Managers in the Middle: The Disconnect Between Managers and HR

 

I don’t think many folks would disagree these days that employee experience is an important pillar of business success, but there’s one group of employees who may not be feeling the vibe and that’s managers.  Around all the recent hype about the great resignation, there’s also a mounting body of evidence that managers as a sub-group are increasingly overwhelmed and dissatisfied. 

For example, research from Visier found that typical resignation patterns have changed over the last two years, with larger percentages of senior – and more costly to replace - employees leaving than previously.  Reasons cited include pay, family obligations, and burn out caused by the expanded scope of manager responsibilities.

We all know the old adage that people leave managers not companies, and HR has led the charge on giving employees a voice and holding managers accountable for engaging and developing their team.  While the impact this has had on weeding out poor leaders is unclear, at least there is now attention on the critical importance of quality leadership.  On the flip side, however, the ever-growing list of responsibilities and sometimes conflicting expectations puts a burden on ‘good’ managers that’s increasingly difficult to carry.

A fascinating survey from Humu on manager v. HR priorities found a complete disconnect in what each group considers to be manager priorities.  Whereas managers are focused on ensuring their teams are appropriately staffed and able to complete their work without burning out, HR priorities read more like a board meeting presentation with buzzwords like ‘agility’ and ‘transformation.’ 

Leaving aside the question of why HR is so poorly aligned with team leaders who execute their strategic priorities on a day-to-day basis, what’s really going on here?  HR priorities reflect C-level priorities, which are at times out of touch with the rest of the business and fail to provide a clear roadmap for success.

Increasingly, managers are caught between the rock of having to deliver concrete business results and the hard place of being expected to individually nurture, develop and engage each member of their team.  At first glance there doesn’t seem to be any contradiction here because high performance, professional growth and high engagement should go hand in hand.

You’d think, but it doesn’t always play out like that.  An recent HBR article Managers Can’t Do It All paints a picture of a beleaguered manager trying to execute on executive priorities like agility and transformation with over-extended direct reports and shrinking control over her team’s work and outcomes.  To cap her feeling of overwhelm and failure, she gets a negative engagement survey from her team, who are – like her – frustrated by things outside of her control.

To that manager, her work experience might look something like this:

1. In the calibration meeting, her boss overrules her performance review for one of the members on her team.

 2. This leads to a difficult conversation with her employee because she doesn’t agree with the assessment but has to act as if she does.

3. When HR roles out the engagement survey, disgruntled employees who feel underappreciated express their dissatisfaction.

4. In the follow up debrief with HR, the manager feels attacked on all sides and put in an unwinnable situation.

This is an exaggerated scenario, and we can all think of ways the manager could have reacted more appropriately in each situation.  Nonetheless, in addition to managing outcomes managers are now also on the hook for feelings, which are subjective and influenced by multiple factors that are outside a manager’s direct control. 

Of course, any leader has to cope with factors that can’t be directly controlled but there’s a golden ratio of control v. non-control that continues to widen for middle managers with each new strategic initiative. The result is like a club sandwich in which executives, employees, and HR are the bread and managers are squeezed in the middle like wilted lettuce. 

Added to all this, the rise of hybrid and remote work has made the manager job even more demanding and complex as they try to navigate a new communication and leadership paradigm.  According to this Fast Company article about manager burnout, being accountable for their team’s performance, wellbeing and engagement makes managers less likely to unplug and thus more vulnerable to burnout than other employee groups. 

This is an opportunity for HR to align with this mission critical employee group and provide much-needed active support for manager priorities like combating team burnout, retaining talent, hiring, and onboarding – so managers can focus on coaching and developing their teams, and also take the time they need to recharge. 

How can HR better support managers? Here are a few ways:

·      Provide direct support for manager pain points – Managers have an important role to play, but it lies within HR’s remit to provide recruiting and administrative support for hiring managers, as well as a smooth onboarding experience for new hires.  

·      Help managers develop their teams - Providing personalized, on-demand training modules will enable people to learn efficiently while managing time and workloads more effectively.

·      Equip managers for flexible work arrangements – Increased flexibility can help improve engagement and productivity out but leading remote or hybrid teams requires new skills and communication styles so it’s essential to make sure leaders are ready for the challenge.

·      Have a transparent job level and pay structure – Offering a comprehensive career and rewards roadmap won’t magically make performance and development discussions easy but will help managers have more productive conversations.

