Hacking HR to Build an Adaptability Advantage
Everyone gets paid enough to live a 'decent' standard of living. After that you get, 'immortality' or some imaginary non-monetary currency to reflect that you have made a meaningful contribution to the organization. The greater the performance, the more 'immortality'!
Of course there is an annual increment based on inflation and the like, but the principle is - "Compensation as a means to distinguish / discriminate / incentivize, is no longer available".
So who wants to take home the highest "immortality"?
I think it was Alfie Kohn and Dan Pink who both advocate taking money out of the conversation when rewarding people. Give people a decent rate of pay and a living wage, don't let's have a race to the bottom as seems to be happening now. That way we all get better off.
In my view HR and people practitioners should start to become the change it and they want the organisation to be, and I reckon the key area would be around the systems thinking as espoused and demonstrated both academically and eminently practically by Deming, John Seddon in Vanguard, Senge, Ackoff, Scholtes, and countless others.
All change beings at the thinking level and not the doing level, yet the result of the change in thinking then delivers change at the doing level. Great intentions, motivation and competencies underpinned by the wrong thinking changes little.
Managers need to recognise the organisation as a system, it’s their job to remove the obstacles within the organisation. They also need to understand human motivation (Dan Pink, Alfie Kohn, etc.). Design of the work from the outside in, and focus on what is the real purpose what matters to the customer. Then, analyse the demand, design measures for what matters, then when you understand the systems thinking that determines the current way of doing things, you simply get the people who do the work to re-design the work in order to achieve purpose and what really matters, and what happens is almost magical! Service improves, costs reduce, morale increases, and the culture change happens for free. At no time do we do anything to the people, we simply get the people to work on the work. That's the systems thinking at the practical and yet quite profound level that I believe HR could help to make organisations more adaptable and adept.
If you want to work more on the Systems Thinking hack, please join the team on page 2!
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