breed of HR leaders emerges. Companies are investing heavily in innovation and analytics, organisations are sharing creative solutions more openly and HR’s alignment with business is improving dramatically.

2016 should be a year of positive changes in multiple areas of HR and for a new breed of innovative and strategic HR and L&D leaders to come to the forefront.

Predictions for 2016: A Bold New World of Talent, Learning, Leadership and HR Technology Ahead. Image source: iStock

The post The top 10 talent management challenges for HR in 2016 appeared first on Inside HR.

“Every CEO knows what they need to do, and in order to understand how CEOs think, any head of HR has got to learn strategy,” said Martin.

“Unless you understand strategy you’re not going to be able to really help the CEO, and help support them and help them make things happen the way they want them to happen.”

Martin, a global expert in design thinking and institute director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, said that HR leaders need to get with the same program that the CEO runs to, in order to help produce the business results that the CEO is attempting to produce.

“There is some good news and bad news for HR”

“Often, HR runs contra to this and says, ‘no, you can’t do that, that’s against this or that’ or ‘that’s against our culture’.

“The CEO is dealing with activist investors, hedge funds – and head of their HR department, which really should be focused on improving the performance of the company and getting profitability up,” he said.

Talent: the lynchpin asset
Martin also said the HR function is experiencing some crisis, and predicted that it may eventually be rolled into another function – unless it steps up to the plate in more companies.

“I think there is some good news and bad news for HR,” he said.

“The good news is we’ve moved from an economy that for most of the 20th century, the key asset that you needed to bring to bear was a combination of capital and raw materials, such as mineral resources, ports or land.

“However, in the last quartile of the 20th century, that has changed and the biggest companies in the world are actually talent based now.

“If you literally said to Google, “here’s the deal, we either have to strip your bank account down to zero and burn down all your buildings, or take all your people to other companies”, they wouldn’t take five seconds to make that decision.

“The pressure really is on HR to understand talent as an asset and what they can do to make their company a talent magnet”

“They would say “that’s sad, but you’ll have to take our money and buildings, because we can just rebuild Google with our people” said Martin.

“But if you went to ExxonMobil and said “we’re going to either take away all of your oil and gas assets, reserves and money, or take all your people”, they might probably say “take our people to other companies, because we can’t replicate our assets”.

There are more companies like Google than ExxonMobil at the top of business now, according to Martin, who said this is because talent is now the “lynchpin asset”.

“The CFO was the right-hand man of the CEO for most of the 20th century, because capital and physical assets were absolutely the most important assets to the company,” he said.

“But now, talent is the most important lynchpin asset, and that’s good for HR because this is the domain of HR’s supposed expertise.

“So the pressure really is on HR to understand talent as an asset and what they can do to make their company a talent magnet, and all the strategy around talent as a resource.”

For the full interview with Martin and story on how HR can benefit from applying design thinking to their role in the future, see the next issue of Inside HR magazine. Image: supplied

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Internally, it runs an innovation council, and any employee is able to put forward any idea which is then reviewed by the council.

If it has merit, $10,000 of micro funding is provided to scope out and develop the idea, said Bashinsky, who adds that Deloitte also runs “innovation cafés” for select clients.

“We’ve made a lot of changes around our internal offerings, products and services, and we also pass that information on to clients,” he said.

Locally, Deloitte has experienced a number of successes with “design thinking” (a process of thinking similar to that employed by designers during the process of designing) and improved innovation, and other member firms of Deloitte globally are taking this up and slowly moving to that concept of design thinking, he added.

Another local innovation taken up internationally has been “growth staircases” (which articulate the key capabilities that each business cluster must develop, as well as setting out a sequence for broadening and deepening these capabilities).

“We’ve really shown how innovative and capable the Australian firm has been over the past five years, and our global colleagues have watched us with interest.

“About 10 years ago our revenue was close to $400 million, but now we’re sitting at about $1.12 billion – so you’ve got to be doing some things right to drive revenue – which is the outcome we’re seeking,” he said.

Innovation in HR has also been a focus for Bashinsky, who runs six innovation teams internally to build the capability of the HR team in order to work more closely with the business and deliver people strategies that will realise business goals and improve innovation.

“So one team might get involved in a business project group and help work on hard business issues, while another might focus on shaping the workforce of the future, where they get to research, recommend and implement national changes to our talent strategy,” he said.

Reinventing performance management
A recent Bersin by Deloitte research report found that many leading organisations are moving away from viewing performance management as a once-a-year event where employees are assessed and evaluated, to a series of ongoing activities that include goal setting and revising, managing and coaching, development planning, and rewarding and recognition.

The report found that continuous coaching is becoming increasingly important, as employees want to receive individual feedback and feel valued by their organisations for their unique contributions.

Deloitte is piloting a new approach across some of its business, which is based on a four-step process involving weekly or fortnightly 10- to 15-minute check-ins with immediate managers.

“The focus of these conversations is less about ‘here are your four KPIs and tell me what you’ve hit or missed’, and more about ‘how are you going, how can I help you, what are you struggling with and what do you need from me to improve?’. So it’s a very short, regular talent conversation,” said Bashinsky.

To support this, leaders also send out a short online employee pulse survey to their individual teams to assess the engagement levels of each team member anonymously.

Performance snapshots are also conducted quarterly via technology, and these assess how individuals are tracking on particular projects and against particular targets, and Deloitte also conducts a quarterly talent review which focuses on high potentials, women of future leaders in the firm.

“So what we’re trying to do is create more regular conversations and provide more regular feedback, and through this, determine how the employee is performing and they will also know how they are performing.

“We aggregate all this feedback so we can see whether someone is a high performer or someone who needs more coaching,” said Bashinsky.

“So we’re not using ratings, but the idea is to get away from ratings, distribution curves and batch data and instead provide real-time feedback to develop the 95 per cent of our people who are terrific, versus the 5 per cent who aren’t performing – which is the reverse of what most performance management systems and rating systems are geared to do.

“That’s a real cultural shift.”

For the full interview with Bashinsky and story on how Deloitte has tripled its revenues through a strong focus on leadership, people and performance, see the next issue of Inside HR. Image: Scott Ehler

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