·      Encourage meeting free days - Remote work has resulted in more meetings than ever and it’s time for a reset. To learn more about the impact of meetings and busy work on mental health and business performance, check out this short video Finding Your Flow in the Post-Pandemic World of Work. 

To conclude, managers tend to get lumped in with employees when it comes to mental health and engagement strategies, but they face unique challenges that put them at heightened risk of burnout or flight. Left unattended, companies risk alienating this critical and expensive to replace talent segment.

Find Your Flow and Avoid Burnout in the Post-Pandemic World of Work

Today's article is about the hidden costs of flow killers at work in terms of mental health and organisational performance, and how HR can lead the charge on minimizing distractions and improving flow across the business.

Flow is a mental state in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed with a feeling of energized focus, full involvement and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In fact, when we talk about how engaged employees do their work, we’re basically talking about flow state.

Given the positive impact of flow on engagement and performance, why is the modern workplace plagued by so many avoidable flow busters?  Why do people spend 60% of their time on busy work, or work about work, instead of... well... actual work?

What do we mean by busy work?  It's stuff like replying to endless email threads, sitting in unnecessary meetings, chasing colleagues for input or suport, waiting for approvals, searching for information, or compiling information from different sources into new formats.

Interruptions and delays have a cumulative effect. First there’s the loss of focus, and the time (23 minutes) it takes to refocus. This can have a knock-on effect of creating more delays or unwanted downtime. The lost time has an opportunity cost that can be calculated.

 

Harder to calculate but still important is that it’s demotivating to be delayed or prevented from making progress, and constant interruptions are exhausting.  So, from a mental health perspective this is concerning, especially with so many people working remotely.

Technology has enabled organizations to digitalize and automate processes, but an average employee switches between job-critical applications as many as 1,100 times every day, or about every 36 seconds.  How much quality work  gets done in 36 seconds?

Technology has helped organisations digitalize but has also had the unintended consequence of turbocharging busy work.  And Corona - or more specifically, remote work - exacerbated this trend because organizations adopted more technology to meet and collaborate remotely.

On the one hand, remote work has a positive impact on productivity because it removes commuting (and in some cases, putting on pants) from the equation. But what about flow?  Here it gets a little muddy, because for many people there are various distractions at home, such as having your kindergarten close.

According to a recent study from MIT, knowledge workers spend more than 85% of their time in meetings, resulting in lower productivity and satisfaction, and less effective collaboration. 

Whereas removing 60% of meetings and replacing them with more targeted communication and project management tools increased cooperation by 55% and improved employees’ psychological, physical, and mental well-being.

One more thing to bear in mind is that meeting via conferencing tools can also lead to a state of online fatigue, which resembles an early stage of burnout.  The upshot is that remote work has many benefits but doesn't necessarily improve flow, and we have an opportunity to rethink culture, leadership, and how work gets done.

When remote work was new, most companies moved what they used to do online with new tools.  It worked well enough and got us over the hump, but people are tired and not necessarily able to do their best work because quality work requires focused attention. 

We can’t eliminate meetings, distractions, and interruptions but we can be smarter in our approach. We can, for example, control how much time we spend in meetings, on busy work, or switching between applications. We can take steps to limit interruptions and bake flow into our culture.

HR thinks critically about employee wellbeing, engagement and performance, and flow is a critical ingredient for all three.  HR can play a key role improving flow across the business by creating organizational awareness, developing leaders to minimize distractions, and partnering with key stakeholders to maximize flow in work design.

If you'd like to learn more about these areas of opportunity for HR to improve organizational flow check out this short talk about Flow at Work on YouTube.

 

https://youtu.be/iSRm7QE9yJ8

To conclude, there are enough distractions in the world and in the workplace and we can’t remove all of them, but we can be smarter and more intentional about how we work and how we use technology at work.

Resilient HR, Resilient Company

Why does HR still struggle to find the right balance between administration and strategy? 

How can HR continue to build its influence and drive strategy in the post-Corona workplace?

Where can I find the answers without reading a long blog post?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF3jpuQf6TE

Navigating the Four-Day Work Week

‘Can I work part-time?’

