Lean Human Resources

Redesigning HR Processes for a Culture of Continuous Improvement, Second Edition

Cheryl M. Jekiel

• Publisher: Productivity Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000034219
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Lean Human Resources addresses a critical issue facing organisations undertaking lean transformation or attempting to create a lean culture of continuous improvement. People are the single biggest factor necessary to ensure success, but it is common for the role of the HR department to be overlooked.

Cheryl M. Jekiel, who has been implementing Lean initiatives out of HR offices for more than 20 years, defines the people-related approaches and practices required for success. She explains how the HR function must work hand-in-hand with senior leaders to alter the cultural dynamic that keeps employees from leveraging their peak abilities, analysing why so many companies allow this sort of waste to exist and how traditional HR departments have not been especially effective in combating waste.

The book provides continuous improvement professionals, executives and business owners with the means to maximize employee potential by showing them how to increase the improvement power of their HR departments. It also helps them understand what lean transformations can achieve with the correct investment of time, funds, resources and leadership approach. It is also the perfect introduction to lean for those working in HR, explaining the role they should take to support lean implementation and help their colleagues achieve their full potential.

Much has been learned since the first edition published five years ago based on the hundreds of conversations the author has had about Lean HR with people from all over the world. This new edition brings Lean Human Resources right up-to-date.

III

Implementing a Lean Talent Management System

One half of knowing what you want is knowing what you must give up before you get it.

– Sidney Howard

In considering the importance of the need to apply continuous improvement practices on a daily basis, Section III covers the redesign of all talent management systems to best support this type of workplace.

Chapter 7 opens with defining a lean talent management system and then provides a specific LASER approach to redesigning these systems. Chapter 8 reviews the development of lean leaders as the initial thrust to creating new workplace practices. Once lean leadership begins to develop, it is time to consider the changes that are needed to create a fully engaged workforce, as outlined in Chapter 9. Lean HR promotes the complete redesign of all talent management systems as a way to fully integrate improvements into how work is defined. As such, this chapter provides the details and methods for this considerable undertaking.

By the conclusion of this section, there is a definite process for creating a lean talent management system that can be used to develop lean leaders, which culminates in an engaged workforce.

Chapter 7

Lean Talent Management Optimizes Success

A few years back, I met a major manufacturer’s HR team during the second year of their lean transformation. Janet, the head of the HR team, proudly announced that they had developed their strategy for the year by interviewing the operations team. Her group had been surprised to learn that the priorities of the business had changed recently. What’s more, the operations team noted several critical initiatives would benefit from significant HR involvement.

Janet and her colleagues realized that if the HR team hadn’t been customer-focused, they would have likely missed these important cues and set annual goals that represented an internal assessment of what HR needed to accomplish. In their opinion, they were just beginners at learning lean, but I could see they had already grown by leaps and bounds. As this story shows, Lean HR is dedicated first and foremost to meeting the needs of all internal customers and, in doing so, eventually impacting external customers.

In this chapter, I begin by defining what makes up a talent management system and how those components are different in a lean enterprise. Next, I’ll present some challenges organizations face with managing talent management systems in general, and especially with those that effectively propel continuous improvement initiatives. As you’ll see, redesigning talent management programs to work well for a lean enterprise means much more than just changing the HR infrastructure.

In actuality, a lean talent management strategy signals a very different approach to how HR functions.

This chapter will provide a five-phase method for altering your entire approach to talent management. Summarized here is a framework for the varying aspects of developing a lean talent management system.

Defining a Talent Management System

What is a talent management system? Anything having to do with attracting, developing, and retaining the people needed for an organization falls under the umbrella of talent management. Many, if not most, organizations require effective talent management to achieve their goals. This critical set of processes ensures having the right people in place to do the right work at the right time.

A talent management system (or program) includes a range of components designed to meet the people-related needs of a business. The most common of those are:

• Recruiting, including selecting the right people and onboarding them effectively;
• Training and development, including career pathing and succession planning as core processes for managing talent;
• Accountability systems or processes (often referred to as performance management);
• Compensation structures for all forms of rewards (e.g., merit increases, pay ranges, bonus criteria, aspects of benefits programs, and other forms of recognition).

Lean Talent Management Systems

The difference with lean talent management is that it offers the opportunity to fully integrate lean into the way work is defined. Unless continuous improvement gets built into every aspect of talent management, organizations will regard it as optional. In addition, to the degree that talent management remains unchanged, conflicting messages that damage or detract from efforts to drive lean transformations will disseminate throughout the culture. Later in this chapter, I’ll examine what constitutes a Lean Talent Management System.

An organization I became acquainted with had some of the highest levels of engagement I ever encountered in my career. For the most part, team members worked independently of leadership and achieved better results than other facilities in the same industry. However, superior results can be vulnerable to changes in leadership or organizational focus. In other words, it’s worth asking, “How easily can lean be stopped once it has started?” The goal is to make it difficult, if not impossible, to remove the new practices and mindsets. The importance of a l ean talent management system is that it embeds the competencies and capabilities into daily work in a manner that’s irreversible.

Once lean practices, behaviors, skill sets, and work requirements are built into every aspect of how employees do the work, they simply can’t be removed.

In essence, by assimilating lean into the talent management system, it becomes permanent. Once people see their job descriptions as including problem-solving, teamwork, standardized work, etc., it becomes virtually impossible to go back to the status quo that existed before those skills became a daily practice. Even changes in leadership or ownership that create massive organizational changes are unlikely to stop individuals from solving problems, working well in teams, etc. Once in place, these skills have such intrinsic value it wouldn’t make sense to remove them.

Obstacles to Lean Talent Management Systems

Before jumping into how to implement Lean Talent Management Systems, I’ll discuss the challenges in doing so. I’ve found remarkably similar challenges among organizations embarking on a Lean HR journey. Most groups first discover that they need to become significantly more adept at partnering with other internal groups and contributing to the business. They also have difficulty understanding lean at a level that allows them to make strategic recommendations. Even when HR is clear on the strategies, organizations often classify HR as a support only function and don’t ask for anything more. Lastly, the HR team needs to consider the various components of the talent management system as a unit (which for most is a new situation). Analyzing all the talent management components at the same time allows HR to compare competencies and behaviors within each of them to ensure alignment between them.

HR Focus Is Internal Rather Than External

Lean transformations often lead HR teams to ask themselves, “What’s most important to our internal customers and how do we relate to that need?” However, before integration, many HR departments are ill-equipped to answer because they haven’t yet created steps to investigate how they might add more value. As they seek this information, HR teams realize they have an insufficient understanding of the business priorities and concepts to understand their optimal role.

For example, I met an HR team that always set their priorities eit...