A New People Playbook for the Now of Work
Natal Dank, Independent People Consultant and Co-Founder of PXO Culture
The world of work has forever altered in response to crisis, disruption, digital change, pandemics, and increasing complexity. It feels like we’re reinventing the organization real time. So many HR leaders and business leaders that I talk to, they’re all looking at how do we help our organization transform their operating model? We need to be more collaborative. We need to be more customer-centric. We need to be more digital. And if we don’t, we might not stay in business. All of this means that you need to have a people strategy that can respond and adapt and deliver value very fast. And the key question is how do you do that? So what I want to explore is how do we end this HR strategy wishlist that we’ve all got. You know that massive list? Yeah. You’re like, “Of all these great things, we’re going to deliver all these solutions, all this activity, talent management, leadership, diversity, equity, inclusion.”
Has anyone seen this? Yeah. What is this? What are we actually doing? What are we delivering? What problem are we solving? What does this actually mean? These are just topics. These are kind of the functions that we have in HR. So tonight I’d like you to come on in and embrace what I call the New People Playbook. And it’s a people playbook based on five key principles, and we are going to explore those now. So the first principle is all about being product-led. It’s about thinking about that employee experience like our product. Yes, it’s made up of different components, onboarding, performance, career growth, but we deliver it as one. And that holistic delivery is about how do we deliver value. And if you think about products, products are valuable when they fix a problem, when they delight you, when they make working life easier.
So how does your employee experience fix problems for people? How does it deliver value? And if we start thinking about value in this way, we start to speak the same language as the business. It’s the commercial reality of why we do what we do. It’s also a way of how we guide our people strategy. So I’d like you to start thinking about how do I identify the most important things to solve for my business, not the topics to deliver. And then how do I ruthlessly prioritize? What do I do first? What do I do second? When do I know that I’ve got that done? And then how do I visualize that across the organization?
Principle two, human-centric design. How do we build this employee experience like a customer journey full of moments that matter for our people and brand? Principle three, T-shaped people in T-shaped teams. This is how we overcome those functional silos. How do we move beyond the competing remits? So what you’re probably wondering, what is T-shape? Well, T-shape is how we get over this generalist versus specialist. Yeah, so we combine the two. It’s about having those good capabilities, those general capabilities so we can navigate different business problems, but then also that deep specialism so we can actually add that expertise to different business challenges. HR teams that I work with love the T-shape because it helps them understand how to work in a multidisciplinary way. Say that 10 times in a five minute speech. And then if you put that together, you’ve got a T-shaped team. A team like this could solve any business challenge that comes along. This is such a powerful way of working.
Principle number four, experimentation. How do you test your hypothesis? How do you validate that this is the right solution, it is going to fix the problem before you release it into the business? This is working evidence-based. And then principle number five is how do we bring it all together? How do we combine all these elements to deliver with impact? How do we move beyond that big wishlist of activity and deliveries and solutions and start talking about the evidence of solving problems? I invite you tonight to move away from that big bang one size fits all, top-down strategy wishlist, and embrace that agile cycle so you can actually start to deliver value early and often.
So let’s stop talking about the future of work like it’s somewhere over there in the distance. It is here now. We’ve got to start solving for the now of work. And if we do that together, we can change our profession for the better.
See Natal delivering her presentation at DisruptHR Aberdeen here >>>> https://vimeo.com/876136055
More talks from DisruptHR Aberdeen here >>>> https://hunteradams.co.uk/blog/disrupthr-aberdeen/
