Anita Lettink Challenges HR Norms: Adapting to the Unpredictable Work Landscape of 2024ANITA LETTINK：Why I'm not writing 2024 HR trends
Anita Lettink, in her newsletter, discusses why she is not writing the 2024 HR trends. She emphasizes the importance of a dynamic, continuous strategy over annual predictions in HR. The article reflects on the evolving nature of work and the need for a fluid, adaptable approach. Lettink argues that understanding and navigating HR challenges require responsiveness to rapid changes in technology, economics, and workforce dynamics. She introduces the 2024 HR challenge, encouraging HR professionals to maximize the use of their HR solutions and focus on making incremental changes to better support their workforce.
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Hey future of work friends,
I probably find you during budgeting and planning time. For me, it’s the end of conference season. I did my final keynote on the New Employee Experience at Indeed FutureWorks last week. And now I am back home, and will use December to read everything I bookmarked to surprise you with new keynotes and articles next year. I’ll also write my annual HR Tech Startup report.
And if you’d like an in-company webinar on what to expect from AI in HR or how to prepare for Equal Pay please reach out - I’ve got you covered!
Thinking about the Future of Work is important. And yes, you’d already assumed I would say that. I've spent years analyzing trends at the intersection of economics, business, technology, and human resources. Each year, I've distilled these insights into trend articles, aiming to forecast the year ahead. However, I've realized that our rapidly evolving world demands a different approach. In this newsletter, I'll share why I've moved away from annual trend predictions and why we need a more dynamic, continuous strategy in understanding and navigating HR challenges. I'll explore how embracing a fluid, responsive stance can better equip us to handle HR (tech) developments.
Why I am not writing 2024 HR trends
I've always been deeply invested in keeping a finger on the pulse of our industry. For years, it was a tradition of mine to sit down at the end of each year and write an article on emerging trends in Human Resources, based on my analysis of developments in economics, business, technology, and HR. I wrote them to reflect on the past year and help you - and me - prepare for the next.
I stopped this tradition. And if you wonder why, it's not for a lack of trends or changes in the industry—far from it. The HR landscape is as dynamic as ever, perhaps even more so. But I've realized that these annual trend articles, while insightful, may not be as beneficial as I once thought. Sure, they give a nice overview of what’s happening and what might happen, but you can’t run after every trend. And most years there were way too many of them.
The world of work is evolving at an unprecedented pace, and the tools and strategies that were groundbreaking a year ago might now be outdated. In this fast-paced environment, I believe that what we need isn't annual predictions but a continuous, adaptable approach to understanding and navigating HR challenges. When you want to provide a stable environment for employees and your company, thoughtful, strategic adjustments might be much more impactful.
So, instead of offering predictions, I'm taking a different path. I want to share with you the reasons behind this shift in my thinking and why I believe it's crucial for all of us in HR to adopt a more fluid, responsive stance towards industry trends.
Embracing a fluid approach
This change was sparked by several realizations. Firstly, the very nature of HR is fundamentally about people, and people are inherently unpredictable. People also like stability. And while trends can give us a broad outline, they can't capture the nuanced, often sudden shifts in employee needs, workplace dynamics, and organizational cultures. We all remember the start of the pandemic, when we put everything aside to make sure that employees could work safely, and where possible, from home. And while we might think this was a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence, we also know the world has become more unpredictable, and we should be ready to deal with similar sudden events.
And that means we should think more in terms of how we can offer a stable base that can handle these sudden shifts. That also means we should not be so quick in dividing work in “the past” and “the future”. While some people argue you should only look at the future of work, I believe we should take a much more nuanced approach.
As example, the picture above: it’s often used to show the past and the future of work. In my thinking, both sides represent the future. It’s not either/or, it’s and/and. And when I speak about the New Employee Experience, I use it to encourage HR professionals to cast a wide net: how can you offer all work options, so you appeal to a larger section of the workforce? It’s not about discarding the past and looking at the future. It’s embracing both where you can. Some people like the 9-5 day, working from an office. Some people find profit more important than purpose. It’s about offering a wide range of choices, to attract and retain people in a time when the labor market is tight. That’s especially important when you work in the Global North, and a next major shift is upon us: a shrinking workforce due to demographics in combination with the lack of skilled workers.
How useful are predictions anyway?
