Thanks for completing the Disruptive HR EACH quiz.

At Disruptive HR, we believe that treating employees as Adults, Consumers, and Human beings – what we call the EACH framework – can help you build an organisation that thrives in today’s fast-changing world. Whether you are delighted with your results or think your organisation might have some areas to improve, you might be interested in understanding more about Disruptive HR’s unique EACH framework for thinking about and delivering HR differently.

If you typically adopt a parental approach to your people, this is not unusual. Many organisations have been treating their employees like children for decades and their HR function is often a reflection of that. This means that we tend to see our employees as people who aren’t capable of doing things for themselves, who need to be protected against poor line managers or difficult news. 

Alternatively, we see them as potential rogues who are just waiting for an opportunity to damage the organisation and whom we must protect the organisation against. This parental approach can be seen in the ways in which we develop employment policies to protect against every possible eventuality or our tendency to create a rule that applies to all, when one person does something wrong rather than dealing with the individual. It can be seen in our people processes that force managers and employees to behave in certain ways or in the way we try to protect our people by hiding bad news or controlling what they hear.

The downsides of a parental approach are numerous, including:

●        You will almost certainly stifle innovation, risk taking and challenge – all of the things we need from our people in a disrupted world

●        You can never really protect your organisation from a rogue employee – you just create frustrations amongst the majority

●        You prevent managers and employees from building their judgement and problem-solving abilities because they are rarely called upon to use them

●        You won’t build a culture of trust which, research has shown, can significantly improve engagement and productivity

●        HR ends up having to police these rules rather than doing things that actually add value

Moving from a parental to an adult approach can be a bit scary, but the benefits can be huge. The questions in the diagnostic provide some clues about what you might do differently to start moving the relationship with your people to an adult one but work with these principles and it will help:

●        Start from a belief that the majority of your people want to behave decently and are capable of using their judgement

●        Develop policies that are lighter touch, focus on people applying judgement and are not designed around a rogue minority

●        Design people processes which encourage individual ownership and accountability

If your organisation typically adopts a “one-size-fits-all” approach to HR it’s no surprise when for years we have strived to develop consistent standards, reduce costs and automate.  However, the downside of this approach in HR is that we don’t recognise the different people we have working for us and can lose impact as a result. This may mean that you:

●        Are providing services that won’t “cut through” the noise and actually resonate with your people

●        May be wasting money on large, homogeneous processes that fail to meet your peoples’ differing needs

●        Won’t be able to move at the pace of the fastest and may be seen as not agile enough and unresponsive to your clients

It is worth considering what we could learn from consumer-facing organisations and how we can apply this within HR. Consumer organisations typically do three things really well:

●        They have a deep insight into their consumers

●        They recognise that we are all unique so they customise and provide greater choice

●        They involve the end-user in the design of their products and services

The benefits of applying this consumer approach to our own people are that we can tailor our HR products to cater for a range of differing needs in terms of how they learn, what motivates them, their career expectations, how they best receive and process information, how they feel valued and recognised, how they want to be led and managed, etc.

In our “human lives” we increasingly expect a customised and personalised service and we in HR need to recognise that that is what we ultimately expect at work too. Whilst we drive for cheaper, more consistent and homogenous processes, we also need to recognise that true impact will come from making our services as relevant as we can for the end-user. Whether you offer greater levels of choice, empower your line managers to use more discretion, adopt a strengths-based approach or simply endeavour to truly get to know your people better – the HR teams who are able to adopt a more consumer based approach to their people will be leading the way in a disrupted world.

Many HR functions are not designing people processes based on how humans actually think, feel, behave, communicate, learn and are intrinsically motivated.  If we did we’d have fewer bureaucratic processes, be more fluid and agile and would have increased engagement and sustained impact. 

 Human Leaders 

The latest research into what makes a great leader now tells us that traditional ‘command and control’ leaders will struggle as the pace of change and levels of disruption make it impossible for them to have all the answers. HR has a key role to play in giving leaders the confidence and ability to change their approach to one that is much more human. This might be through the approaches they take to communication, the insights they have into their team members and what works best for each, or it might simply be giving them permission to admit they don’t know – to show humility – to build greater levels of trust. HR can also do more to equip them by helping them know themselves better – their responses to stress, their anxiety buttons and the impact they have on others. We can do so much more to equip our leaders through focusing on the human dimension rather than the technical aspects of leadership.

Human HR

This section was designed to look at some of the more traditional approaches within HR that rarely reflect how humans actually behave. It’s worth spending some time thinking about how you are motivated, how you improve your performance, how you learn etc – and then question whether these traditional approaches were ever really going to work? The latest research suggests that we can make work so much more engaging if we put actual human behaviour at the heart of HR, for example:

●        Reward in ways which surprise and delight

●        Embed learning through just-in-time, self-managed resources

●        Improve performance through better conversations and focusing on the team

There are some really exciting changes going on in HR through placing the human at the heart of what we do and our approach to leadership. Maybe it’s time to experiment in your organisation?

We hope that you found this useful. If you’d like to find out more about how you can move your HR to one that treats its people like Adults, Consumers and Human beings then we’d be delighted to help. Why not share the EACH quiz with someone else?