The HR Change Toolkit

Your complete guide to making it happen

Lucy Adams

• Publisher: Practical Inspiration Publishing
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781788600439, 9781788602396
• eBook ISBN: 9781788600484
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

It's hard to make change happen in HR. If you're a HR manager with good ideas on making things work better that's frustrating enough, but for organisations that fail to respond to the way the world is changingthe results could be fatal.In this insightful, practical book the world's top HR disruptor - Lucy Adams - explains why HR needs to change its approach if it's to be successful in transforming its organisations. She also shares workable strategies for getting your own HR team ready, preparing the ground in your organisation, designing your change and implementing it effectively.It's up to you to lead the way - here's what you need to make it happen.

Section 1

EACH of Us Has a Role to Play

Imagine you’re in a boat in a storm. The wind is howling, the waves are crashing, and you’re not sure if you’re going to make it to shore. But help is at hand — along comes a lifeboat and the captain throws you a ring. The problem is, you need to dive into the water to reach it. You know you can’t stay where you are because that’s only going to end one way and that float is the key to your survival, but on the other hand it feels risky to jump in and at least give yourself a chance.

Many of the HR professionals I talk to say this is a bit how it feels to be working in HR right now. There’s unfamiliar technology to grapple with, evolving expectations at all levels to cater for, and the never-ending demands of CEOs and Finance Directors to live up to. It’s not that you don’t appreciate the need for change and may even feel excited about it, but it can feel overwhelming at times. You know it’s time to let go of traditional ways of working but moving to something different feels a bit like taking an unwelcome dip in the icy sea. Surely it’s better to sit tight and wait it out for now.

What could make this easier? For a start, it’s helpful to gain an overview of the transformations taking place in the world of work. The notion of organisational change is nothing new but if you’ll let me take you on a whistle-stop tour of what’s happening and why, you’ll see why HR needs to position itself as a leader in these uncharted waters. This section aims to set the scene so you can do just that.

The changes we face

Technological challenges

We can start with developments in technology, which are altering business more rapidly and profoundly than most of us can keep up with — and that goes for pretty much anyone, not just us in HR. Never more than now have organisations needed agile and innovative leaders to steer them through these unsettling changes. Unfortunately, if we were to ask ourselves if we’re helping them develop these capabilities, we’d have to draw the conclusion we could do better. Instead, we tend to be more concerned with driving down costs and maintaining the status quo than with encouraging our employees to make the most of what technology can offer.

Novel ways of serving customers

Familiar companies are increasingly not what they seem: supermarkets are turning into banks and online retailers into media companies, to mention just a couple of examples. Businesses are increasingly realising their goal is to serve their end customers in whatever way they want, which means that collaboration between organisations, and internally between departments, is becoming increasingly common. This is leading to some interesting conversations at boardroom and department manager level. Is your team helping your leaders to manage this shift? If you’re like the majority of HR Managers I speak with, I suspect not.

Evolving working practices

First came the influx of millennials, with different expectations of the world of work to their forebears. Next, the gig economy and the use of artificial intelligence burst onto the scene. All these trends are changing the nature of jobs. Without flexibility in working practices, we find it hard to satisfy the expectations of multi-generational teams, to say nothing of those working across varying time zones and cultures. People are also evolving their expectations of the length of time they want to work for, and how. Motivating and managing these fluidities involves treating employees less homogeneously than we’ve traditionally done, and more as individuals. Yet I don’t see this happening on a meaningful scale.

New-style leadership

And finally, what does leadership mean to us today? The transparency created by social media, coupled with the general lowering of automatic respect for those in authority, has led to an atmosphere of distrust towards those in charge. In many cases this is justified. The damaging of employment brands by unethical CEO and executive behaviour isn’t easy to recover from, and prospective employees are less and less likely to want to work for organisations that don’t behave according to their own values. Even when our leaders do behave ethically, we in HR need to recognise that employees trust people ‘like them’ rather than those who take a command-and-control approach.

I’m sure none of this is new to you, and it’s likely you’ll have a raft of your own more specific organisational challenges that you could tell me about. But what has your HR department done to adapt and — just as importantly — to anticipate them? I’m not referring to sticking-plaster remedies such as appointing a ‘Head of Transformation’ or re-jigging the gradings for your annual appraisal system. I’m talking about fundamentally rethinking how you’re equipping your organisation for the future.

