In HR we are always striving to follow best practice. We learn about SMART goals and teach managers to use them. We study structured interviewing and strive to put it into practice. Yet, do you ever feel a sense of unease that what is best practice today may be irrelevant in the future?
HR has seen a few cases where well-established practices have become outdated. In the 1960s large organizations had whole departments doing workforce planning. No doubt they pursued the best practices of the time, but the whole approach of meticulously predicting manpower needs was eventually abandoned. As the speed of change increased companies found their workforce forecasts too inaccurate to be useful (see Peter Cappelli’s Talent On-Demand).
In the 1970s companies devoted a great deal of effort to job analysis. This involved analysing the duties of a job and the skills needed to carry it out. Analysis usually resulted in a long and detailed job description. The job description would, among other things, become the key document in a time consuming job evaluation process. This made sense as long as jobs stayed the same for a long time. However, thanks to rapid change, organizations found that a job analysis was often out-of-date shortly after it was completed. Job analysis hasn’t disappeared altogether, but it is a shadow of its former self.
The nagging question is, to what extent are we focusing today’s efforts on perfecting management approaches that will soon be outdated? Are we failing to work on inventing something truly new?
The intelligentsia think the truly new thing will be a much flatter, more loosely governed organization; an organization characterized by ad hoc self-managed teams, rather than disciplined hierarchies. This set of ideas often goes under the label “Enterprise 2.0”. When people talk about Enterprise 2.0 they are talking about white collar jobs, not production lines, but it still could be an important change.
In an Enterprise 2.0 environment some of the biggest changes from HR’s point of view will be the diminishing role of the job and of the boss. Static jobs will barely exist, individuals will move frequently from project to project, taking on whatever tasks they have the skills to handle. The manager who oversees Enterprise 2.0 employees will probably not hire, fire or assess performance without extensive input from the whole team.
There is a lot of room for interesting discussion about whether Enterprise 2.0 really is the way of the future and if so what it will be like. Certainly, HR people should be taking a lead on having these kinds of conversations.
But important as this is, it doesn’t adequately address our original concern that we are devoting all our efforts to perfecting elements of the old management model instead of preparing for the new. Furthermore, you can’t prepare for the new just by thinking hard about it. The only way to learn is by experimentation.
Experimentation is most likely to be driven, not by HR, but by a manager who finds that the existing system isn’t working. If an existing system is too slow or inflexible or lacks creativity then he or she will try to innovate a way around those problems. HR’s role is not to initiate experimentation but be supportive of it.
Sadly, in some cases HR seems to be the department most likely to try to squash experimentation. They are often seen as the corporate police saying “No, you can’t do that.”
For HR the real key is to distinguish experimentation from non-compliance. If a manager fails to set SMART goals, is that because they are lazy or because they feel, perhaps subconsciously, that such goals are not relevant to their business? HR should be on the look out for managers who fail to comply with the ‘normal’ way of doing things and judge whether these managers are in fact creating innovative management practices. As much as possible HR should give managers the benefit of the doubt and explicitly label what is going on as an action learning experiment. Experimentation should be encouraged and consciously learned from.
Companies that are friendly towards experimentation are more likely to find themselves easing into an Enterprise 2.0 mould well before their competitors. HR must commit to aiding this process instead of being the biggest barrier.
David Creelman is CEO of Creelman Research, providing writing, research and commentary on human-capital management. He works with a variety of academics, think tanks, consultancies and HR vendors in the U.S., Japan, Canada and China.
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