The Future of Human Resources

Unlocking Human Potential

Tim Baker

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781637422298
• eBook ISBN: 9781637422281
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

This book is a comprehensive blueprint for HR professionals to make the necessary changes to accommodate a new mentality.

Warp speed change is now a constant.

What do organizations need to do to maximize the potential of their employees in the new reality?

The tired cliché that employees are our greatest asset is false. It's unlocking the potential of employees that's the greatest asset.

THE FUTURE OF HUMAN RESOURCES confronts the conventional employment practices of selecting, inducting, developing, rewarding, and exiting employees. This book is a comprehensive blueprint for HR professionals to make the necessary changes to accommodate a new mentality.

Thirteen traditional practices are challenged, and fresh, practical pathways offered. Dr. Tim Baker, according to leadership guru, Marshall Goldsmith, is "one of today's most influential HR experts." He offers new insights about what's still considered conventional wisdom, such as employee induction, the job description, and succession planning.

THE FUTURE OF HUMAN RESOURCES provides you with a roadmap to navigate the post-Covid world of work.

PART 1

Employee-Centered Approach

CHAPTER 1

The Changing World of Work

As a survival mechanism, employees exercised agility during 2020. The challenge is to maintain this agility while the business recovers to full profitability.

AstraZeneca is an organization that capitalized on employee potential. It was quick to mobilize resources to meet the pressing need to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. Tonya Villafana, AstraZeneca’s vice president and global franchise head of infection, credits the company’s accelerated response to its ability to tap into a varied pool of experts, both across the company and through its collaboration with the University of Oxford. What’s more, AstraZeneca not only involved top experts, but also added high performers who were really passionate and wanted to get involved with the vaccine development team.

“They were the right people at the right time to put into that role. Not everyone has to be an infectious disease expert. It was more about having that kind of passion to deliver and the energy to want to do it.”

AstraZeneca also tapped into the potential of its ecosystem. United by a common purpose, the company collaborated with academia and regulatory agencies and applied new ways of working that allowed them to begin vaccine trials in record time, doing in weeks and months what might have taken months four years in the past. The success of those collaborations leads to meaningful change moving forward.¹

In the past decade, the world has experienced dramatic political, social, technological, scientific, and economic disruption, capped off by the pandemic in 2020. In the early part of 2010–2020, we were recovering from the global fiscal crisis of 2007–2008.

Let me remind you of some of the events in the past decade. From royal weddings to missing planes, there were a plethora of history-defining moments in the second decade of the 21st century. Prince William and Prince Harry’s royal weddings, al-Qaeda and Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) terror leaders killed, missing Malaysian planes, legalization of same-sex marriage, reality star Donald Trump becoming president, and tech diversity, are just some of the momentous happenings we experienced since 2010.

More specifically, Apple released the world’s first iPad, the gamechanging piece of technology on April 3, 2010. The South Korean pop superstar Psy created Gangnam Style, which became the first video in YouTube’s history to reach one billion views in 2012. The world said goodbye on December 05, 2013 to Nelson Mandela, the former president of South Africa and the country’s first black head of state. Described as being one of the biggest aviation mysteries in history, MH370, the Malaysian Airlines plane with 239 passengers and crew on board completely vanished on March 08, 2014. The year 2014 was a disastrous one for Malaysian Airlines. Just four months after MH370 went missing, MH17 was shot down while flying over eastern Ukraine, killing all 283 passengers and 15 crew. There was the rise and fall of ISIS. Brutally graphic beheadings, horrific attacks, and suicide bombings from the ISIS hit the western world during its peak in 2015. While the jihadi group-who controlled a population of 8 million at its height-may have been the most powerful and wealthiest force. The ISIS caliphate dream collapsed mid-2017.

The world struck a deal on climate change, dubbed the Paris Agreement, in 2016, dealing with greenhouse gas emissions mitigation, adaptation, and finance. In a history-defining moment on June 26, 2015, the United States legalized same-sex marriage across all 50 states. Ireland, Finland, Greenland, Colombia, Malta, Australia, Germany, Austria, Taiwan, and Ecuador all followed. Greece became the first developed country to default the International Monetary Fund in 2015, which alongside the European Union, provided the nation with €110 billion in loans over three years.

The Brexit Referendum took place. As 52 percent of Britain voted to leave the European Union in 2016, the political debate is still rife. Donald Trump became U.S. president. The television personality, real estate developer, writer, entrepreneur, and investor added another profession to his name in 2016—the 45th President of the United States. There was the largest women’s march in history. After just one day of Donald Trump’s presidency, more than 5 million people marched globally protesting for women’s rights in January 2017. The #MeToo movement started. It became viral on social media following public sexual abuse allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein in October 2017. The inspiring campaign led to global awareness, going down as an iconic feminist movement.

The rise of the share economy began. While companies such as Uber and Airbnb were technically founded in 2009 and 2008 respectively, the past 10 years saw the boom in the share economy’s popularity. The tech giant, Apple, became the first public company to be worth US$1 trillion in 2018. The first photo of a black hole was taken. Astronomers captured the awe-inspiring sight on April 10, 2019, making it one of the biggest space moments in recent history. These are just a few of the events in the past 10 years.²

The world of work has been in a constant state of upheaval too, like most aspects of life. After the 2020 pandemic we all yearn for a period of stability. But we need to accept that disruption and dislocation is now part of “normal” life. This is the new reality.

