The Future of HR - Part 2

Joe,

I think your lists summarized our prognostications accurately. So, it's on to the implications for human resources as this future emerges. I'm going to propose to we take turns outlining one concept at a time.

As a foundation for this discussion, I also want to clarify that I believe that the purpose of human resources for organizations now and in the future is to ensure that the organization has the human capital it needs to achieve it's objectives. Human capital for me means the right people in the right place doing the right things at the right times. Hopefully this definition of HR is at least fairly close to how you define it. How an HR function realizes this purpose in the future is the question we have in front of us.

As I look at our list of what's coming in the upcoming years, it jumps out at me how much needs to change and how much there is to learn. In order for our organizations to navigate this change, we need to build new skills, knowledge and perspectives quickly. To make this happen, the HR organization of the future really needs to master skills in teaching, coaching, and developing others. This means that where HR and training organizations are separate today, they cannot be separate in the future. Each interaction that HR has with an employee or manager should be treated as a teachable moment where they are empowering the individuals with new skills and abilities.

Here's a few things that HR departments need to consider today to begin preparing:

• Start with your HR team. Develop a learning culture with your team where they experience what it means to teach and be taught, coach and be coached. HR will need to be the model of learning in the organization.
• Evaluate the talent of the HR team. If your current staff has been focused on reactive, problem solving, compliance activity, some of them may not be suited for a learning focused team. The HR professional of the future needs to have strong people skills and a desire to help others learn and grow. Be diligent in setting new standards and diligently manage your talent pool to the skills you need in the future.
• Invest in teaching coaching skills to your HR staff. They need the formal tools to help others (particularly leaders) learn and grow. Coaching is not an intuitive skill and it requires training and practice.

What are your thoughts?

Jason

The Future of H.R. - Part 1

Jason-

Hope you had a good thanksgiving holiday, sorry for not getting back here sooner. Life happens.

We have been working on this question of Where Will We Go? for a while now and I think we are now getting to the good stuff. Before we start zeroing in on what all of this means for human resources work, I want to summarize what we have discussed so far.

We started by giving some thought to how business might be different in the future, and some of the key influences that we identified were:

• Importance of Innovation as opportunity for competitive advantage
• Increased rate of change
• Disruptive technology
• Importance of individualization and customization
• Importance of trust
• Importance of design

We then considered what these key influences might mean to the future of the organization, and we came up with:

• Organizational culture is going to be very important
• Understanding the value of ideas and information is going to be very important
• There will be a new relationship "of equals" between org and employees and org and customers
• End of management as we know it
• Transfer of authority, access and decision making to employees and customers
• Mo flatter, mo better
• Learning as super competency
• Transparency will be king
• Flexibility as a new norm
• Manager/leader as coach

Does that seem to accurately capture our conversation up this point? Let me know if there is anything I have left out or misrepresented. If we are both good with this, we can now move on to consider what this means for human resources.
-joe

The Future of the Organizatin, Part 3

Joe,

I think I misunderstood the assignment you provided for this leg of our discussion. I will do as Avis always promotes and "try harder" this time.

So to reset, if business is going to change in these ways . . .

1. Innovation as a key opportunity for competitive advantage
2. Increasing rate of change
3. Disruptive technology
4. Importance of customization and individualization to consumer desires
5. Trust as a key opportunity for competitive advantage
6. Importance of design

. . . how will the organization be different? Rather than talk specifically about what the organization should look like as I did in my last post, I'll instead talk more generally about what is likely to happen in organizations as business evolves in the directions we discussed.

How will the organization of 2020 be different?

