The pace of change in HR is taking its toll in a world of ever-growing complexity
Human resources is at the centre of a storm—a significant one. As organisations seek to exploit every aspect of their operations to drive competitive advantage, they are finally recognising that the biggest lever for growth—their people—is not only the one they need to focus the most on, but also the hardest to grasp. After all, people are inherently complex and outcomes of changing the way we work with our people are never certain. Add to that a time of unprecedented economic volatility and a pace of change in technology that we have never seen before and it requires HR to develop a clarity of purpose and strength of will that has often been absent.
Transforming HR from a purely administrative function to one that actively drives business results is a process that has already started, but given the fast-paced change of this evolution, most organisations do not have the time required to unleash the full potential of its talent. Today the focus of HR needs to be in creating conditions in which talent succeeds and a service provider to help line management to achieve objectives through ingenious strategies to hire, onboard and retain top talent.
There is, however, a problem HR does not feel well-equipped for this new world, and in particular the average HR professional feels particularly ill-equipped to deal with the growing complexity that requires them to embrace and deal with constant change. A recent survey commissioned by Lumesse found that 61% of HR leaders reported feeling overwhelmed by complexity and 52% claimed that they did not have the ability to fully cope with it—these factors included changes in regulation and compliance and the emergence of new technologies that make it more difficult to gather important data.
The results of this global survey were particularly gloomy in the APAC region, with 17% of HR leaders and executives in Hong Kong having little confidence in their leaders to handle accelerating complexity. In Singapore, 33% of respondents feel ‘overwhelmed’ by complexity in their roles. These results are concerning as with fear and uncertainty comes paralysis—at the very time that HR needs to be actively responding to the challenge. HR professionals, therefore, must learn to deal with complexity in order to thrive and avoid the risk of slowly fading away.
Hints and tips for ‘embracing’ complexity
1. Do not see complexity as a problem to be solved. Understanding that it is the complexity of your workforce that creates its power is the start of this important journey. If that means different hiring processes between countries or functions, more than one performance management process or using mobile to attract the best—then so be it.
2. See your role as creating the conditions for talent to succeed. The biggest value you can sometimes make in helping to embrace complexity is to ruthlessly eliminate bad complexity—pointless bureaucracy, poor management and unclear and unaligned goals. Help clear the path for people success.Embrace technology. If you are in HR today then you are a technologist. Your ability to understand technology and make it work for you, not the other way around, will be a huge factor in your success. If your candidates are on Facebook or Twitter, then go there too. If you're not sure what Cloud computing is, or SaaS, then get clear—quickly.
3. Measure what matters—if your business cares about cost per hire, measure it, if they care more about quality of hire then measure that. It’ll be more difficult but much more valuable. The two key requirements in HR metrics are alignment with the business and simplicity.
4. Embrace failure and take risks. Accelerated evolution requires trial and error, and with error comes failure. Achieving competitive advantage in hiring and developing talent usually means doing things that your competitors are not, and so learning to live on the edge and getting it wrong as often as you get it right is part of the fun of embracing complexity.
By taking an accelerated-evolution approach to HR transformation and learning to embrace the complexity that we are surrounded by we can start the journey to ensuring HR delivers on its potential by helping our talent deliver on theirs. These are exhilarating times but if we embrace them we stand a chance of making the difference between success and failure.
Paul Arkwright
Publisher
