RE-SKILLING HR TEAM

Is your HR ready for tech disruptions and the changes around? Here's how you can make your team future ready.

The tides are changing. The question being asked is no longer “Where do you work?” but “What are you working on?” There are new rules of work dominating the workplace. Work has become more deeply embedded in our lives than before. We work everywhere and all the time – from stable jobs to gig culture, from time bound to 24x7 time zone and from office-based to co-sharing or home-based flexible work arrangements. For better or worse, the line between work and life is almost disappearing. And thanks to technological disruption, it is transforming every aspect of managing people. Hence, the task of HR has become even more critical.

There’s a strong need for a re-skilled HR team – a team that can handle the nuances of the current changes, meets stakeholder’s expectations by becoming a partner and creates a workplace which is future-ready.

Here are a few things you need to do as a leader and custodian of a progressive HR function when it comes to making your team future ready:

1. Enhance the Tech Quotient (TQ) of your existing team

In order to keep up the HR evolution trend, you must measure the ‘Tech Quotient’ of your team. Find answers to these three critical questions:

#How digitally savvy is your team?

#Do any of your team members have experience in implementing tech tools?

#How forthcoming are your HR team members when it comes to adopting new age solutions for the organization?

The adoption of digital technology has already seen a huge impact on Human Resources. As per a report based on research conducted by Accenture and Success Factors, a more technologically advanced HR department has three immediate benefits: 2% decrease in turnover, 7% increase in internal job fill rate and up to 5.4% increase in productivity.

With AI-based tools and cognition related technologies, HR processes are becoming agile. They are enabling better people decisions and reduction of human biases. If your HR team is still not aware of the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of AI tools that are available in the market, it’s time for you to plan to educate them on various resources with respect to technology or you may outsource it to consultants who can train and guide. There is no substitute to TQ in this technology-driven world for HR professionals.

2. Frame a Solid Career Plan

As an HR Leader, it is imperative for you to ensure that your team is updated with skills that future jobs require. According to a study,  4 out of 10 jobs today will be lost due to automation. As a leader, you need to have a long-term career plan framed for the team.

#Look at opportunities where demographics are changing.

#Identify competencies your team will require based on the organizational vision.

#Prepare a road map of their career so that they are business ready.

3. Create Learning Workers

According to a report by World Economic Forum, one-third of the skills that are now considered important will change in the next five years. As a leader make sure that you are trained to equip the kind of re-skilling’ that is required for yourself and the team. Keep seeking answers to these questions at a fixed interval:

#Where is your business heading towards?

#What kind of skills do you want your team to have?

#Where is the gap and how do you bridge it?

#What do you want to learn to keep yourself and the team updated?

Along with attending seminars and networking sessions, it is imperative that the HR team undergoes training on a regular basis. Help create learning workers in your team. Build “always-on” continuous learning experiences that allow employees to acquire skills, quickly and easily, on their own terms. And link these learnings with performance and rewards. Be a role model and walk the talk.

4. Build Change Champions

Get ahead of the curve and bring a change. Develop the art of storytelling through data in your team. HR professionals need to manage relationships with the right blend of influence when it comes to adoption of any change. This trait helps build change champions.

# Storytelling through data - There’s an uncanny sense of resistance when it comes to adoption of anything new in the system. Successful change agents are good data storytellers who use data and then translate them into reliable insights for action.

# Relationship Manager – One cannot force employees to change immediately. Influencing and relationship building skills help in building such bridges. Develop and harness these skills to listen empathetically and translate information in ways others can comprehend.

5. Business Know-how is a Must

HR professionals should be well prepared to influence the organizational culture by creating customer and employee experiences well-aligned to the core business sustenance needs. The needs must be congruent between people and organizational performance.  Businesses cannot afford to compromise the quality of their HR team when it comes to transforming the talent ecosystem. However, all of this is feasible only when the Human Resource team has a full ‘know how’ about what is going around in the ecosystem - the business needs and challenges. Unfortunately, HR has many shades of non-technicality that lacks to establish the credibility required vis-à-vis other functions like Sales and Marketing. Knowing the nitty-gritty of business, competitor, finances, market forecast and technical trends is as important as knowing the internal culture, people, and competencies. Get your teams to participate in Sales meet and train them in creating marketing plans cross-functionally. From understanding the balance sheet to developing competitive intelligence report; these are all required to qualify to become a new age HR leader.

Evolve and re-skill your team to prepare for the future!

In the changing HR landscape, be brave enough to ‘give it a shot.’ Explore different avenues to evolve further and enhance your and the team’s preparedness for future. The readiness to change and the congruency between organizational valence (Will the new changes benefit my organization?) and personal valence (Will such changes benefit me, personally?) is seen as one of the critical deciding factors.  And organization’s leaders need to be fully committed to such transformation. And hence, such prominence will eventually give rise to collective new behaviours that will help to create new age HR teams.