• Culture will be important, for the reasons you described, but also because top talent will be increasingly more portable and willing to move. Today's younger generations also put more value on culture as a decision for where they choose to work.
• IT as we know it will no longer exist. As technology gets more pervasive, sophisticated, and inexpensive, the role of the traditional IT department (writing code) will go away and a new strategic IT must emerge. Every person in every function will be utilizing technology in a significant way to do their job. IT will need to become more of an internal consulting organization to help the business make decisions about where and how to implement and utilize technology to make business happen.
• Brand building will become increasingly important. Controlling the company message in the media and community at large is no longer possible so putting out a bunch of BS in an attempt to spin things won't be an option in the future. Web 2.0 tools have created an environment where you will have to authentically "walk the talk" or your employees and customers will crucify you through their blogs and social networks. Thinking of brand in a much larger way will be the key. What you say about your brand must also be true about your culture in the future.
• Specific and deep expertise in a product or service area may become a liability. Organizations who are able to develop competencies in creation, seeing the future, disrupting markets, and solving big problems are likely the ones best able to navigate in rapidly changing markets and business environments. These competencies are also global in that they create value regardless of business and locale. These organizations are likely to be those who are right-brained companies who embrace some chaos and welcome in the deviants who are too "different" to fit in at traditional companies.
• Relationships and communication are going to be critical with both customers and employees. You mentioned building communities with customers. These communities need to power wide-open, no-holds-barred dialogue between customers and the organization. These dialogues aren't about pushing products or promoting the company, they are about only listening and seeking to understand what is being said. And, they are the key to delivering the kinds of things that the market will consume. These same dialogues will need to be taking place with employees.

I hope that this was more in line with the assignment.

-Jason

Looking ahead...

Jason-

I liked the points that you made in your post from Monday, but I think that we need to make a decision about or clarify what we are attempting to do here. You made the point that you were identifying characteristics of what you thought the future organization should be, and I am wanting to make sure that is in line with our objective here.

I think that there are a lot of people talking about what the future of HR could be / should be and I am hoping we can add a slightly different perspective to that conversation. We cannot predict the future, but we have identified some of the ways in which business is changing and will continue to change.

As we move closer to the heart of this issue and consider the future of the organization, rather than us thinking about what we would like the organization to look like in the future, I had wanted us to look at our original list of ways in which business is changing and develop some thinking around how those changes would influence and shape the future of the organization. Having done that we could move on and consider how that stuff would shape the future of HR work.

I may just be confused by or over analyzing language, but I wanted to make sure we were both on the same page before doing more work on this. Let me know, thanks.

The Future of the Organization, Part 2

Joe,

Thanks for summarizing our thoughts in your last post. The only place where I wanted to add a comment was related to #4 regarding choice. My thoughts are that individualization and customization are much more complex than simply choice. I think we already expect choice today as consumers. In the future, we not only expect choice, but we'll expect to be able to buy a product or service in almost every situation that is specifically and uniquely designed to meet my own needs.

As for the future of organizations, I want to issue a caveat before sharing my thoughts. There is a difference between predicting what the organization of the future SHOULD look like versus what the organization of the future WILL look like. I'm choosing to take an idealist view of things for the purposes of this post. So, what I'm about to share is how I think a successful organization ten years in the future should look. In addition, I'm taking a little more prescriptive approach as I think about how the organization itself needs to evolve.

1. The flatter the better. While I think it will take time to break down the hierarchies of the past, organizations that become flatter in the future will be better able to innovate and adapt to rapid changes. The fewer layers, the faster information can travel and the less places there are for silos and walls to be built. However, to become effectively flat requires some radical changes in thinking about accountability, power, career paths, development and communication.
2. Learning is the super competency. Innovation, design, driving and adapting to change are all learning activities. They require that individuals be constantly taking in information, processing it, looking for patterns and opportunities, and taking actions. Those who can learn the fastest and put new knowledge to work will be best positioned in the future. This is particularly true for leaders and executives (which will be a major change for them from the past). To effectively deliver on this, organizations are going to have to get much more aggressive in providing learning and development programs for all employees at all levels.
3. Transparency is king. The days of closed books and controlled flow of information are gone. With social networking, blogging and the web oozing in through every crack in even the most locked down organizations, there is no longer any place to hide. In the future, organizations will have to build their companies and cultures in such a way that they are fully authentic to their brand promise. Their actions will truly need to match their words.
4. Flexibility is the new norm. Fixed schedules, set work locations, and narrow job duties are things of the past. This may be where technology has it's greatest impact. It won't be long before all of your knowledge workers will require broadband wireless enabled laptops so that they can work where ever they happen to be, whenever they do their best work. Online collaboration tools are making "the office" less and less relevant. Additionally, even those who work in front-line, more traditionally structured jobs are going to expect flexibility in scheduling, job responsibilities, learning opportunities, etc. This will create a great deal of management complexity which will require organizations to be very creative to be successful.
5. Manager/Leader as coach. If you have ever participated in sports, you know how much differently a coach behaves towards his or her players than a manager does towards his or her employees. A coach may have been a player at one point in their life, but in their role as coach, they have very specific responsibilities that are different than being a player: teaching the game to players including the formal rules and the subtle nuances; figuring out where each player fits best (what position should each play); helping each player master the fundamentals of playing the game; setting up a system; and finally, managing the game and making adjustments as situations change during the game. The coach spends most of his time with his players practicing the skills required to perform when it counts. Contrast this to the manager of today who spends most of their time still playing the game and minimal time working with the team (and almost no time practicing). The leader of the future will need to model the style of a sports coach and spend 90% of their time focused on helping their employees excel in their positions.

