From its inception as a safeguard to just employee labor practices, HR has undergone a major evolution to become the strategic partner to business success it is now. If one thing has remained steady in the HR function, it’s that change is always just around the corner.
As managing consultant at LandrumHR, a full-service provider of HR services, Justine Carroll has seen her fair share of change and differing strategies. She spoke shares her insights on how the HR profession has evolved, where she sees it going and tactics to handle the change.
How has HR’s primary role changed?
Human resources has changed significantly from its origins. Essentially rising out of necessity during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when employee populations were feeling the pressure of unfair labor practices which had long been a part of the industrialization era, many American workers were looking for change, and specifically improved labor practices and conditions.
Of course, at the time, while most employers wanted to keep the status quo, a few organizations were starting to consider long-term how to address employee strikes, walkouts and other safety issues-ultimately giving rise to HR departments.
Then, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972 created significant changes specific to discrimination and harassment laws. And by the 1980s, HR began getting the stereotypical image of being sent to the “principal’s office.”
In recent years, we’ve seen HR shrink from large teams with subject-matter specialists in payroll, benefits, leave and employee relations, to one or two people that may or may not have experience in those varied areas.
So what’s next for HR? The rise of value. We’re seeing astute and resourceful organizations evolving their HR groups into critical business partners that help their organizations outperform competitors by hiring, engaging and growing their employees, creating avenues to retain the best talent for their workforce.
In the present and fast-paced business industry of today, HR should be aligning and collaborating with the C-Suite to support long-term business goals by being a key player in creating and retaining competitive advantage internally. HR professionals should be leveraging their knowledge of people, how to attract them, motivate and engage them. This is not the principal’s office or compliance officer of before, this is setting your people and your business up for long term, sustainable success.
To do that, HR needs to shift their focus away from the strictly tactical, the punitive rule-following and focus on what makes the organization more robust, engaging and agile to meet long term goals of both its people and its business goals. The multiple generations of employees in the workforce have greater expectations of what they want out of the organization they work for and HR needs to be prepared to meet those evolving needs.
At the top of that list is always culture. Culture cannot just be about mission statements and slogans on the wall. Real and impactful culture is about creating avenues to engagement and collaboration with your employees, it’s about reflecting what the employees of your organization are seeking and finding a middle ground for their needs and the needs of the organization. HR’s job is to identify what that is and help create a path to get there.
Organizations can’t start with the idea of culture—they need to start with the goal or problem their trying to solve. They need to define what success will look like and why it will matter to the organization and their people. It’s about the employee experience, and that employee well-being drives productivity, enhances communication and creates contagious success.
Employee sustainability—their well-being, purpose and career opportunities—have a direct impact on the success of the organization. This new HR has an opportunity to prioritize the employee experience, and by virtue of those improvements, improve their organization’s own competitive advantage.
It will take time, but the organizations that create a new employee experience will elevate employee engagement and unlock greater success for their organization to become a more agile model for the future.
How can HR leaders tackle the generational diversity of workforce planning?
For one of the first times in U.S. history, five generations are working together in companies across all industries. Every few years, a new generation with its own unique set of traits, priorities and values enters our microcosms of work, bringing disruption and innovation of ideas. As HR leaders, it’s important we strive to appreciate and understand these differences to harness the positive attributes of each generation on our workplace environments.
As a leader in an organization, it’s not enough to acknowledge that generational differences exist. We need to focus on areas to unite within the workforce, to maximize each generation’s strength and not just accommodate the different mindsets, but also enrich our workforce through them.
This can be done in a variety of ways, though cross generational mentoring, creating new opportunities for communication by building environments that encourage meaningful connection and creating a work community. It’s important to know that their respective methods of communication are just as important as the language used in those circumstances.
Recognizing different cultural references, minimizing corporate speak and leaving room for your organization’s vernacular for all generations to engage in is critical to minimizing disconnection and misunderstandings. Having a variety of mediums of communication is essential to encouraging and developing ongoing and unrestricted communication, using text, IM, email, Zoom or telephone to communicate helps each generation to connect in the manner their generation is most comfortable.
Communication failures have a high cost of morale, unnecessary conflict or complaints. Don’t make the mistake of stereotyping by age or generations, we’re still talking about people with unique experiences and knowledge that they are bringing to your workplace.
Culture, or better explained as community, in an organization begins with a shared identity. The greater the variety in our workforce populations with different generations education, economics, outlooks and behaviors, the more varied and valuable our workforce is. Transformational leaders who can recognize and capitalize on the unique characteristics each generation brings will have long-term tangible success with their organizations.
How has career planning and pathing changed and what are you doing to address it?
Career pathing used to be only one direction: An employee climbed the ladder up to be a manager and strove for the corner office. An employee inherently starts at the bottom of pay, status and prestige and step by step, position by position, an employee trudges towards the top.
But as workplaces have changed, so has the definition of growth and success. In the 1990s and early 2000s, HR began to see a two-tiered ladder approach in some industries, one was technical and one was managerial, but still it was a laddered method.
Over the past two to five years, we’ve begun to see the emergence of a new career planning approach, the career network, more of a grid or web of job opportunities that create and foster new ideas, skills sets and career prospects. It creates diversity of thought and experiences that allows individuals who have exceptional skills in certain areas who never want to manage a team or people to continue to grow, upskill and succeed.
A secondary upside to this new way of thinking about career development is that it has a measurable impact attracting and engaging new talent. It’s also an alternative avenue for a company to increase retention and keep their best employees by offering other meaningful opportunities to stay with an organization rather than leave.
It creates a varied succession plan that generates depth of talent in multiple areas. When designed thoughtfully and well, it is an incredibly powerful tool for empowering employees to craft their future successes in a manner that supports their long-term goals and the businesses objectives as well.
