Spanish
In this incredible era of transformation, HR cannot escape the challenges imposed on them by today’s world and with intense pressure to do it quickly.
No matter the business sector, the country, the company size, clearly what worked before doesn’t work anymore today. We cannot play a new game with old rules.
Just like it’s been happening in organizations on the whole; the People areas are immersed the challenge of change from a distinct perspective and deploying across the transformation spectrum, from the most conservative companies who modify just the odd transactional issue (for example, implementing the electronic payslip) to innovative companies that rethink all the processes, bring in technology, and revolutionize people management. All HR areas are in transformation mode!
Let me borrow from Josh Bersin’s model published under Deloitte for the new social enterprise and use it for HR to show how it evolves into an agile model and creates a framework for explaining the transformations.
HR areas are evolving in two ways based on what their focus is and how they do things. Their focus shifts away from thinking from the company’s viewpoint to thinking from the person’s and considering all the stakeholders in their ecosystem. This opens the door to novel approaches, such as Experience Management (both Employee and Customer Experience), using data to understand people more deeply, methodologies such as Design Thinking for listening better, among others. About how things are done, HR becomes agile, adopts new technologies, builds relationships with new technology partners that solve issues with innovative Apps, opens up to new forms of labour relations. This new HR functions
The figure below shows how traditional HR evolves into its new agile model:
A new paradigm underpins HR transformation that translates into these 10 trends summarized in this table:
| Traditional HR | Agile HR |
| A traditional and reactive department providing support and service | A transformation catalyst operating like the right hand of the business |
| Inbred focus | Outward focus on the ecosystem, all stakeholders, with social and environmental responsibility |
| Respecting and endorsing hierarchy | Endorsing and encouraging organization-wide leadership, understood as the capacity to transform |
| Supporting structures | Rethinking and transforming structures, new organizational designs and flattening |
| Strategy based on standard processes | Strategy based on agility for transforming key processess and bringing new meaning to them |
| Focus on management and control | Focus on employee experience and organizational learning |
| Aim is cultural alignment | Aim is organizational redesign and cultural transformation |
| Key source of input is listening | Source of inputs are listening and data analysis |
| Thinking and looking inwardly | Thinking and looking outwardly |
| Learning processes understood as static | Creating learning networks to ensure reskilling and upskilling |
The impact of HR transformation is truly deep, mainly because the new mindset puts the person at the centre. Fortunately, technology provides novel solutions to accompany and enable this transformation!
The main challenge is not in embracing digital, but in the transformation of the business logic we use to view reality, especially the logic that decision-makers use to tackle problems.
