Look Outside…for the future shape of a HR Organization.
HR organizations of today are relics of a different age.
HR organizations of today are relics of a different age.
HR organisations of today are products of an age that was created by the industrial revolution and developed by the invention of the large corporation.The large corporation, with ownership of an elaborate value chain, was designed to create value within the corporation. To do so, it employed large volumes of people to work on different parts of the value chain.
The role of the HR function was to engage these employees and make them productive for long periods of time as these value chains, once created, delivered value for decades.
You should, therefore, not be shocked to still encounter notions of employee ‘life cycles’ that map out the ‘employee experience journey’ from ‘hire to retire.’
HR organizations of today are all designed to service this employee life cycle.
Three factors are driving the end of such an HR organization.
Technology is killing traditional value chains.
2. Employee life cycles will outlast company life cycles.
During the course of the working life of an employee, a company will transform beyond recognition a few times over, or will cease to exist.
3. Traditional structures are becoming barriers to value creation.
Internal focus is the core dynamic of traditional structures. The motivation to succeed in the internal hierarchy and win recognition in the internal social system far outweighs the motivation to succeed in the market.
These structures are designed to preserve what is created rather than create something new or to destroy the old.
As companies start creating value ‘outside’ of the internal structure through a network of agile and flexible partnerships, HR organizations will have to be re-designed. The goal of the HR Organization will now be to enable the creation of a value-creating ecosystem — a major change from ‘servicing’ the employee life cycle.
The Future of Organization in three minutes.
Three forces are making your current organization structure unfit for the future. And, what you can do about it.medium.com
Consider these four actions for a new shape of the HR organization:
Create a Platforms and Partnerships function.
What is at the core of creating value in your company? Are you a company that creates technology or one that applies technology? Where are the pools of talent that your company needs to access? Are these pools available in start-ups, universities, other companies or as individuals who do not want to be employees?
How do you create partnerships that enable your company to access talent and create a competitive advantage?
Are you aware of platforms that are designed to identify and manage talent? Are you aware of platforms that link you to start-ups, universities and other potential partners?
To answer such questions, the new HR organization needs a function it has never had before: A Platform and Partnerships Function.
2. Create a Research and Development function.
While the platforms and partnerships function is engaged with the development of a value-creating eco-system, we know that tomorrow will be different from today. Technologies such as machine learning, voice recognition, image analytics and of course artificial intelligence are all in the at the cusp of explosive development.
The focus of the HR R&D function is on tomorrow. It does so, partly with an intent to support the partnerships function, but, mainly, to develop current leaders of the company. It alerts leadership to forces of change and ensures that it is well prepared, both offensively and defensively. This is the re-incarnation of the capability development function.
We are already finding that traditional institutions of development and even top tier consultancies are not fast enough in identifying what is relevant and how to prepare for it.
HR functions need to create top class R&D functions.
3. Initiate Employee Segmentation.
In the construct of a value creating eco-system, it will not be possible to stack employees of the core company in a neat pyramid built on the assumption of a linear differentiation of capabilities and rewards.
Some employees will create value that will equal to profit per person of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Others will deliver value of few thousand dollars per person. The demand and reward environments for both these segments of employees will have to be vastly different.
HR organization design will have to cater to such an employee segmentation. In addition, some temporary internal networks, project teams or virtual organizations may create much more value than the rest of the organization. Such teams will need high quality HR input and strategy.
4. Establish an HR Operations hub.
HR organizations have been developing the shared services model for some time now. It is time to ramp the concept up to its highest potential. All aspects of the traditional HR organization will eventually fold up in an HR Operations function that will be to the rest of HR what a Sales function is to a Marketing function. HR Operations will be a strong value-delivery organization that is technology enabled and relentlessly focused on high quality employee service.
It is possible to create a strong HR Operations function with the explosion in HR Tech. Dis-intermediation of recruitment processes, digital employee communication, real time engagement and sentiment analysis, chat based query management, expert employee relations and more can add up to an HR Operations hub that does what entire HR functions used to before: Manage the employee life cycle — however short or long it is.
Presentation on The Re-imagined Organisation:
Continue reading →https://medium.com/future-of-hr/whose-business-is-it-to-create-jobs-7de549314022