How do you take HR from being a reactive, transactional business process, to a strategic, proactive service delivering value to the organization? This was one of several interesting threads that came out of the Connected Enterprise 2011 conference held in Scottsdale this past weekend by analyst firm, Constellation Research Group. The event encouraged healthy discussions and provocative ideas by the analysts, other speakers and an active audience around the future of organizational processes in the landscape of ground-shaking technologies like social networking, mobile, cloud and analytics.
VP & Principal Analyst Yvette Cameron spoke of the need for Chief Human Resources Officers (CHROs) to shift their focus from policy administration to showing how they create value out of the people in the organization. This may be a redistribution of emphasis of time and resources across typical HR activities: policy management, talent acquisition, talent and skills development, leadership or succession planning, and employee climate.
A great deal of effort today is spent simply in policy management which is complicated enough in just one jurisdiction, let alone in a globalized world of mixed concerns and differing views. However, this is typically a defensive, non-proactive, and as Ms. Cameron indicated, a very transactional activity. Creating value is more a strategic affair and the opportunity here for HR lies in acquiring, managing, and developing talent.
Speaking on the same point was John Hagel, Co-Chairman of Deloitte Center for the Edge. Mr. Hagel explained how if you ask any senior executive of how harness increasing returns they will inevitably cite talent as a key factor. When CHROs are asked what they do with talent, the two common foci: attracting and recruiting talent, and retaining talent when they make signs of leaving the organization. Mr. Hagel asserted that what is becoming more and more marginalized is the talent development program.
Talent development is also typically delivered through education and skills development classes and curriculum within the organization or outsourced to a partner. As per the common view, students entering the workplace straight out of college typically need additional or complete retraining to learn applied skills for the workplace. Professional hires may also need them but may have a more vague point of entry into these corporate universities. A second often-cited approach, but often vaguely implemented, is mentoring and pairing junior and senior talent.
From the social business viewpoint, talent development is still done by talking at the employee-students, rather than conversing with them and bringing their own tacit knowledge to bear and share. While the concept of social or peer-to-peer learning is growing in prominence, official corporate directed programs are still not common, and more so, the system of learning itself has not completely solidified.
Mr Hagel raised his enduring point for the need to reintroduce passion into the job and the workplace. In giving the example of consumer products supply chain management company, Li & Fung, he described how this does not just end with passionate employees but should extend to partners. According to his research, Li & Fung’s partners learn faster about running a consumer products business by being part of their network than they might on their own.
To recruit a new partner, Li & Fung does not send out a business development or legal person to explain terms and conditions, but send actual manufacturing operations and process experts you can evaluate how the candidate operates and how they can improve. This learning in turn can be redistributed across the network; this is peer-to-peer social learning on a level beyond the individual, and scaling to teams and entire organizations.
Organizations can create passion within their organizations and across their ecosystem by providing key value to developing individual talent as well as on a group level. It is not simply a matter of how do you sell products and services or sharing new offerings, but shared learning. It begins, per the Li & Fung model, with a strong anchor willing to share knowledge but also recognition that this organizational learning should go both ways. We can be both teachers and learners at the same time.
