From Inhuman to Human Resources – Part II

(12:13) The Great Reshuffle shows that organisations need to up the game and change to stop the vicious spiral of attrition. Those who hesitate will end as the dinosaurs.

The starting point is clear-cut: Inhuman resources must humanise to transform into human resources.

Reinventing, transforming, and revitalising human resources is ongoing, data-driven differentiation with titanic performance potential.

It is about evolving to deliver value instead of activities, operating more efficiently and effectively, ultimately becoming the exemplary work environment which marketed identities project.

When work environments are inspiring and healthy, talent attraction and retention is a self-sustaining cycle.

This second part of the article articulates additional five executive reflection points to inspire human resources to transition into an adaptable, agile, employee-centric, performance-stimulating engine.  

What if Human Resources:

7. Cultivates organisation-wide psychological safety.

Psychological safety describes a work environment in which employees are comfortable being and expressing themselves. When employees can speak up without being humiliated, ignored, or blamed, and can ask questions, share concerns and mistakes without embarrassment and retribution, innovation and performance arise with cast-iron certainty (Edmondson). 

It is not enough to hire smart, motivated employees, if they cannot contribute what they know because of interpersonal fear. When employees are free to bring their brains to work and collaborate with others to solve problems, putting their talents and passions to best use, they create value and thrive.

It is about unleashing individual and collective talent, and fostering prime conditions for learning, innovation, and growth.

In a psychologically safe environment, human resources actively facilitates collaboration, propagates leader behaviours, and sets role-modelling standards to unleash talent. 

In a ‘new normal’ when fear has been driven out, employees feel that their candour and opinions count. When we trust and respect our colleagues, mistakes are addressed, corrective actions happen fast, coordination is seamless, collaboration blooms and innovative ideas flourish. 

8. Practices Management by Walking Around and become Employee Experience Partners.

Great leaders are in touch with their organisation. They plan time in their calendars to build meaningful relations by walking around and engage in informal, face-to-face conversations with employees. Practicing active listening, Management by Walking Around (MbWA) provides a chance to both energise and set directions, but also understand issues and concerns, find solutions, and get ideas (Peters).

Another important way of taking the temperature is to regularly participate in team meetings to experience the daily work environment which leaders create for individual contributors.

If human resources tested their assumptions of leader´s capabilities and current state of work environments to identify the reality of performance conditions, they would be better equipped to achieve their humanising targets.

The point is organisational feedback, reflection, and learning: how an organisation listens to workplace tunes, meets expectations, and moulds behaviours is an opportunity to build trust.

As always, seeing is believing.

It starts when organisations actively take ownership of employee performance conditions and drop the notorious, passive HR Partner role, which too often serves as whitewasher of antisocial, out-of-touch-with-social-norms leader behaviours, and instead become Employee Experience Partners.

Employee Experience Partners participate in meetings at all levels to capture organisational discords and put leaders to account.

When employer promise (SAY) translates into employee experiences (DO), human resources builds sustainable work environments. It is the pre-requisite to attain first-choice employer status.

9. Checks in with new employees to ease assimilation and become sparring partner for employees and their leaders.

Taking on a new job is a big decision. New employees are filled with optimism, energy, vision, and motivation to take on a new challenge and use talents, knowledge, and experiences to the benefit of employers.

On the other hand, deciding to leave a job is one of the most consequential decisions we make throughout our lives, especially if we don’t have another job lined up. As uncovered in the series about the Great Resignation, employees were so profoundly discouraged by leader experiences that they left without another source of income.

The fact of the matter is that employees didn’t find a place to belong and unleash their talents. Ergo, they took responsibility for their mental and physical health as well as work-life destiny.

Indeed, every time a well-qualified employee leave, no matter if resignation occurs in the probation period or at a later stage, resignation is always a sign of leader failure that should trigger investigation of leader Menschenbild and competencies.  

If human resources challenged their assumptions about leader´s abilities and competencies, started to listen to employee experiences while they are still in the job, discords could be detected early and in many cases resolved to the benefit of organisational performance.

Beyond traditional onboarding and compliance training, human resources must lead the humanising transformation and create work environments to which people want to belong.

10. Involves employees in leader hiring processes to foster employee engagement and greater leadership success.  

Engaged employees are emotionally connected to the organisational purpose. They are involved in, enthusiastic about and committed to making a difference through their work, thus contributing to organisational success (Cortelius).

Considering the Great Resignation trend and knowing that a global average of 80% of employees are not engaged or actively disengaged at work (Gallup), appointing qualified leaders with character, empathy, sound judgement, and outstanding competence has never been more important.

If something smells bad, it usually is bad. A reek is an invitation to test assumptions.

