The third evolution of HR

HR has been through a number of stages since its humble beginnings in the 1950’s and 60’s. For those of you who are as old as me, you’ll remember our early days as ‘personnel officers’. We were seen as the place for employees to go if they needed support. Our main skill set was employee relations, and we were focused on sorting out problems – usually with a significant amount of admin! Our influence of the business and our leaders was minimal and the idea that we could be on the board or exec team would have been laughable.

Strategic Business Partners

Our second evolution came in the late 90’s when we were introduced to the concept of ‘strategic business partners’. Overnight we were told that our role was not to provide tea and sympathy to our employees, and instead we should be a key member of the senior team, influencing our leaders to manage people properly. I think that many of the issues we have today in HR stem from this period. The transformation from ‘Personnel’ to ‘Strategic HR’ was often made without changing or upskilling the people in those roles. They had been trained in administration, process and policy and they brought this mindset to their new positions. Over the course of the 90’s and into the new millennium, HR became awash with processes as the way to change behaviour or improve people performance. Whilst we occasionally did get that seat at the executive table, it’s debatable whether we built up any real influence with our leaders. And sadly, we often lost our reputation as the function that really cared about employees. Our numbers were reduced. We outsourced many of our functions. We invested in cumbersome HR systems that only worked if you applied one-size-fits-all processes in order to streamline. Our alignment to our leaders meant that we were often seen more as the ‘lackey’ of our leaders. Doing their bidding at the expense of the interests of employees.

Thankfully, those first and second evolutions are drawing to a close and we are now in the third evolution of HR.

Not just a change of title

Of course, a new title is part and parcel of our next iteration, and we are now known as the Chief People Officer, Head of Employee Experience, or the People and Culture Team. Whilst these new titles are welcome – what’s more exciting is how we are changing our approach. Our primary purpose is no longer just to serve employees or support managers. Our purpose now is to enable people to their best work. To create the conditions where our people can be more agile, more productive or more innovative. Our key skillset is no longer employee relations or process implementation. Instead our key skills are around the development of tailored solutions based on insights into what our people need and want, supported by the intelligent application of human-centred products.

Let’s take the example of say, onboarding through these three evolutions and see how our approach has changed.

In our first evolution – the personnel phase – we would have delivered onboarding sessions for every employee. In our second as strategic business partners, we would have created an onboarding process, a mandatory onboarding training programme for managers and then monitored compliance. In our third evolution, our starting point is – ‘how do we want our people to feel during onboarding?’ – to shape our thinking. We create a range of onboarding options designed around the different types of people who are joining us. We provide ‘nudges’ to hiring managers to help them think about the key things they need to do on day one or in the first week, such as get the new hire a buddy. We ask new hires to help us create the onboarding approach for the next cohort. We focus on the outcomes we’d like to see from onboarding and then provide digital tools to enable our people to do it for themselves. We focus less on telling people stuff and more on helping them feel welcomed and confident. We see onboarding as an opportunity to find out more about them.

Finally, this third evolution of HR is transforming the influence we have in the business. It now matters less whether we have a seat at the top table or not, because our credibility comes through our understanding of the business and providing solutions that are based around actual human beings, not compliance with our processes.

So let’s welcome this third evolution of HR; focused on enabling people to do their best work through insight-driven and tailored solutions.