As a team lead and hiring manager I hear this question a lot, now that the four-day workweek is a ‘thing’ – and for the right candidate it’s a no-brainer.

via GIPHY

I consider myself as a four-day workweek pioneer, blazing a part-time trail before it was cool.  It started when I was returning from maternity leave. I wanted to work part-time but was confident I could handle the demands of the role in fewer hours. 

I felt a bit nervous asking the hiring manager, but his answer surprised me: ‘I love part-team people.  They cost less, waste less time, and work harder.’

I accepted the offer and ended up doing two full-time roles in twenty hours a week, which was possible because the team culture supported me and we had top notch collaboration tools.

Now I pay it forward, not because it’s trendy to offer a four-day work week, or even because multiple four-day work week experiments have shown higher productivity and engagement.  It's because being flexible gives me access to some amazingly talented people who can effectively manage their time and deliver key results faster.

There’s a flip side, of course: skipped team lunches, minimal time for networking, leaving earlier than everyone else, missing meetings, etc.  But all that can be managed though proper expectations setting and proactive communication. 

If being available and ‘being seen’ are prioritized at your company, you may not be ready to accommodate part-time people in leadership or high visibility roles.  That’s fine but you may be missing out on some great talent, or paying people to focus on non-mission critical tasks.

Is a four-day work week right for your team or company? 

First let’s look at the benefits:

• Access to talent – A growing number of senior professionals prefer part-time opportunities because their expertise makes them highly efficient.
• Employer band – Making flexible work schedules and part time opportunities part of your employer brand will help you attract the best people.
• Mental health – Having afternoons free or one day off provides space to manage one’s personal life with less stress.
• Lower salary costs – While subject to negotiation, part-time professionals may accept a lower salary in exchange for flexibility, plus salaries are typically prorated by hours worked. 
• Engagement – Taking a bit of time away from work and work-related emails has a beneficial head clearing effect that increases engagement.
• Productivity - Embracing a shorter work week creates an opportunity to rethink processes and workflows to make them more efficient.

Now let’s look at a couple of caveats because a four-day work week isn’t for everyone:

• Right role – A four-day work week shouldn’t necessitate hiring extra personnel, which is why creative, strategic, or even leadership roles may work better than customer service or 'bottleneck' roles that others depend on.  
• Right experience – Someone with little job experience may need the five days to learn the ropes – in my first management role I worked about 60 hours a week but quite a bit of that was figuring stuff out.
• Right level of maturity – The four-day model works best with people who know how to manage their time and key stakeholders - a certain amount of finesse and experience are required.
• Right manager – If your company's managers learned most of what they know about leadership in the 90s this model is probably not for you.  
• Not everyone wants it!  According to recent EU stats most people are still looking for full-time work, either out of habit or for the higher earning potential.

The corporate world isn't yet ready for a universal four-day work week, but you can pilot the idea and get most of the benefits by: 1) offering it where it makes sense; and 2) supporting the arrangement with tools, communication, expectations setting, etc. so it works.

Whether or not you like the idea of the four-day work week, more people are asking for personalized work arrangements and choosing to work for companies that offer it.

Breaking News: Meetings Make Us Miserable

In recent headlines, a large global tech company used data analytics to discover that people who get pulled into too many crowded meetings are miserable at work. 

My reaction to this can be summed up in a single word:

Duh!

I mean, the only surprising thing about this discovery is that it required analytics to figure it out.  Am I right?

Seriously, if there’s a bigger bummer than sitting in crowded meetings for 50-75% of your work week, it’s working for people who can’t figure that out for themselves without technology.

On the other hand, at least they took the problem seriously.  Too many companies either ignore the problem or fix the wrong thing.

They also used real data to correlate people's feelings (biased) with what was actually hapening in the business (unbiased), thus avoiding the tricky problem of getting people to tell the truth.  

Let's face it, even assuming there would be no repercussions for saying, 'You morons call way too many meetings!' people don't always know why they're miserable and can be quite expert at misdiagnosing their feelings.

So, I guess it’s a win, but I can't help thinking...

WHY DO PEOPLE NEED ANALYTICS TO TELL THEM STUFF LIKE THAT???

If you'd like to read more about why meetings are expensive and make people unahppy, check out htis article: Collaboration: $199/lb

And if you're interested in how to run happier and more collaborative meetings, read Games People Play: A Guide to Gamification for HR.

Hey, HR: Ready to Design the Future of Work?

