Most HR professionals are eager to learn new things. We study techniques for training, recruitment, compensation and so on. These are all important topics, but they have been around for decades. It can be interesting—and a good career move—to build expertise in less mature HR topics. If you pick a subject where there is no textbook and no college course then you have a chance not to learn from experts but to be the expert.
In this article I mention four topics where there are still a lot of unknowns and that means there is a lot of opportunity to discover better ways of doing things. Following the best practices of other companies is not enough in this area, you have to create your own best practices—that’s an interesting challenge for an ambitious HR leader.
Four Underdeveloped HR Topics There are many underdeveloped topics in HR, but here are four that spring to mind.
• Web 2.0 is an area that is rich with promise; the term includes tools like wikis, blogs, social networking and prediction markets. Web 2.0 is all about getting people to work in groups and that’s a great area for HR to investigate.
• Contingent workers are not a new phenomenon but is an area where HR practices are underdeveloped. Unlike Web 2.0 which is still experimental, the contingent workforce is already a large expense in most organizations; progress in this area has an immediate payback. What is striking is that HR has invested an enormous amount of effort in how to recruit, reward, train, and motivate permanent employees; whereas relatively little effort has been put into getting the best out of contingent workers. Learning how to manage the total workforce (permanent and contingent workers) is an area rich with promise.
• Analytics is another area where HR leaders can break new ground. Analytics just means doing some analysis of data; for example, if you analyse employee performance by source of hire you can find out which source of hire gives the best employees. There is a lot of data in HR systems these days but very few companies have developed skills at getting useful insights out of that data. Pick up Thomas Davenport’s book Competing on Analytics and you’ll see this is an exciting new area to explore.
• Virtual Teams, where team members are in different locations, are becoming the norm rather than the exception. Right now I’m on a team with a top business magazine, a large consulting company and a niche PR firm. I’ve never met any of the people on the team but we can still work effectively together. Virtual teams are becoming so important that developing expertise in what makes them successful will be a great aid to your organization.
Reading, Investigation, and Action Learning There are three things you can do to build expertise in one of these underdeveloped areas: reading, investigation and action learning.
Reading is the obvious first step. There is a lot written even on the most obscure topics and thanks to the internet articles are easy to find. But this is just a way of getting started, at this point you are just picking up existing knowledge, not creating new knowledge.
Investigation is the next step. Find out what is already happening in your organization on your topic. For example if you are interested in contingent workers it’s easy to go around and talk to managers who use large numbers of contingent workers and develop your own ideas about best practices.
Action learning is where you work on a project in one of these areas specifically to build understanding. Perhaps you create on-boarding programs specifically for contingent workers or launch a social networking site to reinforce the company culture. This is probably the best method for developing new insights.
Angry Advocate or Quiet Advisor It’s worth mentioning that you probably won’t get an official mandate to become an expert in some underdeveloped area. This is something you need to pursue on your own. If you want to learn about how the manufacturing department uses analytics don’t wait for the organization to arrange an official meeting, take the initiative and invite a manufacturing manager out to lunch.
Once you have educated yourself on a topic it is natural to become an enthusiastic proponent of the subject and urge managers to try it out. This is natural but it may not be the best strategy. Busy managers are not eager to try out someone’s pet ideas. Enthusiasts often end up angry because no one wants to take advantage of their new expertise.
The best strategy is to talk to managers about problems and opportunities. When you really understand their situation then you will eventually find situations where your newfound knowledge genuinely is of use. If you are working to address their need, rather than working to promote your area of interest, then you will be much more successful.
David Creelman is CEO of Creelman Research.
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