Is HR Ready?

Surveys show that HR enhanced its reputation in the way it dealt with the COVID crisis.³ HR is in a great position to capitalize on its new status. But if we dig a little deeper, it’s the traditional domains of HR that get high marks. Executives praise HR for its handling of health and safety matters, its workforce communication strategies, and promoting the well-being of employees. HR now needs to expand its influence in other areas.

If we assume that disruption is now the constant (and this is a fair assumption), HR must adjust. While keeping its good reputation in customary areas, tackling some of the other issues affecting employee performance is the next frontier. I will discuss these in the following chapter.

Before we consider these HR issues, let’s consider some of the broad strategic issues for business.

The first obvious adjustment is that conventional strategic planning isn’t viable anymore. As a replacement, companies need to focus finding a value-based purpose in a turbulent and unpredictable marketplace. Values are enduring. Strategic plans are not. Values offer a foundation to build upon. But a strategic plan can be obsolete by the time the ink has dried. A values-based purpose gives the business scope to pivot in unforeseen circumstances. Values supply guiding principles for clarity of direction. For instance, being flexible and innovative, suggests that the business should change when the opportunity arises. Being customer-focused remind the business of its #1 priority, regardless of fluctuations in the marketplace. Short-term goals can be shaped around values.

There are two types of values. A value can be terminal or instrumental. In his book, The Nature of Human Values,⁴ social psychologist Milton Rokeach defines the difference between terminal and instrumental values. Rokeach defines values as, “enduring beliefs that a specific mode of conduct or end-state of existence is personally or socially preferable to an opposite or converse mode of conduct or end-state of existence.” Terminal values signify a destination or outcome. Instrumental values signify a behavior.

Let’s look at some illustrations of terminal and instrumental values in a business context. Terminal values provide a direction for the future. For example, terminal values include:

• Profitability

• Quality

• Excellence

On the other hand, instrumental values might include:

• Taking responsible risks

• Innovating

• Continuous improvement

• Being a “team player”

Instrumental values are generally a guide to acceptable behavior that is observable.

In a climate of accelerated change and uncertainty, specific goals can become obsolete quickly in changing circumstances that can’t be predicted. Values are enduring and more reliable indications in the face of ambiguity.

For HR, setting a clear set of values that are both terminal and instrumental would be a good place to start. I’m hoping that the 13 mindset shifts I introduce in Chapter 5 will give you a basis for formulating a new set of values consistent with these transformations.

Ken Sneader and Bob Sternfels of McKinsey in their article, From Surviving to Thriving: Reimagining the Post-COVID-19 Return,⁵ suggest that to come back stronger, companies should reimagine their business model as they return to full speed. They identify four areas to focus on: recovering revenue, rebuilding operations, rethinking the organization, and accelerating the adoption of digital solutions. For businesses to rethink their operating model, HR must adapt too.

As a survival mechanism, employees exercised agility during 2020. The challenge is to maintain this agility while the business recovers to full profitability. Undoubtedly, there are lessons to be learned from the pandemic. What were the success factors that facilitated this agility?

Where the Rubber Meets the Road

A Lesson in Agility and Responsiveness

Consider a Chinese car-rental company whose revenues fell 95 percent in February 2020. With the roads empty, company leaders didn’t just stew. Instead, they reacted like a start-up. They invested in micro-customer segmentation and social listening to guide personalization. This led them to develop new use cases. They discovered, for example, that many tech firms were telling employees not to use public transportation. The car-rental company used this insight to experiment with and refine targeted campaigns. They also called first-time customers who had canceled orders to reassure them of the various safety steps the company had taken, such as “no touch” car pickup. To manage the program, they pulled together three agile teams with cross-functional skills and designed a recovery dashboard to track progress. Before the crisis, the company took up to three weeks to launch a campaign; that is now down to two to three days. Within seven weeks, the company had recovered 90 percent of its business, year on year—almost twice the rate of its chief competitor (Sneader and Sternfels 2020).⁶

Agility

Agility can mean many things. It’s a word we tossed around before the pandemic. In the context of speed in a crisis, it means putting into place new operating models that focus on the end-user, the customer, supported by rigorous processes. Being able to be responsive and pivot quickly is critical to success in a post-COVID marketplace, as it was during the peak of the pandemic. Operationally, it means accelerating end-to-end value chain digitalization. Digitalization tools are available, and they can significantly reduce the cost of flexibility. Low-cost and flexible operating systems are not only now possible, but they are also available. The challenge for HR is how they can synchronize people with...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Description
• Contents
• Testimonials
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1 Employee-Centered Approach
• Part 2 Starting Phase of Employment
• Part 3 Developing Phase of Employment
• Part 4 Rewarding Phase of Employment
• Part 5 Parting Phase of Employment
• Action Plan
• Notes
• References
• About the Author
• Index
• Backcover