Over the last decade, HR has done an impressive job re-inventing itself as the strategic owner of the 'people agenda.'  However, in order to navigate the next wave of technology advancement, they’ll need to again rethink why they exist and how they serve the business.

(As will everyone else.)

With so much speculation about the future of work and employee experience, what is the most critical skill needed by HR to stay relevant as new technologies replace some of the more traditional - and transactional - HR tasks?

I see two areas that stand out as genuine opportunities for HR to create business value, both of which require a new breed of HR professional:

1. Holistic people agenda – Given the increasing trend toward temporary and outsourced roles (check out my guest post at Hacking HR What Companies Need to Thrive in the Gig Economy), it's time for HR to define a people agenda that includes both employees and contractors.  In my blog post Is HR Ready to be GIGantic? I outlined some of the key areas HR will need to consider. 
2. Work experience design – With process design skills and a fresh mandate from the business to drive employee experience, HR is ideally positioned to take a critical look at work: who does it, how it gets done, and where the process or organizational blocks are that slow progress,

The workplace of tomorrow needs people with exceptional coaching and listening skills who understand the fundamentals of design thinking and effective work design.  To do what, you ask?  To design a better work experience.

Consider the following example: A marketing organization delivers global campaigns across several teams.  The campaign strategy team comes up with the campaign story, the content team creates the supporting assets, the digital demand team sets up the email campaigns, tracking codes and marketing automation, the field teams localize, and whoever’s responsible for social media creates some social promotions.

On paper it looks fairly straightforward, but if you were to dig a bit deeper – and actually talk to people about how the process works - you might be surprised.  

You might discover, for example, that the only person who understands how the marketing automation tool works has been sick for two weeks.  Or that the person who sets up the campaign trackers is chronically late because she can’t keep up with the volume of requests.  Or that the local teams don't know about the global campaign and have already spent their budget.  Or that the creative team is tired of the field teams pretending they don't know about the global campaign.  Or that there’s zero quality control in place for the social media posts. Or that… you get the idea.

The point is, poorly defined work processes and organizations that ignore bottlenecks create a permanent sense of low-grade frustration and futility.  The thing is, you won’t hear about it in any operational meeting.  Unless you actually talk to people and listen to their feedback and ideas, you will be unable to help them to find workable solutions.  

In other words, you won't be part of the solution.

Another example: The business has implemented a project management solution as part of its overall digital transformation agenda.  Everyone assumes it’s working fine but if you dig a bit deeper you might discover that using the tool creates extra work because it doesn’t do what the project leads need, so they end up double reporting.  Or you might discover that the extra work still doesn’t deliver the information needed to identify bottlenecks and inform capacity planning.

Perhaps people despise the new tool because it has to be used outside the flow of work, i.e. it creates an interruption with non-value adding extra work. Or people may love it… but how will you know unless you take the time to find out?

Once companies have invested in new solutions, they are verrrrry reluctant to scratch below the surface because of the risk it turns out to be a mistake.  It’s understandable and very human but unless you do exactly that you will miss most of what’s really going on, putting the success of your digital transformation projects - and your business - at risk.

Where most companies fall short on design thinking is skimping on testing, iteration and improvement.  In the example above with the project management software, the implementation team may have asked employees for their feedback early in the process but then didn’t use the feedback to improve the implementation.  Or perhaps they focused on change management rather than proper testing and iteration.

In other words, instead of ensuring the new tool adds value to the people doing the work, they made the people who do the work add value to the tool.   

Too often, companies and teams roll out new tools, organizations and processes without doing proper testing and iteration.  Then they move onto the next thing without verifying success or opportunities to improve.

Design thinking helps you design valuable solutions and processes that add value for the people using them.  If HR can master design thinking they will be well suited to step up and help fix work.

Design Thinking is a discipline that creates value through continuous ideation and iteration, and there have been some excellent articles written for HR, for example by Enrique Rubio (Reinventing the Future of HR with Design Thinking and Agility) and Karen Jaw-Madson (Work Experience Design).  

You may also enjoy:
Design Thinking for Leaders and Innovators
Design Thinking: Tips, Techniques and Sprints

Work Hard, Wear Jeans, Have Fun

Work Hard, Wear Jeans, Have Fun

Could it be we are overthinking employer brand?

I mean, my husband's an IT architect.  He helped design the technical foundation for the world's most successful SaaS-based HCM solution.  He's the guy who can talk to busy executives, inflexible power users, nerdy propeller heads and uptight clipboard carriers.  IT companies want to hire more people like him.

