As you can imagine, I've been having a great many conversations with business leaders about the potential impact of the pandemic. A common thread is the idea that the working environment will change forever as people realise the benefits (or rather, lack of dis-benefits) of working from home. One of the many thoughts that this has sparked for me is whether this crisis will be the beginning of the end of the Chief Human Resources Officer as an executive role.
The CHRO has long been a puzzling thing to me. The challenge lies in the blend of roles that sit within the Human Resources silo. My observation over the years is that these functions are in general very operational, dealing with the mechanics of employee relations, recruitment, training, internal communications and so on. Because of the operational focus of much of the people-base there is a general lack of high quality strategic thinking and high impact action to turn an organisation's people into a competitive advantage. Where that happens, it tends to be as a result of visionary line management.
My advocacy in the past has been to split the strategic roles from the operational and move the operational execution of policy into either the COO or the CFO groups where they can be appropriately treated. The pandemic has altered my thinking a little.
In software businesses there is often the idea of 'customer success' as a hybrid sales and operations role. The idea is to work with individual customers to get the best out of the applications they are using in order to get the results that they were imagining when they bought the licences. Interventions can be broad ranging, spanning basic Q&A, through training to advice on process alterations that would improve performance. Customer success is a powerful idea because it explicitly regards each customer as an individual person or a business of specific culture and character and seeks to make them successful by their own definition. This all got me wondering: given that knowledge workers (like myself) are all working in a more individualistic way than ever before, could we apply the same principle of 'success management' to employees?
What is success? For me it is two-fold: productivity and happiness, the two of which are clearly somewhat interconnected. If we were dealing with customers, we would describe this as a kind of value proposition for the people that work in a given organisation. Constructing the domain of the People Success Officer (who would be responsible for productivity and happiness of the organisation's people) would mean putting together a few unloved parts of an organisation:
- Desktop IT, for which the emphasis should flip from central push of applications to a user-centric, persona-based value proposition
- Workplace, which would be designed around different user personas
- Learning and Development, would similarly become more focused on the individual person, their context and their needs. In a mission-based organisation, L&D would focus on working practices and the Profession on hard skills development. In a conventional organisation it'd need to do both
- Internal Communications, I think we have all recently observed the power of clear, strong and purposeful messages about the intent of organisations - internal comms is a powerful means to create a sense of belonging and intent within an organisation and it should be done with the same craft and integrated thought as the best external marketing campaign
I'm sure there are other bits to this but I'm sure you get the idea. Just as a great product manager is looking to iteratively improve the value proposition with every action, in pursuit of a grand vision, so the CPSO would be measured on dynamic, real improvement in productivity and happiness. They are the employee's champion and voice in the strategic discussions of the Executive Team, helping to make use of any organisation's most vital asset.
Fascinated to know what you think of this one!
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