Businesses must evolve in these challenging times, and HR—the profession and the people—is where innovation MUST happen.
THE HUMAN IN HUMAN RESOURCES
A crisis is a pressure test of imagination. Some companies go into the bunker, planning to simply weather difficult times by protecting the status quo—play it safe, keep your head down. And then there are the visionaries, the leaders and organizations that look at the challenges emerging from a crisis as an opportunity to innovate. Big problems require outsized thinking and nimble responses, which can lead to extraordinary outcomes.
CEOs have to understand these reactions, have to listen, be aware, be focused on what they can do. Can they be more accessible in a crisis? Can they communicate more effectively? There are things you can control. What you can do is assure your workers that you are doing everything possible to provide stability amid the uncertainty.
THE HUMAN CORE OF INNOVATION
You might not think of innovation as something that happens regularly in HR. But it does, and it should. Working with the C-suite and leadership, there are three areas where HR can innovate and test those innovations: the work, the worker, and the workplace. We define a worker, whether it’s a gig worker or a fifty-year employee. This is where the muscle behind innovation lives—people.
But there is a price to pay if your People Managers are miscast and out of sync with your culture of innovation. The cost of turnover? About $223 billion over a five-year period, according to SHRM’s research. Core values innovators have in common include:
- Curiosity and a natural ability to question the status quo
- Risk-taking and a willingness to learn from failure
- Openness—organizations with strong silos tend to be less innovative.
- Patience, tenacity, and the sense of giving an idea a chance to grow.
- Trust, underpinning the other values.
CREATING A CHALLENGE CULTURE
You have to create the environment for innovation. In my estimation, there are really three things that illustrate what it means to do that: provide a platform where people can share ideas; be willing to hear the hard truths while pressure-testing those ideas, and willing to go through the process and return with a refined idea – that’s living ideation.
Achieving the desired degree of challenge and innovation in your corporate culture starts with a process of self-reflection. Pressure-test yourself. What have I done to implement this culture? You have to look inside for answers.
REINVENTING, NOT RETREATING
Innovation is everywhere, even in places that might seem too big or too old to change. If you look at IBM, an iconic legacy brand headquartered in the town of Armonk, New York, not Silicon Valley, you’ll see how they evolved from a hardware business into a service-industry goliath.
Innovation is not only necessary to emerge from a crisis, but also the investment in ideas is critical in confronting one. Amid IBM’s transition, it was still all about people. And it was all about the profession. There was no other way for IBM to innovate, to evolve and ultimately survive, except through people and a leader who had been part of its “Think” culture and carried that model into a bright future.
SAME IDEAS, DIFFERENT PACKAGES
What’s your first move to make innovation a priority? It all starts with everyone buying into the greater vision and establishing the right culture. If people don’t feel like innovation would be well received, they’ll play it safe. If your compensation plan doesn’t reward people who take risks—even new ideas that don’t work out—then guess what? You’re just treading in the same-old, same-old waters.
The most forward-thinking CEOs and the most effective CHROs: they’re the ones who, at a time of crisis, will look at the challenge in front of them and the competition around them, and approach the problem from a different angle. Leaders must reflect on their own ideas surrounding innovation. It’s just helpful to stop every once in a while and ask yourself whether you’re fully engaged in what innovation means.
LEADERSHIP LESSON
HR is often viewed as a cost center with limited business acumen. Whether we have called for automating HR functions or putting them in areas overseen by others, HR continues to sit as an untapped human engine for the organization. Specifically, we have seen during recent reset moments that HR is the true home of innovation within the modern organization.
This is because HR leaders now have the responsibility to offer the kind of employee experience that attracts and retains top talent.
More still, HR is now the driver of the innovative employee experience, with customized levels of employment and a broad array of potential work settings. Your CHRO has become the primary cog in maximizing operational efficiency and driving talent acquisition for new business lines. This has never been the case until today.
For this reason, you as a leader should engage HR with ingenuity and innovation as the primary objective. Businesses must evolve in these challenging times, and HR—the profession and the people— is where innovation MUST happen.
Here are some key questions to consider making part of your reset repertoire:
- Do I actually care about new ideas?
- Do the new ideas have to be mine?
- Do I see connectivity where others don’t?
- Do I have the right people for innovation? Why do I keep getting the same talent ideas in a different package?
- Do I hire tinkerers?
- Where does innovation really live in my organization?
- What does innovation contribute to our reset moments and vice versa?
- Do I have the right CHRO for unlocking innovation potential?
Adapted from Chapter 2 of Reset: A Leader’s Guide to Work in an Age of Upheaval (PublicAffairs), by Johnny C. Taylor, Jr., President & CEO SHRM – Society for Human Resource Management