None of which is my point.  My point is, how does someone like that decide where to work?

While companies compete with one another to have the most complicated answer to that question, for him it's always been really simple.  Back when he had just graduated from college and was avoiding 9-5 jobs like the plague while helping a friend build software in a garage, this job advertisement caught his eye:

Work Hard.  Wear Jeans.  Have Fun.

That's it.  He applied, got the job, and the rest is history.  

What does this tell us?  It tells us that people who know what they want are really good at self-selecting the work culture that will work for them.  

The other thing worth noting is that this advertisement wouldn't work on him today, because he's at a different phase in his career.  Today he wants to work in service to ideas that create positive social and economic impact so, 'Help us save the world,' might be a better lure.

To continue on this, 'It's really simple,' theme: The best way to attract great talent is to be the kind of place to work great talent wants to work for.  The catch is this means different things to different people, with creative freedom, interesting projects, work life balance, money, increased responsibility and finding your purpose of more or less importance depending on where you are in your career.  

That noisy foozball table in the break room may be a big hit with twenty-somethings who hang out in the office late, but highly annoying to your Sr Digital Marketing Manager who has a campaign to get out the door, and of no interest whatsoever to the working mom who has to leave on time to pick up her kids.

So here's a crazy idea: Identify the kinds of employees you'd like to attract more of and talk to them about what they like - or don't like - about working for your company.  Then do more - or less - of that.  

Don't guess or copy what other companies do.  Ask.  Try.  Iterate.  (It's called #designthinking.)

You may also enjoy:

Work Design Experience: Interview with Karen Jaw-Madson

The HR Journey from Productivity to Purpose

How to Find, Hire and Lead Great Talent

Here's a handy #designthinkingforhr infographic:

Is HR Stuck in a Rut?

A bit more than three years ago I left the HCM world to re-enter the world of purchase-to-pay and supply chain finance.  There had been some exciting new developments, not the least of which was supply chain finance.

As I re-engage with the HR world, however, I get a sense of de ja vu because there don’t seem to be many new developments or thought leaders.  The topics are amazingly similar to what they were three, five, even ten years ago: Performance management is still broken, the war for talent continues, and HR technology still promises to solve everything from talent acquisition to employee engagement.

Meanwhile, industry experts are still talking about how to do the same things better while surveying HR practitioners about HR priorities and best practices.  It’s quite the echo chamber so perhaps it’s not a huge surprise so little has changed.

There are a few fresh voices talking about things like employee experience, design thinking, behavioural economics, the gig workforce, holocracy, gamification, etc.  Some of it’s pure nonsense, or ahead of its time, but at least it’s new.  And some of the tech trends are truly exciting.

Nonetheless, after three years focused elsewhere, it feels like HR has gotten itself stuck.  Is it fear of failure?  Is it an ingrained tendency to follow rather than lead? Or is it just easier to talk about the same problems with like-minded colleagues than it is to rethink them completely?

Don’t Talk the Talk, Walk the Walk

Here’s an example of what I mean: If diversity and personalization are drivers of creativity and innovation, why do HR processes continue to trend toward standardization?  And if outcomes matter more than activities, why do organizations continue to measure things like number of training modules or performance evaluations completed?

I mean, sure, if you’ve taken the time to roll out an LMS or a performance management process – despite the fact that for more than a decade, experts have claimed performance management is broken while offering new best practices to break it in more up to date ways – you want to understand your participation rate.  I totally get that. 

Understanding your numbers is fine as you don’t confuse a high participation rate with success.

One of the problems facing HR today is confusing activity with outcome.  And it’s not just HR, because we humans latch onto anything we can measure.  The problem is that when it comes to people, some of the most important things can’t be measured.  So, in a way, it’s worse when HR does it.

And don’t bring up AI or block chain now as the magic dust or I’ll have to come over there.  AI and block chain won’t help measure the unmeasurable, although machine learning will likely have a huge impact on personalization.  At best, they’ll help you do a better job measuring or making sense of the things you already try to measure.  At least for a while.

Just kidding.  I totally won’t come over there.

Time to Rethink HR Conferences?

