How to add and create value in both strategic and people-centric HR

Welcome to my newsletter on multi-sided HR. In this edition, I explore how practitioners can create new value for their business and workforce by going beyond what other leaders and employees and other workers say they need, understanding what might be possible, and delivering on that.

I’ve had to have another break in my newsletter publishing, but I’m back to it again, and will start this new edition with a short summary on my earlier thinking which I’ve shared previously. I’ll then move on to new content on some of the actions that practitioners can take to deliver on the opportunities I’m describing.

Strategic and People-Centric HR

HR is still progressing towards a more strategic future. However, more recently our focus has shifted towards being more people-centric. This has included increased attention to wellbeing during the pandemic, and an ongoing concern for employees’ experience/s at work. There are a lot of other new things in HR as well, but most of these support one of both of these two perspectives.

Multi-sided HR refers to the idea that we need to be both strategic and people-centric, and see people as both the basis for a company’s strategic success, and also an end customer of what we provide - although I suggest this needs to go well beyond what we deliver under employee experience today.

It leads us to shape organisations around both the business but also groups and individuals within the workforce. And it’s more about helping people shape and meet their desired outcomes than it is about the journeys they follow to get there. This can be seen by thinking about the value we provide.

Three Levels of Value

In any area of life or work, we can deliver value at any of three levels. Firstly, we can just meet the basic requirements (‘value for money’). Secondly, we can ensure we really understand what is needed and provide that (‘adding value’). And thirdly, we can seek to go beyond what is being asked for, and add new, unanticipated value in what we provide ('creating value').

In strategic HR, these three levels often focus respectively on basic compliance and efficiency (VfM), supporting business objectives (AV) and accumulating people and organisation capability to help a business set new or more stretching goals (CV). This means, in contrast with much thinking on ‘strategic HR’, that we are only ever truly strategic when we focus on the potential inherent in people and the organisation, and not when were’ just supporting the rest of the business to meet its operational, customer or financial needs.

In people-centric HR, the levels equate to basic safety and experience (E-VfM), helping someone deliver on their performance objectives (E-AV), and helping them meet their own goals for some transformation in their wellbeing (E-CV). Adding and creating value for employees will help a business succeed, but we’re not doing this for a direct business benefit as that would make the approach business or people-centred (in newsletter 11, I suggested an analogy of a circumstellar planet), not people-centric (or circumbinary) and would reduce the impact of what we do.

Each level of value is valuable (hence the term!), but the higher the level, generally the greater the impact.

Delivering at higher levels of strategic and particularly people-centric HR will be challenging – and most organisations won’t be able to, or won’t want to do this – I’m just trying to show where I think HR is going to have to go. (I see my suggestions on people-centric HR as a bit like where HR was in the 1990s when we started talking about becoming strategic.)

However, lifting our focus to higher levels of people-centricity is also important now. Many organisations are making huge investments in employee experience and I’m not sure we understand the limited value these are providing, compared to the increased value from acting at higher levels of value, potentially without that much more effort to do so.

Adding and Creating Value

I’ll have more to write about this later, but even just in newsletter 17, it’s possible to see some specific ways in which HR can act at the higher levels of value, to meet existing and and create new opportunities for both the business and employees.

These are generally separate conversations (about strategy, with other business leaders; and about the person’s needs and wants, with each individual), but I see both sides following the same basic flow involving four main stages:

🔷 Listening

HR’s been focused on understanding business needs for a few decades now, and personally, I think we’ve got quite good at this. [AV and CV✔]

More recently, the increased focus on employee listening in order to improve employee experience has been very useful. We can build on this. However, rather than just asking about experience with business, organisation or HR touchpoints, or the way that life events are experienced with the organisation, we need to ask about the person’s ability to deliver for the business [E-AV✔], and their personal needs, as well as how these are being supported by and within the organisation [E-CV✔].

🔷🔷 Pitching

Once we understand existing needs, we need to pitch to other business leaders to support organisational outcomes which would be useful for the business, and to provide the sponsorship, time and budget, etc. This applies particularly to the opportunity to create value for the business (CV✔) where we need to propose particular organisation capabilities, based on our understanding of what might be possible, and discuss together the business benefits these might provide. (As I described in my last Linkedin article, it’s unlikely there will be any good data or analytics we can use to reinforce these links.)

Please note that this isn’t about HR going off on it’s own agenda. It’s firmly focused on the business, but sees business success as an indirect impact of what we can achieve with people, rather than the driver of what we do with people. As Dave Ulrich says, value is perceived by the receiver of a service, not the provider - however, for me at least, a provider can still propose what the service should be. (More relevant quotes might be Henry Ford’s comment on his customers wanting a faster horse, or Steve Jobs’ challenges on stated customer requirements, and his ability to infer their real needs.)

We don’t need to pitch the benefits of transformation to employees, although many organisations will need to develop higher levels of trust for people to want to participate in the type of conversations which will enable this focus. However, we will, once again, need to pitch to other business leaders for their support in more people-centric approaches, and especially(!) in enabling employee transformation (E-CV✔).

🔷🔷🔷 Planning

This stage also isn’t new, but in strategic HR, we still need to focus on organisation outcomes / capabilities more than we do, and then identify the actions which will provide these outcomes.

In people-centric HR, we need to look at two main things. Firstly, what are the consistent personal needs across the workforce which we can partly need together / centrally. And secondly, how do we develop the organisation to enable more of people’s more unique personal needs to also be met.

As I’ve previously suggested (in newsletter 10), many of the actions we will need to take will support both strategic and people-centric HR. However, some will be just strategic and others just people-centric and it will be important that we remember which of these a particular activity is (I’m developing a template for this which I’ll share with you in a later newsletter).

🔷🔷🔷🔷 Facilitation and Implementation

Once we’ve developed a plan, we obviously need to implement it, and, particularly in a more people-centric environment, support other business leaders and line managers to have the personally supportive conversations they’ll need to have (not all of this can be done by AI), and to understand how they can adapt and personalise centrally driven processes to better meet the individual needs of those working in their areas.

 More on all of this most weeks from now on, but I really do need your help in trying to articulate HR’s mulit-sided future – so please let me know what you think…

Jon Ingham

Strategic HR Academy

Picture credit: Wikimedia Commons

Janus,_from_Illustrium_imagines,_1517.svg