Ten action areas critical to HR 3.0 are:
Measure employee performance continuously and transparently: Clear and continuous coaching and performance conversations are essential to proactively address workforce and performance issues. Performance is both behaviour and outcomes/results. You must know what behaviour is a priority for a start. Managers are the most critical element in this and they must know how to give constant feedback - coaching "on the fly". Managers should not be managing people if they are in the bottom 25% in emotional intelligence.
Invest in the new role of leadership: The role of leaders requires new and different skills and behaviours. Predict strong leaders with analytics and invest in their development will be key. At the C-suite, and next-level down, each leader should have a wise, experienced, commercial but behaviorally orientated coach. New leaders are results-people, coaches, team-builders and fast learners. Everyone should be aware of their strengths and those of peers.
Build and apply capabilities in agile and design thinking: HR must be equipped to help design and manage agile teams through operations, rewards, performance management, and workplace productivity tools. HR people must be able to facilitate scrums and run change initiatives.
Pay for performance - and skills - in a fair and transparent way: The old model of pay for tenure prevents growth, innovation, and hiring of top people. Increasingly Companies will "pay the person and the team" not the job. They will not use KPI's (which always get gamed) rather than actual results and behaviour. Performance reviews will be regular - ideally monthly and fast and tech-enabled with no bureaucracy. Everyone will know where they stand.
Continuously build skills: Employees and leaders must be learning all the time, with both formal and informal learning embedded in the culture, coupled with capability academies for deep skills. Leaders need to be good teachers. People learn by doing so short sharp bite-sized delivery and deployment teams focused on outcomes will be a new keyway to organise work and manage change. The hero will be amazing team leaders on whose projects everyone will want to be. Agile team structures build around dynamic projects will mean the Company needs to be great at forming and redeploying talent in an agile way - including contingent talent. I'd be surprised if gamified action learning is not part of this learning journey.
Design intentional experiences for employees: Today’s workforce expects meaningful employee experiences that are highly personalised, responsive to their needs and constantly improved. Again, project Staffing is the keyway this will be done. People will be allocated to deliver projects based on strengths and also current gaps.
Modernise your HR technology portfolio: The move to a Cloud-based, HR platform architecture enables speed, scalability and flexibility. The tech needs to allow 24/7 self-management and everyone should bring and be accountable for their own data and device. The only part of your life that is not on your phone is your work-life - that will change. No one will manage anyone else's leave, rosters, onboarding, off-boarding, pay, training records, benefits, etc. These will be managed by each person and overseen and approved but routing via their Manager. Big monolithic centralised HR systems have no place - sorry SAP, Workday, and the others. Payroll will be simple and fast and approved by Managers.
Apply data-driven insights: People analytics are now essential to understanding, managing, and continuously improving organisational performance. This will include things like dynamic and regular 360's and everyday NPS.
Reorient and reskill your HR business partners: HR must act as strategic advisors, trusted coaches, and data-driven problem solvers. They will be likely top 10% in emotional intelligence and top 25% in IQ. Both should be measured. This is a biggie. HR people will need to be the best coaches in the Company, awesome communicators, very influential will need to know how the company makes money, know the impact of costs, margins and revenue on business results, and have customer exposure. They are in the numbers business but also the behavior business. They are unlikely to have an "HR career" as their skills are also the ones you need in the best line managers. Clearly, the pay of about 15% of highly skilled HR people will dramatically increase and the other "transactional 85%" will pretty much disappear as the tech will manage it.
Source talent strategically: Top talent can come from novel sources, so companies must look inside and outside to find the best hires to remain competitive. Most likely the relationship with future employees and strategic contingent partners begins well before they are hired or engaged. Live and dynamic talent pooling and curation is the likely future of talent acquisition.
I'm not even sure there will be an HR function per se because the valuable capabilities skills of coaching, customer engagement, facilitating, influencing, presenting, team management, people engagement, and learning will actually be endemic and the most critical skills required in all levels of management. In that sense, the HR Department is actually the whole Company. Everyone in the Company will be about customers, people and cash.
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