I know, they're really fun.  However, instead of talking about the usual tech trends and topics, why not talk about how to apply behavioural economics to innovation or incentive strategies?  Or how to ensure managers are inclusive and promote a culture of trust where innovation can flourish?  Or how to apply gamification principles to motivate the entire organization to achieve the impossible?  Or how to create healthy workspaces that inspire creativity and play?  Or introducing a 4-day work week?

Someday AI will know us better than we know ourselves, but it’ll still be a while before a a bunch of code – be it ever so elegant, unbiased and networked - understands people well enough to make accurate predictions about individuals in a fast-changing environment.  And quite frankly, HR will have about as much to do with blockchain as they do with SSL or Unix, i.e. you’ll use it without knowing you’re using it.  I don’t mean to be insulting but let’s face it, the business isn’t looking to HR to figure out distributed encryption or machine learning.

So why not use the time to talk about how to enable people to bring their best and most authentic selves to work?  My post The HR Journey from Productivity to Purpose suggests some ways to help you do that.

Is HR Ready to be GIGantic?

In my most recent post HR and the Gig Economy, I talked about how the workforce is changing as managers staff their teams with more contingent labour.  HBR also wrote a thought-provoking article Run Taskrabbit Run, exploring a not-so-distant future where businesses no longer have employees.  Since my very talented former colleague Stacy Chapman, the CEO of SwoopTalent, has predicted that more doomsayers will write more about this topic… challenge accepted.

I'm actually not a doomsayer, at least I don't think I am.  I personally see the gig economy as an opportunity for HR rather than a threat, at least in the medium term (y’ know, before HR gets replaced by chatbots), because contractors are people.  For too long HR has let procurement own services talent as the proportion of contingent workers steadily increases.  It’s time for HR to step up and reclaim the people agenda.

Here are some of the challenges HR needs to be ready for to stay relevant in the gig economy:

People Data: I know we’re all still high fiving about moving to the cloud, but to prepare for the gig economy, your HR solution needs to track data for contractors as well as employees.  You need to know where your contractors are placed, when, for what, and how much they cost.  You also want to know if they are effective, which will be a challenge since they aren’t included in your performance appraisal process.

Compliance: There are some legal challenges with making contractors feel too much like part of the team - not to mention employment insurance - but someone needs to figure that out for the business.  Who better than HR?  Not procurement, unless HR also wants to share ownership of core competencies, performance management and employer brand.  Yeah, I didn’t think so.  : )

Organizational development: What is the right employee to contractor ratio?  Where should external skills be brought in on a project or fixed term basis v. in-house?  Most importantly, how can HR add real value to this discussion, rather than just consolidating input from different parts of the business?  Own this!!!

Recruiting: HR plays an active role in recruiting talent but not – typically – in acquiring contractors, besides signing the contract with the agency and/or sending over the NDA.  However, just like employees, contractors have diverse skills and personalities, and some will be a better fit than others.  Does HR really want to leave this up to chance, allow mission critical work to go to the lowest bidder, or fail to consider skills augmentation in a broader company context?

Performance and Engagement: Like employees, contractors need to be engaged and assessed for organizational fit and quality of work.  After all, they perform critical tasks for your company, provide a crutch for your company’s core capabilities, and cost money.  It’s important to make them feel like part of the team, help them succeed and establish some metric to assess the quality of their work.  

Skills Development: If we envision a future where most or all of the workforce is project based, at least in some industries, how will HR shape core competencies in that future?  What will core competencies even mean?  And how do you ensure today that skills for hire are also transferred, and that any skills or knowledge gaps your contractors have are addressed so they can work as efficiently as possible?

Leadership: Managing contractors requires somewhat different skills and perspective than managing employees.  It’s HR’s job to make sure managers are ready to lead a truly diverse workforce made up of employees, contractors and non-humans.

Rewards:  As more contractors are brought in to augment teams, compensation equity and company perqs will take on a new flavour.  There’s no one right answer, but plenty of wrong ones, and it needs to be considered in light of what is best for the business.  Ideally, you don’t want rewards to create a divide between internal and external team members, which is what will happen if contractors get treated like second class citizens.

Collaboration: The right collaboration and project management tools can help teams work more productively.  With the gig economy, having the right tools to streamline processes and tasks while linking work to company goals has never been more important.

