HRHeadStart #36: HR Strategy; Better Thinking; Behavioral Science

The Talent Agenda

The ever shifting business environment puts enormous pressure on the HR function to develop strategies and execute plans that drive organizational success. There’s constant redefinition of HR priorities and realignment of HR service delivery to create business value.

There are structured ways to translate the business strategy into a relevant and coherent HR strategy, but it’s unsuitable to be explained via a brief newsletter. However, one useful way to visualize all the work that goes into this is to organize it by zones and horizons.

• Performance Zone: These are all the core HR services - stuff, if absent, will cause major disruption to the business such as HR Information Systems, compensation/benefits, payroll, hiring, performance management, compliance etc.

• Incubation Zone: These are services which are being incubated to support emerging business needs. This could include redesign of existing processes to modernize them, launching new service offerings like skills architecture or implementing technology/automation to enhance the employee experience and improve HR service delivery. This zone is typically quite resource-intensive.

• Transformation Zone: This typically is the starting point and concerns long-range plans on how the entire portfolio of HR services are integrated to deliver a coherent experience and business value.

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Working Better

The world lauds people who are "decisive" and make those decisions fast. But the best thinkers are slow thinkers. While making or recommending a decision, they carefully peel the layers by asking "what happens next" a few times - what happens in 5 days, 5 weeks, 5 months and 5 years of making the decision. That reveals the true nature of the problem, the solution and the stakeholders who are affected by those decisions, thus creating a better path to making progress. Such questioning is a powerful way to peek into the future of your decisions. Good thinking is expensive, but poor thinking costs a fortune.​

The best way to improve your ability to think is to actually spend time thinking.

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A Productive Workout

A workout is a great way to create mindspace for processing and learning new ideas. And it primes you for creative thinking. For your next walk, run or workout session, take along Rory Sutherland from Ogilvy. He asks the question “Is everything BS?”That is, Behavioural Science, by the way! He talks about how we can arrive at better solutions to many problems by combining economics and behavioural science. Grab the links - Spotify, Apple Podcasts.

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Tiny Thought

We all seek relevance and influence in the organizations we work in, but how do we build them? The simple answer is by using your expertise to genuinely help others. When you lean into people’s problems and help them, they become your advocates. Word spreads and you get set on the right path.