Recognising the new, post-corona work-life threshold and knowing that employees primarily leave because of inefficient leaders, it is time to boost engagement through democratic influence and involve employees in leader recruiting processes both in relation to internal promotions and external appointments.

Let employees co-choose leaders, listen actively to employee feedback, confront leaders with the effects of their behaviours and be ready to act on employee perception before the workforce is drained of energy and starts looking for a new employer.

11. Rethinks performance management to truly engage employees and stimulate collaboration.

To drive performance, an organisation puts words to what it is striving for: what we want to do, why it is important and how to measure success. Effective organisations have well-defined vision and mission statements that communicate organisational philosophy – the reason for being – and the values and beliefs that underlie culture and guide operational decisions.

With the foundation in place – the why, the what, the how (purpose, customers, product, scope, values, and principles to guide the journey) – a strategic development process can start: establish overall goals and cascade to departments and task owners specifying work outcomes in pursuit of the desirable future.

Performance management is a process to ensure that a set of activities effectively deliver outcomes that meet organisational goals. To help employees perform to the best of their abilities and assist leaders, who monitor and evaluate employee work, a Performance Management System (PMS) details what to use time on and why.

Although a well-structured, well-managed plan can improve performance, a system is never perfect.

Even more importantly, performance management processes and tools thwart the purpose: to engage employees in making a difference through their work.

In fact, traditional performance management approaches are disengaging because:

a. Instead of stimulating a learning culture with feedback and coaching to help employees optimise performance, performance rating is a forced annual verdict,

b. Instead of giving employees timely feedback to equip, inspire and improve, praise or correction come too late. It either generates a feeling of unnecessary recapitulation of a painful period or it is a waste of time because it has no relevance for future performance,

c. Instead of considering how work context impacts flourishing of talents, the effectiveness of leaders makes or breaks careers of talents, fuelling disengagement,

d. Instead of fostering collaborative team players who help others to succeed, the free-riders, those who put themselves before the team, are rewarded, fostering combative, aggressive, back-stabbing cultures of solo performers,  

e. Instead of using PMS to identify ineffective leaders, consider cause and effect and hold leaders to account, upper management keeps leaders because immediate and short-term outcomes are more important than performance sustainability (safeguarding individual contributors). Invariably, employees fall victim of either inefficient leadership or lack of succession planning,

f. Instead of measuring what is important: value-driven outcomes in a future perspective, PMS measures what is easy: activities.

While PMS tools and process compliance vary greatly from organisation to organisation, the list of critique is endless: time-consuming, subjective, demotivating, unhelpful, unfair, and irrelevant.

Although most organisations have thought-through performance management systems and in most cases, they know what it takes to create high-performing working cultures, leaders don’t ‘live the structure’ of performance management systems despite endless training initiatives.

When a system defeats its own purpose, and the Great Resignation uncovers unawareness and unresponsiveness to unproductive human dynamics and ineffective leader behaviours, which jeopardise employee health and future performance, organisations are at point of no return.

The question is no longer: do performance reviews help us get the most out of our people?

Facing the threat of employee-flight, the questions is: how fast can PMS be abolished?

De facto effective ways to monitor and enhance work environments and hold leaders to account must emerge.

Prescription: Become a Place to which People Want to Belong

A successful transformation takes big-picture, holistic thinking, and systemic change.

Human resources must show adaptability and skilfully respond to shifts in key stakeholder needs and context to strategically realign efforts.

Human resources must manage people and organisation with a post-corona outlook and become driving force of an employee-centric performance mindset to truly engage employees based on known motivators: mastery, learning, purpose, values, autonomy, collectivism, and recognition.

Prioritising employee engagement is the only way to overcome a crisis and become first-choice employer:

· Set people free to do their work and empower them to make mistakes, learn, and innovate,

· Stimulate collective, cross-disciplinary, co-creation cultures to generate engagement, learning, and find solid solutions to multi-dimensional challenges,

· Shift to team focus and encourage frequent performance dialoguing and feedback,

· Set fluid team and individual objectives with future-needs focus and provide forward-looking coaching and development, 

· Identify over- and underperformers to give them better contexts for success.

An organisation’s workforce is its ultimate engine.

Competitiveness is about having the right workforce in place, creating the intellectual capital an organisation needs to generate innovation and growth.

Human resources, if you snooze, you lose.