Certainly, this list isn't exhaustive, but I think that these five things will be the fundamental changes that successful organizations will make over the next ten years to survive in this changing environment. I'm sure I've missed a few, so I'd look forward to you filling in the gaps and telling me what I may have gotten wrong.

Jason

The Future of the Organization

Jason-

So, let me try to summarize what we have pointed out as key influences changing business:

1. Innovation is becoming a prime opportunity for competitive advantage
2. The rate of change is increasing
   
3. Disruptive technology
4. Choice is becoming increasingly important (you said individualization and customization, can I lump those together as "choice?)
5. Trust is becoming a prime opportunity for competitive advantage
6. Design is becoming increasingly important
   

Does that accurately capture what we have sketched out so far?

I think that this seems like a decent list and that there is some evidence to support each of these trends. As I think about what this means to the organization, this is what comes to mind for me:

• Organizational culture is going to be really, really, really important. Culture has always been important, but culture plays a huge role in an organizations capacity to innovate, adapt new practices and technology, and build relationships based on trust. Honesty, transparency and authenticity are becoming critical and that is a big change.
  
• Understanding the value of ideas and information is becoming critical as are access to information and tools to share and organize information.
• The relationships between the organization and its employees and between the organization and its consumers will have to become much more interactive and "two-way" in nature. Employees and consumers (past, current, potential) have valuable information about a great many things and it is no longer feasible for that information to slowly "trickle up" to key decision makers. Employees and consumers have to be viewed as as scouts and forward observers.
• There is little (if any) case remaining for the profession of management as we now know it.
• Organizations are going to need to find ways to put more power and tools and resources into the hands of employees and consumers. I think that organizations will become less about specific products or services and more about building community and providing that community with platforms upon which they can build what they want and need.

Looking forward to seeing what you have to add to this.

-joe

Previous Posts in this Series:
1- Where Will We Go?
2- Game On
3- Thinking About Where We Will Go
4- Thinking, Take 2

Thinking about where we will go . . . take 2.

Hey Joe,

Good thoughts and thanks for getting us rolling on our Business 2020 discussion. I've been thinking and collecting notes on this topic since you first posed it. Predicting the future is a more daunting task than I originally anticipated.

Two issues you raised were on my list as well.

• Rate of Change. Speed is becoming critical. Not only the speed at which you change, but the speed at which you can adapt to the change around you.


• Technology. The disruption of technology has only just begun. Increasingly, more jobs will be replaced by technology leaving people searching to find different ways to create value.

Here are a few other thoughts I have about what the future might look like.

1. Individualization and customization of products will not longer be a differentiator but an expectation. Customers increasingly expect their products to be unique to their needs. As an example, the NFL has begum promoting that you can now order jerseys and shirts from your favorite NFL Teams from their website where you choose the design, color and what it says on the back. We expect to be able to customize everything and that will continue.


2. Trust is officially dead. Skepticism has long been a label of Gen X, but every generation is growing increasingly skeptical. People get lied to or spun everywhere they turn and it seems that there's no one to trust. So, transparency and full disclosure will no longer be a choice but a requirement on the part of organizations. Companies who can build loyalty and trust over time through their actions will have an advantage.


3. Design will be king. The ability to anticipate customer (and employee) needs and desires and design products and services to brilliantly meet those will differentiate the successful from the rest. This isn't just artistic design, but product design, brand design, communication design, organization design, etc. (Think Zappos, iPhone apps, and the Obama presidential campaign--all examples or brilliant design in one way or another).

It seems that we are collectively becoming more impatient and demanding as people. We want things our way, right now. I don't see that this trend will turn and certainly this trend will impact not only how we do business, but how we design our organizations as well.

On to the topic of the organizations of the future.

-Jason