The first day of the CIPD’s Festival of Work centred on HR’s positioning as a catalyst for change as the scale of the Covid pandemic’s impact on culture, how we work and engage each other begins to be appreciated.
For US author, consultant, innovator and HR podcast creator Lars Schmidt, the way people have been working during the pandemic is not really covered by the term “remote working” but by the term “survival”.
“We were forced into this situation,” he said. “Instead of saying how Covid moved us into remote work we need to say how Covid forced us to work at the same time as just living,” with many of seeing a collision between work pressures and caring responsibilities for children and older people.
Schmidt emphasised that people’s experiences of working in this manner were entirely individual, which meant that HR should be looking to personalise its responses in terms of communication, training and messages.
In HR we have to be able to think differently and inclusively. These things don’t just happen … we have to realise that the system is designed for those already in power – white males basically. Rooting out systemic inequities is one of the most important aspects of HR now” – Lars Schmidt
Herculean effort
HR’s success in at least supporting the move to the new way of working was “Herculean” he told delegates, referring to figures from consultancy McKinsey which showed that such a move to remote working would have been expected to take 454 days in the pre-pandemic world, but had actually taken organisations only 10 days on average.
Traditionally, command and control characterises how organisations were run, with organisational hierarchy determining how businesses structured themselves, Schmidt said. But the pandemic had enabled a different mindset to come to the fore, one which shone a light on the need for collaborative organisational models, which put the onus on clarity, communication and community. For these models to function properly co-creation must be core to the employee experience. “We have to design with employees not ‘for’ employees”, he said, with community embedded into how the organisation operates.
Hybrid models, which formed part of these, were very difficult to judge, said Schmidt, because every company would need its own hybrid model to suit its own employees.
The digital evolution was a key enabler of the move to collaborative models. Here, again, work by McKinsey was cited by Schmidt. This suggested that companies needed to “field tomorrow’s leaders today”, flatten the structure, speed up and delegate decision making, rethink the role of CEOs and all leaders and, learn how to learn.
Companies with flatter structures were more agile, he said. But in response to a question from a delegate, he conceded it wasn’t always easy to convince organisations of the need for this because some people felt their titles conferred a kind of perceived authority.
HR, he said, could now play a role in this transformation thanks partly to the pandemic. It was at the forefront of all the changes taking place and was helping to map the future so it needed to appreciate that this was the time for a system reboot.
HR was not always seen as progressive and innovative, said Schmidt. A legacy mindset still persisted in HR, characterised by deference to a command and control model, “black box silos”, thinking in terms of diversity as opposed to equity and inclusion, and policies based on the behaviour of a few people that restricted creativity and increased bureaucracy.
Schmidt cited figures showing that 20% of HR organisations were legacy departments, associated with words such as “reactive,” “personnel”, “transactional” and “fixed mindset”.
About 70% of HR teams were, however, competent, tactical and forward looking with 10% being modern, open, inclusive, decentralising and empowering. They had policies for the many, not policies based around prohibiting the behaviours of a minority. And business acumen trumped HR acumen, he added.
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Command and control policy was certainly a sign of a legacy mindset, he argued, one in which authorisation and approval was seen as pathways to power. Schmidt said this “pissed off our employees and our leaders lost faith with HR – there were too many processes for the sake of having processes; we got a bad rap for this.”
Equity and inclusion
Schmidt spoke powerfully on the subject of inclusion. The past year had seen a reckoning with racism and social injustice, he said. “In HR we have to be able to think differently and inclusively. These things don’t just happen … we have to realise that the system is designed for those already in power – white males basically. Rooting out systemic inequities is one of the most important aspects of HR now.”
However, one of the biggest “seismic shifts” from legacy to modern HR concerned what Schmidt called “black box silos”. People in more modern HR teams were no longer looking at what the company “had always done” to address issues but to use resources and communities from outside their own employment for learning and ideas.
What 2020-21 should have told businesses, Schmidt concluded, was that “we’re all messy humans” who didn’t always say or do the right thing. We’d been reminded how vulnerable and fallible we were. But as long as we recognised this and were more open and truthful then employers and employees could engage more positively.
We were not engaged in a zero sum game: “We have the capacity to collaborate and both win.”
Earlier at the conference, London Business School finance professor Alex Edmans told delegates that a “purposeful” business sought to create profits only through creating value for society. He argued that long-term profits were dependent on treating stakeholders well, paying employees well, and not polluting the environment.
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While many speakers focused on how leaders should alter policies and their own behaviour, Peck Ke Low, CHRO and adviser, Singapore Public Service Division, reminded us that leaders were in the same boat as all of us and that leading by example was not only the preserve of people high up in organisations. “We expect a lot from senior people,” she said. “We treat them like cobblers’ children – we expect them to care for everyone but they go around barefoot. We need to take care of them. It is so gratifying for them to know they are appreciated and it gives them energy.”