About this Article: This article is inspired by the series of articles investigating The Great Resignation: What Are Your Employees Telling You featuring first-hand testimonials from talented, experienced, and well-educated professionals who took the drastic decision to clean out their desks and leave employment. The series goes behind the economic trend of alarming mass exodus triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic to propagate learning opportunities, stop the bleed, and build a better work-life future. To learn more, click on contents of interest:

1.       The Great Resignation: What Are Your Employees Telling You?

2.       Can You Lead without Trust?

3.       Can You Smell the Odour of Mendacity?

4.       Employee Assertiveness Defines New Work-life Threshold (meta-analysis)

5.       The Great Resignation Uncovers an enormous Leadership Crisis (meta-analysis cont’d)

6.       The Five Performance-destructors @ Work

7.       Are You in the Box? To Lead People, You’d Better Get Out

8.       Have the Prince and Princess of Wales Cracked the Leadership Code?

9.       Here’s WHY Performance Fails and HOW to Make a U-turn

10.   Does Your Performance Triunity Deliver the Desired Performance?

11.   From Inhuman to Human Resources – Part I - 11-point Systemic Game-changer.

Up Next: Why Hire for Skills When We Fire for Character?

About the Title: From Inhuman to Human Resources: The title is inspired by the thought-provoking, French miniseries ´Derapages´ which means ´misconduct´ or ´skidding´. In English, it holds the provocative title ´Inhuman Resources´ which suits the extremity of leadership development adventures conducted by a new Leadership Development Executive. The ex-football player turned actor, Eric Cantona, plays Alain Delambre who uncovers the characters of an executive team exposing them to a hostage situation. Not knowing they are part of a role-playing game; things don’t go as planned. Forcing viewers to reflect on the leadership development paradigm and costs of assimilating to deeply unethical people, the series contains several pertinent work-life themes, including age and gender discrimination. Watch trailer: does HR lead or mislead?   

About Menschenbild: Deriving from the German language, it means ‘image of man’, referring to the worldview of humanity and self-image. It captures assumptions about the nature of man, personal values and fundamental beliefs which develop within the individual (Zichy).

Arising from education and individual life experiences, it shows in how people orient themselves in the world and understand connections. Menschenbild is our personal construct of how we understand ourselves and the world.

In an organisational setting, it reveals itself in the way we collaborate and lead people: power-controlling avoiding employee involvement because it makes no difference or democratic-participative motivating multiple stakeholder participation to improve outcomes? 

In winning organisations, vision, mission, and values are the driving forces of all decisions and actions; they are aligned with employee and stakeholder values and Menschenbild. The communications and stakeholder engagement approach of an organisation - how it bridges stakeholder interests and demands - reflects executive maturity, leadership philosophy and Menschenbild. The Menschenbild of the leaders we appoint is who we become – our culture (Cortelius).

About Management by Walking Around: A key part of being a good leader is being in touch with your employees, securing open cross-organisational communication and transmitting values. Walking around not only gives you a chance to energise, answer questions about strategic directions and have informal, face-to-face conversations.

When you manage by walking around, you have a chance to build meaningful relations and get an idea of what is going on in your organisation. Being aware of operations and learning from informal situations, you understand issues, concerns and get ideas. You can act on findings, resolve problems, and obtain inspiration for decision making. Plan time for unstructured walks, be aware of body language and practice active listening (Peters).

About the Listening Organisation: The practice of listening is a process of understanding the feelings and thoughts of stakeholders to create better outcomes i.e., listen to employees to create a better work environment. It entails capturing the good, the bad and the ugly and using the information to develop policies, procedures, and stakeholder-centric communications decisions.

Listening to and addressing concerns bring valuable organisational learning, build trust, and improve communication. With the proper strategy, planning and tools, it is possible to improve listening skills. Six questions to unveil value-add of your communications department (end of article).

About the Learning Organisation: The systems scientist, Peter Senge, challenges leaders on their ability and willingness to develop organisations through learning. The Learning Organisation refers to dynamic systems with continuous adaption and improvement where people continually expand their capacity to create desired results. Apart from the leader’s ability to foster learning, two conditions are crucial: the ability to design an organisation to match its desired outcome, and the ability to recognise when the initial direction of the organisation does not align with the desired outcome and correct the mismatch.

Organisations which foster learning and adapt quickly and efficiently will excel. Apart from a compelling case for change, time to change, change process and removal of change barriers, the precondition for learning is listening with intent to understand (Senge).

About Malene: Malene is a social scientist and branding strategist with 20 years of global working experience who passionately partners with organisations to stimulate dialoguing efforts and identify where to play and how to win brand familiarity and favourability.

References:

Cortelius, Malene. Workplace Revolution – Outperform Competition through Employee Engagement, Forum Dialogi, 2019.

Edmondson, Amy C. The Fearless Organisation – Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation and Growth, John Wiley & Sons, 2019.

Gallup. State of Global Workforce 2021 Report, Gallup Inc., 2021.

Peters, Tom et al. In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America´s Best Run Companies, Harper & Row, 1982.

Senge, Peter M. The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organisation, Random House Business, 1992.

Zichy, Michael. A Nietzschean Concept of Collective Understandings of Human Nature, The XXIII World Congress of Philosophy, Philosophy Documentation Center, vol 28, pages 169-174, 2018.

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