Performance Prism

Is your organisation getting what it needs from its existing performance measurement system? ,

3 major reasons why a new framework is needed to replace first generation models, such as the balanced scorecard and the performance pyramid:

It is no longer acceptable or even feasible for organisations to focus solely on the needs of one or two stakeholder groups. Most performance measurement frameworks focus on the needs of the owners, and possibly the customers of an organisation. Other stakeholders such as employees and suppliers tend to be forgotten about.
Most performance measurement frameworks ignore the changes that must be made to the organisation’s strategies, processes and capabilities in order to meet the needs of stakeholders. It is assumed implicitly that if you measure the right things, the rest will fall into place automatically. This is often not the case.
Stakeholders must contribute something to the organisation. There is a ‘quid pro quo’ between the organisation and its stakeholders – stakeholders expect something from the organisation – but the organisation also wants something in return. Performance measurement should consider whether such stakeholders are delivering what the organisation wants from them.
The five facets of the prism
The Performance Prism aims to manage the performance of an organisation from five interrelated ‘facets’:


Source accaglobal
Stakeholder satisfaction – who are our stakeholders and what do they want?
Stakeholder contribution – what do we want and need from our stakeholders?
Strategies – what strategies do we need to put in place to satisfy the wants and needs of or our stakeholders while satisfying our own requirements too?
Processes – what processes do we need to put in place to enable us to execute our strategies?
Capabilities – what capabilities do we need to put in place to allow us to operate our processes?
The Performance Prism, originated from Cranfield University, is a consequential development of the Performance Management framework.
Its key advantages over previous frameworks are considerations of the wants and needs of the stakeholders, and exclusively, what the company wants and needs from its stakeholders? By doing this, a mutually satisfactory relationship with each stakeholder is explored.
The Performance Prism presents an innovative and practical solution to this phenomenon and provides the answers to contemporary managing-with-measures challenges.

Manning

Manning refers to the supplying of man power to a particular department of the company depending up on the need of the department.



Companies used to prepare manning table which is a kind of survey table which shows man power requirement in each of the department and the time for which they are required. Manning is one of the part of Staffing.

Staffing refers to recruitment, selection, training of the selected candidates, their compensation and development of employees in the organization. After the recruitment and selection part of the staffing, the selected candidates are deployed to various departments depending upon their work experience, skillset, aptitude , nature of the job, skills required in the job and this process is called as manning.
Before manning, the organization has to do forecast of manpower required and planning.
This phase shows :

1.Where more man power will be required in the future.

2.What will be the skills expected from the manpower.

3.Which employees needs to go for training and how many new employees will be needed at that place.

4.How many will be promoted in near future and who all will be replacing them.

All the future requirements are analyzed and based on that recruitment and selection is done. This creates a pool of new employed people and then they are deployed to various departments.

De-manning is also practiced in companies sometimes. This is a process in which manpower is reduced. The reasons of de-manning are generally like if a new machine is introduced in the plant, the workers doing the same job manually are no more in need now, automation of data entry and the employees doing it earlier by manual entries are not needed now, reduction in business of the company, technology advancement, closure or merging of a particular department etc.

Employee Engagement Survey for employees ( Questionnaire)

Workplace Satisfaction

1.      On a scale of 1 to 10, how happy are you at work?

2.      Would you refer someone to work here?

3.      Do you have a clear understanding of your career or promotion path?

4.      On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate your work-life balance?

5.      Hypothetically, if you were to quit tomorrow, what would your reason be?

Feeling Appreciated and Valued

1.       Do you feel valued at work?

2.       How frequently do you receive recognition from your manager?

3.       The last time you accomplished a big project, did you receive any recognition?

Employee Retention

1.       Do you believe you'll be able to reach your full potential here?

2.       If you were given the chance, would you reapply to your current job?

3.       Do you foresee yourself working here one year from now?

4.       Do you believe the leadership team takes your feedback seriously?

Organizational Culture

1.       Do you feel like the management team here is transparent?

2.       What three words would you use to describe our culture?

3.       On a scale of 1 to 10, how comfortable do you feel giving upwards feedback to your supervisor?

4.       Do you feel like coworkers give each other respect here?

5.       Do you believe we live authentically by our organizational values?

6.       Does our executive team contribute to a positive work culture?

7.       Do you have fun at work?

 

 

Theory X and Theory Y

What kind of personality are you?

Productivity plays a vital role in success of any business.

Theory X and Theory Y (Personality types by McGregor )

The management or leadership style of a leader is strongly influenced by his/her assumptions and beliefs about what motivates team members. If you believe that your team members not putting their best or dislike work, you should use an authoritarian leadership style of management, On the other hand, if you think that your team members take pride in doing a good job, you should adopt a more participative leadership style.

Theory X

Theory X assumes that employees of an organization or team members are naturally unmotivated and dislike working, and this encourages an authoritarian leadership style. According to this view, management of an organization must actively involve in get things done by their employees. Theory X assumptions are:

1. Employees dislike working and not put their best.
2. Team members avoid responsibility and need to be directed.
3. Employees of the organization have to be controlled, forced, and threatened to deliver work
4. Employees of the organization need to be supervised at every step
5. Workers need to be enticed about producing desired results
6. If leader will not entice employees they have no ambition or incentive to work.

In X-Type organizations managers and supervisors of the organizations control their workers at every. There is very little delegation of authority and control usually remains firmly centralized.

         

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Theory Y

Theory Y focuses on a participative leadership style that is de-centralized. According to Type Y employees of organizations are happy to work, task oriented, self-motivated and creative. This further assumes that many employees enjoy working with greater responsibility. Leader should motivate and encourage their team members in accomplishment of goals and objectives. Theory Y assumes that:

1.       Employee of the organization take responsibility and are motivated to achieved the desired goals

2.       Employees accept the responsibility & do not need much direction for achieving task.

3.       Employees consider work as a natural part of life

4.       Employees of the organization solve work problems imaginatively.

5.       This more participative leadership style is more widely applicable. In Y-Type organizations, management also involves the lower level employees in decision making hence the have sense of belonging and work with more responsibility.