When it comes to innovation, HR has the dubious distinction of being a great proponent and beneficiary of innovation but not capitalizing on it in practice. When it comes to technology, unless you are a strong business partner at the strategy meeting table, you’re going to find yourself defending every decision, investment and expense. Cost-benefit questions are the core of most discussions, because if you’re not a full business partner, it means you are a resource. And a resource has to give back more than is invested in it, sooner rather than later.
Being able to gather ideas on HR innovation and manage them in an efficient and thorough manner allows you to stay ahead of developments but also to present these ideas at your strategy meeting with the confidence that you know its value, cost and return on investment. By managing these resources, you transcend being a resource yourself. The biggest ways to change HR operations are:
- System Improvements: Improving and expanding existing systems, upscaling operations or streamlining processes that already exist within the company.
- Disruptive Improvements: Using new technologies that achieve the same, or better, results with less cost or time involved. Allows for future architectural improvements once existing technology has reached the end of its life cycle.
- HR Cycle Improvements: Rather than improving on what is already there, this means adding new features or potential to HR that were not there before; like check-in performance monitoring, AI-driven workforce analysis and potential/talent management of the last decades.
To do this, one potential method is the “incubator”. The key part of an incubator is that it’s a collaborative process, where HR is the mediator and driver, but not the only source of input of innovation in the HR scene. Rather, to gain potential insights, it’s important to fetch data and ideas from all layers of the company. Sometimes these will be in the form of complaints or gripes that people have, sometimes a question, where people wonder why something functions the way it does. Perhaps there exists an unanswered need within the company, such as information or clarity of process that hasn’t been achieved yet. And often people have ideas on how to put unrelated technologies, problems and processes together in ways you might not have considered by yourself.
I will create a separate post with a primer on how to set up and manage such an incubator, but for now let’s look at the underlying reasons for choosing this method of innovation.
1 – HR Automation will change the face of Human Resources
Technology and HR theory have always gone hand in hand. When people were still managed as “resources”, and HR got its name for the first time, this was mostly focused on streamlining the primary processes of recruitment, payment and dismissal. With theories on efficiency and people’s suitability to do certain tasks came the first focus on analysis and performance monitoring. Technology improvements and theories on communication further deepened the HR skill set, and added a greater need for knowing, implementing and monitoring various legal requirements and policies. Employee requirements have gained a much greater balance between skills and personality recently, but this also means that this puts further pressure on HR’s ability to analyze and decode those requirements.
With further HR Automation, many of the administrative tasks currently on HR’s desk may become commoditized, implying that this leaves an opening for HR to become much more focused. Already we see a split in the administrative and consultative sections of HR, and this trend is going to move further in the future.
HR Incubation as a source of innovation relies on technology to capture ideas and integrate opportunities throughout the company. The larger a company is, the more benefit technology can provide in unifying all these locations, business units and cultural differences. Cloud computing and AI have offered tremendous new options in gathering and translating data from all over the world, from different cultures, different timezones and different opinions on what a good, responsible business is. It can categorize, analyze and streamline how this data is presented, offering insights in ways that trigger new questions and ideas.
2 – Change comes from within, not without
A time-tested way of achieving innovation was by way of consultants. External agencies offered their insights, analyzed the data and gave updates on the latest trends and buzzwords concerning HR innovation. Sometimes these were valuable interactions, giving you new ways of dealing with issues you’d been struggling with, sometimes it was merely a collection of Sci-Fi stories and hopeful dreams of the future.
Consultants are here to stay, and I think consultants provide valuable services through their impartiality and expertise. Often they have a level of knowledge and experience that isn’t easily matched by people in your company, and hiring someone on like that on a permanent basis would be too costly, or even impossible. But they are also not of your company, they also lack that crucial knowledge of the company’s true workings and internal history. They work off models, interactions with people, and these can become very distorted if the reality doesn’t match what people say in interviews. When people speak with “outsiders” they are often conservative in their comments, and afraid they will burn themselves or their department by speaking truthfully on how their systems and processes really work.