It comes to this: we can’t keep saying the world of work has changed but keep doing (and thinking about) HR in the same old way. If we don’t move more quickly than other people in our organisations by jumping into those waves and grabbing the life-ring, we’ll be forever branded as the department that’s floundering and failing to catch up. It may feel overwhelming at first, but the rest of this book will give you the tools and techniques to help you challenge both your own assumptions and those of your company. Stick with me and put on your life jacket, because it’s going to be a fascinating adventure.

But first, you’ll need some principles to work with.

The EACH model

If you’ve read my previous book, HR Disrupted, the EACH model will be familiar to you. Feel free to skip the rest of this chapter if that’s you, although refreshing your memory is not a bad idea. If you’re not familiar with it please read on, as this model summarises my principles of what HR should be like if it’s to remain relevant and even become respected. I appreciate it may make you feel uncomfortable and you might think certain aspects of it have nothing to do with you. But I’m equally confident you’ll be nodding your head at various points, and if the odd rueful laugh escapes your lips while you’re doing so that’s great.

HR needs to undergo fundamental change if it’s to enable organisations to lead, manage, and train the people they need for the future, so let’s look at what that transformation could look like. There are three elements to this: we in HR must start treating our Employees as Adults, Consumers, and Human beings. This is a radical new way of seeing our role, and it applies not only to what we need to do to make change happen, but also how we do it. I’ll take each of the three elements of Adult, Consumer, and Human in turn.

Employees as Adults

When we think of the relationship HR has with the employees in our organisations, what’s the first word that springs to mind? Is it ‘trust’? Probably not. In fact, in most companies the default setting is more likely to be one of parent to child.

This takes two forms. The first is that of HR seeing staff as children who must be protected from themselves, such as when we manage every aspect of their careers or put up posters in the bathrooms saying ‘Now Wash Your Hands’. I dub this approach ‘Employer Mum’ (forgive the gender stereotyping) because she likes to take an overly protective role. The second is that of HR seeing all employees as potential troublemakers who could harm our organisations, such as when we write multi-page policy documents that nobody reads or bestow grades on people at their end-of-term school report (the annual appraisal). I call this approach ‘Employer Dad’ because he’s the critical parent.

What’s wrong with this? For a start, when we don’t have confidence in employees either being able to think for themselves or behaving well, we irritate and patronise the vast majority who are capable of both. It also has more serious consequences because a non-trusting environment makes it hard for people to take risks, challenge authority, and try something new; and that, as we’ve seen from the changes sweeping through our workplaces, is a killer for innovation, progress, and even survival.

We could start from a place of trust instead of control. When we do this we find our employees are more likely to behave in a responsible, productive, creative, and forward-thinking way. We could even encourage them to take increasing accountability for progressing their careers, thereby fostering their enthusiasm for improving their performances. And if we were to wrap this up in communications which treat them as intelligent adults, we’d likely be surprised by the resourcefulness and wisdom they show in return.

Employees as Consumers

When creating a strategy, successful consumer companies always start with their market and then work backwards. We never hear their Marketing Directors express the wish that their customers would behave differently; instead, they find out what those customers want and make sure they provide it. If we were to apply a similarly consumer-based thinking to the way we see our employees, we’d experience a radical shift in our assumptions. For a start, we’d realise we need to understand more about them as individuals, rather than seeing them as a homogeneous group. This would lead to us moving away from one-size-fits-all processes designed to suit HR, and towards flexible systems that treat them as clusters of people with differing wants and needs.

The problem is, most organisations don’t know much about the people who are supposedly their most important assets: their employees. This is because we in HR don’t use the right tools and techniques to find out. Instead of the pointless annual engagement survey (when did that ever produce anything useful?) we could encourage managers to check in with their staff more frequently or carry out some qualitative research across the business.

Segmenting our employee base is critical to developing services that meet everyone’s needs. If we don’t do this, people will feel disengaged from our processes and act grudgingly instead of with full commitment. Nowhere is this more evident than in the annual appraisal process, a classic uniform procedure. Research shows 92 percent of companies do them, but that only 8 percent believe they’re worth the time and effort — that’s a huge waste of time and resources. Once we know more about our employee segments we can design processes around our users, instead of around our own convenience and desire to control.

Employees as Human beings

My encouragement to treat employees as adults and consumers could be directed as much at the leaders around our organisations as it could at ourselves. But not treating employees as human beings is an area in which HR really has made a rod for its own back. As a profession we need to put the human back into human resources, by developing a deeper understanding of how employees think and feel, and also by considering how we can create more human leaders at the same time.

