HR

Agile HR Ahead

by
chatchai.b/Shutterstock

It may be time for HR to change its approach to change management. Change management is probably one of the most critical core competencies required of HR professionals. The profession of HR, however, seems to be lagging behind the very thing that it needs to be leading.

The cause for this lag is explored in recent articles that come from the technology sector. They explore how responsiveness and agility are embedded in business approaches using pro-active systems thinking. Due to the lack of agility on the part of HR, our profession as a function appears to be struggling to keep up with the businesses we are supposed to serve.

Click here to read why HR needs to be agile.

Click here to read more about agility in HR.

As noted in these articles, an agile HR approach includes increased responsiveness, catching up with business language in an authentic way and reducing reliance on out-dated systems just because they used to be ‘best practice’. In Jeff Gothen’s article, he describes the challenges involved in having employees at ING re-interview for their jobs in order to implement systems change. This resulted in a ‘staggering’ 40% of ING employees either changing jobs or leaving the organization.  Not because they did not have the skills, but because they needed to have a different organizational mindset. It was HR’s role to understand and implement what that cultural mind set looked like and felt like in order to make this type of organizational change happen. In order to implement this change for others, it seems critical for the mindset in HR to be changed first.

Agile HR means allowing more time to reflect on organizational practices. It means taking a critical look at what is working or not working to meet the needs of the business and responding proactively when those needs are not being met. HR can not be perceived as the organizational anchor due to its reliance on ‘old-ways’ systems thinking that approaches change as an event to be managed.

Agile HR means hoisting the sails and navigating through the seas of constant change, leading to new ways of thinking.

Discussion Questions:

  1. Identify one HR practice that is perceived as unresponsive to the changing needs in the current workplace.
  2. If you had to re-interview for your current job, would you hire yourself? Explain your rationale.
  3. What does agile HR mean to you as an HR professional?

Promises Made, Promises Broken

by

Simply put, the collective agreement is an employment contract.  As you will remember from your employment law studies, any employment contract that is formed between two parties, must have an offer, acceptance, and consideration in order for that contract to be enforceable.   In a unionized environment, each time the collective agreement is renewed through the legitimate process of collective bargaining, these principles of offer, acceptance, and consideration remain in play.  Once the parties have agreed to the terms of renewal, they have a contract between them.  Signed, sealed, and delivered.

Source: ALEXSTAND/Shutterstock
Source: ALEXSTAND/Shutterstock

The collective agreement is not a one sided ‘union’ contract that the employer can ignore.  It is a contract between two parties.  Nothing will harden and sour the relationship between an employer and a union more than the perception that the employer is ignoring the terms of a negotiated, settled, and accepted collective agreement.

Let’s look at this from a personal perspective.  If I agree to sell my house to a buyer, we negotiate the sale of the house and everything that is agreed and committed through a signed contract.  If that contract includes the agreement on my part to leave all of the window dressings in place, then I leave them in place!   I don’t take them with me or destroy them – That is not what I agreed to do.  If I do take them with me, I should expect a very unfavourable reaction from the other party because I have deliberately broken the contract between us. Actions are similar with collective agreement administration.  If the employer agrees to something during the life of the agreed upon contract, and then breaks that agreement, the union is going to react in a negative way.  This result should not be a surprise to anybody with the responsibility for administering a collective agreement.

Yet, it happens, as is discussed in the article, below.

Click here to read the article. 

It is easy to be an armchair critic and wonder why the employer, in this case, would have agreed to a commitment of no layoffs during the life of a collective agreement if they knew they could not afford it. We must remember that any contract negotiation is never straightforward and we have to live with the results.

What are the Human Resources lessons to take from all of this?  Effective HR planning and preparation for realistic implementation of a collective agreement is critical!  And, do not make promises you can not keep.

Discussion Questions:

  1. What types of terms could have been negotiated into this collective agreement?
  2. What could the employer have done differently in order to lessen the impact on unionized employees?
  3. Identify three specific pieces of information that an HR practitioner could have included as part of collective bargaining preparation?
  4. What steps would you advise the union to follow in this case?

 

Getting a Pulse on Employee Engagement

by

From the HR Practitioner’s perspective, it is very important to be able to assess and measure a range of employee activities.  The most common method of employee related data collection is through an annual employee engagement survey.