Not so when an opportunity arises to improve matters within the company, with a team of colleagues. Provided the people involved have faith in HR’s ability to change things for the better, and that they feel heard and empowered, they will speak openly and reveal whatever is needed to improve the way in which their work is done. But this must come with a reward; their own work has to, in some way, become easier, quicker or more rewarding for them. Don’t make the mistake of improving processes only to add more responsibility and tasks to “fill up the gap”, because then these people will feel they have only burdened themselves and are unlikely to participate again.
When people are empowered, feel involved, and are rewarded for the work they put into the innovations they are asked to contribute to, change will be easier but also longer-lasting.
3 – Trends are great, foresight is better
Wayne Gretzky
A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.
Trends are a form of predictive analysis performed by taking data from the past and extrapolating what this will mean for the future. It follows a relatively linear line of thought, where there is a direct correlation between what is known and what will be. But there is a lot more going on in the world, and it often fails to take into account the exponential increases in areas related to HR and HR technology whose impact is hard to see if you’re not looking for it.
For example, in the history of HR there were big changes in processes when a new theory or model was introduced on how Human Resources should be organized, treat people or their contribution to the company. Partially this was connected to various social studies, such as Psychology and Communications. But if you ignore changes in Marketing, you might be blind-sided by how new theories on product branding made changes in employer branding. If you ignore changes in green technologies and electric cars, you may be running behind on the discussion of electric company cars. If you ignore changes in people’s social and political views, you may not understand that talent isn’t flocking to your big paycheck, but chooses the company offering parental leave, time for developing their skills and running charity projects.
With technology improving the required time invested to run the purely administrative section of HR, more time needs to be invested in knowing the changes in people’s lives and life cycle, politics and needs beyond strictly what attracts them to you as an employer. With economic insecurity and the gig economy putting dents in people’s confidence, it becomes more important than ever for HR, as representatives of the company, to look further ahead and provide support and shelter. That way, once history shows its upswing again (as it invariably does) you will have benefited from innovation, loyalty and foresight in braving the trends.
4 – No single person drives innovation
It can be tempted to rely only on one’s own steam to drive change and innovation. Often policies and technological improvements have been decided upon by a small number of people in a meeting room where they were completely divorced from the realities of the company. Thinking they knew all they needed, relying on scale models and a bird’s-eye-view, they made decisions that later turned out to return much less than planned, or even proved disastrous.
When change happens quickly, successive failed implementations can exacerbate this effect. People become disillusioned, feel like they are not listened to or are considered expendable. Grumbling about management’s competence and focus on short-term profit ensues. In a small company, the effects are quickly measurable and quick to correct again, but in very large companies there exists a bit of inertia, and sometimes the changes aren’t fully visible until years later, when successive changes in management may have erased most of the knowledge of the implemented change.
By using a diverse team of people to consider all angles of changes and innovations, you can prevent the two largest pitfalls of change, namely inaccurate knowledge of the as-is situation, and lack of support for the change from the people actually involved. Innovation can be very exciting, and more than just “a project that is an extra burden on our time” but it’s important to work together on defining the benefits of these changes. People who implement the change and see the benefits themselves (and to themselves) will not only keep the improvements alive, they will also keep the ideas and philosophies alive that made those changes a reality in the first place.
5 – The results may be unexpected…and powerful!
One of the great benefits of using various people, backgrounds and skill sets in incubating ideas for innovation is that it might bring in results which you weren’t planning for, but which give you a great boost regardless. Sometimes you don’t even achieve what you set out to do, but find something completely different instead!
This is one example in which you may have been intending to make an innovation in systems and processes, but instead found a way of adding new features or potential to HR that you didn’t consider before.
By asking the opinion of Sales people you may have found a whole new way of scanning companies on Linkedin to provide reference material for your role descriptions, or Marketing might introduce a completely new process for getting your company name known to candidates and getting them involved with the company so you can find new talent. Maybe you hear of “family days” where people bring people to the factory floor which provides a new avenue for onboarding new hires. Or an employee’s experience in online games provides a new vocabulary for you to use in your recruitment strategies.
Conclusion
What is important here is to be open to the possibilities and give each idea the thought and attention it deserves. It also illustrates the greatest traits that benefit HR in their leadership: curiosity and an open mind. By being open to new ideas and the opinions of others, and being able to combine those into new ways of looking at and working with the employee life cycle, you stand a good chance to stop running after trends, but having them follow in your footsteps instead.