If you want to understand more about the human brain and how it works, there’s a wealth of resources available. David Rock’s SCARF model,³ for instance, shows how people respond negatively to threats to their status, sense of certainty, autonomy, ability to relate to others, and perceptions of fairness. When these elements are rewarded instead of threatened, people are freed up to work more effectively. Take a moment to consider whether the majority of our HR activities are designed to create either threats or rewards. Do they centre on generating policies and procedures which reduce autonomy? Do they create a parent-child dynamic which reduces a sense of status? And do they impose structural changes, which upset people’s feelings of certainty and fairness? My guess is that threats, rather than rewards, are the rule.

So what does motivate people? Dan Pink’s research-based book Drive⁴ explains how we’re all intrinsically motivated, and questions whether extrinsic rewards, such as money, are as worthwhile as we assume. He says there are three internal drivers which make us want to work productively: autonomy (the ability to control our lives and work), mastery (the chance to become better at what we’re good at), and meaning (having a sense of higher purpose about what we do). How much time do we spend developing our employees’ sense of autonomy, mastery, and meaning? In my experience as an HR Director, I’d say it’s not a lot.

How does HR measure up?

You may be feeling a level of resistance to these arguments, and I get that, because it’s only after a few years of developing this thinking that I’ve been able to embrace its relevance. The EACH model is designed to help companies survive in a disrupted world, so it’s inevitable some of it will feel uncomfortable. A good place to start is to evaluate how it relates to your organisation, by taking my 10-minute diagnostic test at https://disruptivehr.com/each-hr-diagnostic. Over the past two years almost 1,000 HR professionals from a wide variety of countries and sectors have completed it. The results show two thirds of respondents have a predominantly parental approach to their employees, and the area in which they’re least effective is in treating their staff as consumers (72 percent use one-size-fits-all processes without any kind of meaningful customisation). So you’re not alone in struggling with these issues, and it will be interesting to see how you compare.

Here’s the link to the diagnostic again: https://disruptivehr.com/each-hr-diagnostic.

It’s not just what we do, it’s the way that we do it

There’s good news ahead: we can now move onto what you can do about this situation, and I promise you it’s plenty. But first, let me make one important point: I’m sure there’s much you want to change in your organisation, but it’s how you go about doing it that’s just as important. This means you need to take off your HR hat for a while and don one from marketing or product development instead. So abandon the idea of rolling out a top-down change programme, for instance, which would be the old-style, parental way of implementing transformation. Instead, open yourself up to finding new ways of achieving what you want by customising your actions to different audiences, and by factoring in how humans think, feel, and behave. These alternative methods are actually a lot more fun and exciting to implement than the old ones, and — crucially — they work.

Action points

• Take the diagnostic test for your own organisation at https://disruptivehr.com/each-hr-diagnostic and discover your own company’s EACH profile.

• Record this in your workbook, which you can download at https://disruptivehr.com/thehrchangetoolkitworkbook.

• Consider visiting our blog, which contains lots of implementation tips for the EACH model in all areas of HR: https://disruptivehr.com/blogs-podcasts-webinars.

Quick recap

• Workplaces are changing at a fundamental level and have been for some time, but we in HR aren’t equipping leaders and managers to thrive in this new world.

• When we treat employees as children we reduce their willingness to take risks and innovate; treating them as adults gives them the confidence to cope with change more easily.

• When we treat employees as recipients of one-size-fits-all processes and procedures we stifle their ability to work effectively; providing them with products and services designed around their particular needs frees them from pointless and harmful restrictions.

• When we treat employees as assets or machines we demotivate them and make it hard for them to do their best work; treating them as human beings encourages their innate ability to adapt to change in a positive way.

• As you think about what you’re going to change, consider first how you’re going to do it and with what mindset. Your thinking must alter before your behaviour can.

Section 2

Why HR Finds Change Hard

If you’ve ever tried to get one person to change the way they do something, you know how difficult it can be. I must have asked my husband not to leave his stuff on the stairs a hundred times, but still he does it. Likewise, no matter how often my PA has suggested I give her more than a week’s notice for planning my business trips, I can never seem to factor this into my thinking. If it’s this tricky when you want to affect one person, how much m...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• The Frustration of Change
• Section 1: EACH of Us Has a Role to Play
• Section 2: Why HR Finds Change Hard
• Section 3: Prepare Your HR Team
• Section 4: Prepare the Ground in Your Organisation
• Section 5: Design Your Change
• Section 6: Help Your Change to Happen
• Section 7: A Test Case: Changing Performance Management
• Section 8: 20 Changes You Can Make Right Now
• Section 9: Essential Reading
• About the Author