Hand drawing heart
Source: Jacek Dudzinski/Shutterstock

Many of us spend a lot of time sending out the surveys; waiting for employee responses; sending out prompts to remind employees to respond; collecting the data; analyzing the data; writing reports about what we think the data means; and then, finally, coming up with recommendations that we hope will address the issues.  The process and the methodology for all of this is usually electronic and should be efficient; however, the reality and timing is not always on the mark.  When all of the data collection and report writing is complete, it is usually time for another annual survey and the process starts all over again.

Maybe it is time to pitch the long and drawn out annual employee engagement survey. If your organization is not doing annual employee surveys at all or if the annual surveys are stopped, how else can the HR practitioner assess and evaluate what employees are thinking about their workplace?

 

The Director of Customer Happiness at OfficeVibe was interviewed recently on the CBC radio network. He offers a short and sweet approach to employee engagement activities.

Click Here to Listen to the Interview.

It seems that sending out annual surveys could be a thing of the past if the future relies on constant and meaningful employee engagement strategies.

Discussion Questions:

  1. What are metrics?
  2. What are the specific metrics that provide good indicators for employee engagement?
  3. What are privacy concerns related to the collection of data from employees?
  4. Do you agree that a weekly ‘pulse’ survey would be an effective way to gauge employee engagement?
  5. Would you recommend a product like ‘OfficeVibe’ to your employer? Why or why not?
  6. What are some of the risks involved in employee engagement surveys?

 

 

Why Aren’t We Sharing What We Learn?

by
shutterstock_299587979
Source: Lightspring/Shutterstock

In our Human Resource studies related to Training and Development, we read and hear about collaborative learning and systems thinking as key concepts and drivers for the learning organization.  Systems thinking, in particular, brings forward the need for understanding organizational and management issues in context with each other. Research and analysis are all part of systems thinking which allow for organizations to learn and to grow using evidence based methodologies. It seems, however, that there is a continuing divide between the learning that business organizations achieve based on management research and the learning that is produced in post-secondary communities, based on purely academic research.

This divide is explored in an interesting article, by Fiona McQuarrie.

  Click here to read the article

Isn’t it time for research that results in management learning and research that results in academic learning to come together and be shared in order to be truly collaborative?  Ms. McQuarrie’s article speaks very clearly to the need for all of us to start communicating about what we have learned, so that we move out of a silo-based mentality that hoards information and into a collaborative, shared learning community that benefits all members of our respective academic, management, and Human Resources related constituencies.

Discussion Questions:

  1. How will you apply what you have learned through research in your HR studies into practical application as an HR professional?
  2. What benefit does academic research bring to the Human Resources profession?
  3. How should organizations share research based learning inside and outside their respective communities?
  4. Where can you access current Human Resources related research that provides leading edge learning?

HR’s Role in Economic Predictions

by
Girl with shopping bags looking at internet browser in sky
Source: Wavebreakmedia/Shutterstock

There is no doubt that the retail sector is a huge industry in Canada.  Many of us have worked in this environment, somewhere along the way, on our individual employment journeys.  There is also no doubt that the retail sector is going through significant challenges and changes that will continue throughout our employment lifetimes.

Click Here to Read the Article

The shift to online shopping has to be one of the most significant changes influencing the retail industry.  As customers, we can now enjoy the ease of online shopping in our pajamas, every day, without ever leaving the comfort of our homes.

From an employment and staffing perspective, it is interesting to note that this article does not speak to the impact on the existing workforce.  Will the need for smaller stores and increased online presence for a retailer like Walmart have an impact on its employees? Will this impact be positive and/or negative?  Absolutely! Just because it is not identified does not mean it does not exist.

This is our challenge, as HR Professionals – we need to be cognizant of these types of industry predictions.  We cannot be blind to patterns in industry that are laid out for us to consider from an employment, staffing, and workforce perspective.  Too often, we leave the industry and economic predictions to others in the organization to process and consider.  Our challenge is not to just monitor the changing economic environment and industry forecasts; but to identify the real issues that will arise because of these changes and chart the right course for the future.  Forecasting is an activity full of risk, but it is a necessary task, as it must identify potential impacts for the employees that we, as Human Resources professionals, serve.

Discussion Questions:

  1. How do I shop differently now from the way I shopped three years ago?
  2. What are three positive impacts on employees who work in the changing retail sector?
  3. What are three negative impacts on employees who work in the changing retail sector?
  4. What are key skills or traits that a Human Resources Professional needs for working within a retail environment to ensure accurate workforce forecasting?