Internal support: This one has long frustrated me as a hiring manager.  New employees get the red carpet rolled out by HR, a new laptop, a new workstation, etc., whereas contractors need to go on a treasure hunt to find a place to sit and get signed onto the system.  Which the company pays for in lost productivity, frustrated engagement and an hourly rate to boot.

Employer Brand: Just like employees, some contractors are a better fit for your organization than others.  How do you help ensure your organization attracts the best contractors, and equip them to deliver the best results?

So, you get the idea.  As contractors become part of the mix at work, HR needs to start thinking in very real terms how to attract, retain, engage and develop them.  Or… become less relevant to the business as the workforce changes.

Visual courtesy of Business in the Workplace.

HR and the Gig Economy

Not long ago I made a decision to leave my executive job and embrace the gig economy.  I had a number of personal reasons for doing this that you can read about here, but the main reason was that I could.

What changed – besides a growing desire to define a new deal for myself – was the epiphany that organizations have problems they need solved but don’t always have the skills or the headcount to solve them.  

I experienced this first-hand in my previous role, in which I led a global team of FTEs but also brought in fixed term contractors to help with everything from content and customer marketing to maternity leave coverage to organizing our sales kick-off event.  

This article is not about replacing FTEs with contractors, or even about creating the right mix of internal and external talent, a great topic in its own right.  What I’m talking about here is the difference working with contractors makes to a line manager when it comes to working with HR... because it changes everything.

‘I need more headcount’

Consider the following scenario: You lead the content team at a medium-sized global organization and your team’s responsible for rolling out three large global campaigns, including key messages, headlines, content, thumbnails and a full social media plan.  Your global content team consists of three people, one of whom has been co-opted to support the field marketing organization in your largest market.  How are you going to create all that content? 

You talk to HR and long story short, there's no headcount.  Now, you can either continue to plead your doomed business case or use part of your operating budget to hire a contractor instead.

IT is dead.  Long live IT.

I don’t know if you remember what happened to IT when cloud computing changed the business application market forever, but the biggest change had less to do with technology than with how IT organizations were impacted.  Suddenly, global software projects were no longer controlled by IT because solutions were designed to be selected, implemented and used by business users. 

At the same time, the subscription model for cloud-based applications meant departments could pay for them out of their operating budgets.  Modern solutions were easy to use and included visual reports at the touch of a button, with amazing drilldown capabilities, and business users could even build their own.  Best of all, they were designed to be quickly implemented with no more upgrades!

In short, cloud computing left departments free to innovate and try new things without waiting for IT to catch up on the backlog of upgrades and issues created when the the current solutions were rolled out. 

So, what did IT do?  Something quite brilliant, actually.  They regrouped, downsized and transformed themselves into a service organization.  As point solutions popped up like mushrooms across the business, they demonstrated a new kind of value managing a complex ecosystem of solutions and responding to the business more promptly when special cases came up.  After a brief struggle against the inevitable move to the cloud, IT embraced the new reality and discovered it’s a lot more fun to be a hero than a gatekeeper. 

Embracing the Gig Economy

What does this have to do with HR?  Two things: First, HR has already responded to the call of the cloud but still has some work to do helping leaders acquire, develop and retain great talent.  Second, the gig economy will again change everything for HR, because the entire workforce composition will change.

Current cloud-based HR applications may not be able to keep up, because while they were designed for the cloud – some more than others - they may not have been designed for the gig.  In other words, if all that fabulous employee data you’ve been collecting only describes part of your actual workforce, you have a major blind spot.

But that’s not all: Just as the cloud enabled departments like HR to get around IT, the gig economy lets department heads go around HR.  For starters, consider how much easier it is to bring in a contractor than it is to hire someone.  It’s also cheaper because it’s on demand and you don’t have to pay benefits or invest in career development.

Working with contractors creates its own challenges but if it’s easier - not to mention cheaper -  for managers to bring in contractors, guess what they’ll do.

Also note that more skilled workers are choosing the gig economy, either because they’re having difficulty finding a permanent role, or because they want to spend less time jumping through administrative (or political) hoops and focus on the work they love doing.

So, the gig train has left the station but HR still needs to climb aboard.  Just as the introduction of cloud-based point solutions enabled IT to step in and propose a more coordinated IT ecosystem, having contractors popping up all over the business costing money and doing ‘something’ presents a golden opportunity for HR.  

If you'd like to read more, I've written a follow up post here about how HR can step up and be... GIGantic.

Thanks for reading.