
I posted about this on Linkedin just the other day, but I couldn’t quite fit everything in. So after catching up with our Director of Product, Ali Hussein, I decided to get our notes down as a blog.
Last week was Unleash Paris, although there wasn’t time to hear everyone I wanted to, I heard some fantastic ideas. Not everything has context but they’re all pertinent to us as HR people and they all deliver excellent food for thought. Feel free to send me yours: I must have missed plenty. Apologies in advance for any minor misquotes or misattributions…
From Peter Hinssen’s session Industry 4.0: A New Vision of Globalisation
- Don’t get too hung up on how to add value in data analytics. Start collecting the data, then connect the dots and turn that into value.
- According to IBM’s Chief People Officer, only 10% of jobs will disappear in the next couple of decades… but 100% of jobs will change.
From Heather E . MacGowan’s session Preparing for jobs that do not yet exist
- People graduating today will have, on average, 17 jobs across 5 industries. Helping people adapt to change is the number one issue for HR.
From Josh Bersin’s session The HR Tech Market Disrupted: What’s coming in 2020?
- Employee experience is now everything.
- HR technology needs to focus on enabling employees, managers and HR to take action on the data we collect. There’s too much noise, not enough action.
- We need to start thinking about sustainable performance. This means all the things that support high performance and help it thrive: wellbeing, psychological safety, health and so on.
Josh (I think!) also shared a story about Pepsico’s process shredder, where employees vote to get rid of old processes or ways of doing things. It reminded me of our Break and Remake sessions at Clear Review, where we look at our legacy systems and habits and ask if they still serve the right purpose.
Netguru have revolutionised their company culture of the back of multiple sessions they did with their employees. They work to a quarterly focus, but after three quarters of working they dedicated their fourth quarter to consolidation, cleaning up unfinished OKRs and visions, values, methods, obstacles and metrics (V2MON). It’s an interesting way of ensuring that nothing gets missed.
Diversity, as a concept, can easily be taken in too narrow a way. We think of it as something that relates to age, race and so on. But there are external dimensions that have a bearing too: think location, marital status or religion. We need to think more flexibly about diverse workforces.
Previously we learned in order to work. Now, we work in order to learn. Advances come quickly: you need to be able to constantly reinvent yourself and keep pace with rapid change.
Moneysupermarket have adopted a “personalise” approach to cultural change. For example, at their annual company awards, prizes are always personal and tailored to the employee receiving them.
In 2016, the IBM Global Skills Survey showed that the #1 and #2 skills in demand were STEM and computer skills. In 2019, those are #6 and #8: Agility, time management and flexibility are leading the way. Rapid change, yes, but note that two of those are about reacting to change.
I realise there’s a lot here and it’s rather disparate: the challenges of trying to capture thoughts from lots of people in a short space of time! Feel free to share what I missed on my Linkedin post.