Secondly, I noticed a pattern over the years. Many of the trends I predicted would either rapidly evolve or be overtaken by entirely new developments before the year was out. Just look at Generative AI: at the end of last year, no one predicted that this would be the main topic of 2023. This rapid (r)evolution made me question the usefulness of annual predictions: why do we write them only at the end of the year? In a world where change is the only constant, static yearly forecasts seem almost counterintuitive. How can we even begin to predict what is coming, when recent events put everything we know upside down?
And lastly, I also started to wonder if focusing too heavily on future trends might pull us away from the present. When we always look ahead, we might miss crucial opportunities to address current issues effectively or fail to build on the strengths we already have. It can sometimes cause us to miss out on addressing the immediate needs and challenges facing our employees and organizations.
By constantly chasing what might be ahead or new, we risk not fully leveraging the strengths and successes we currently possess. It's vital to strike a balance between preparing for future changes and optimizing our current practices. This way, we can ensure that our efforts are not only geared towards what the 'future of work' might look like but are enhancing today’s HR strengths, thereby creating a more holistic and effective HR strategy.
2024 Challenge
And to illustrate the above with a practical example, let me ask you this: what percentage of your HR solution do you actually use? I am not asking for an exact number, just an estimated guess. When you look at its current functionality, do you use all of it? Half? Maybe even less?
When you close a contract for an HR cloud solution, the vendor will not only maintain the solution in its current state, but also improve it over time. And the fee you pay covers all those new features and functionalities. That means you get more bang for your buck. But if you don’t activate any of these features, then the vendor is wasting development capacity, and you are paying for something you will never see. Would you consider that good use?
And the problem isn't just the use; you will also miss out on the potential to support your workers better and change your workplace. Every unused feature in your HR solution is a lost chance to improve employee engagement, streamline processes, or uncover people insights.
So, here’s my 2024 HR challenge for you:
1. Guess: How much of your HR solution do you use today?
2. Pick one unused feature in your HR solution, explore it, and make it available!
Try to make a gradual change every month. Repeat that during the first six months of 2024 and then evaluate your success or learn from your mistakes! And don’t forget to tag me with the results! Instead of focusing on yet another 2024 HR trend, let’s make sure that we first use our HR solution to the fullest, one feature at a time. I think this will be more helpful to your organization than you might think.
Let’s continue the conversation
I don’t want to leave you with the impression that looking forward isn't important. On the contrary, it's crucial. If only for the reason that what we build today will affect our future workforce the most. But we should do it with the understanding that HR is less about predicting the future and more about creating it through proactive, ongoing engagement with our workforce, our company, and the world around us. To maybe not take giant leaps but make incremental changes that benefit the people we work with most. People are tired of constant change. However, we can draw inspiration from social media tools - by implementing small, gradual improvements, we can consistently enhance the experience, allowing people to smoothly adapt to these changes over time.
This shift is not just about how we talk about HR trends; it's about how we do HR. It's a move towards a more dynamic, responsive, and collaborative approach that recognizes the complexity and fluidity of our work. It's about creating a living dialogue that evolves with our ever-changing environment.
We must talk about the future. But it shouldn’t be confined to the end of the year. There is no reason for such a hard cut. I look forward to engaging with you, in continuous conversations about what we're seeing, doing, and expecting in real-time. This approach, I believe, will not only keep us more connected to the immediate needs of our organizations but also better prepared to adapt to whatever the future holds.
While I don’t write HR trend articles anymore, my commitment to helping you understand and make sense of the future of work is as strong as ever. I will keep you posted on the latest developments as I see them. I will continue to write this newsletter about my observations on how we can improve work with the help of technology, especially new tech.
Good luck with planning the year ahead. And let me know if you would have preferred a list of 2024 HR trends,
Have a great day, Anita
What’s next for compensation?
Pete Tiliakos, Anke Mogannam and I participated in an online #WDAYChats. We shared insights and POV’s on modern payroll operations and how payroll leaders can help their organizations minimize cost and accelerate innovation.
Decusoft asked me how companies can prepare for pay transparency and equal pay. You can find my answers here.
Indeed asked people if money really makes them happy. Find the surprising answers, an interview with yours tryly and more compensation charts in this insightful Dutch report: De toekomst van compensatie.
generative AI
2023年12月01日
generative AI
Don’t Be A Copy-Cat: People Analytics as the Antidote to HR Strategy Copy-CatsThis article is written to discuss: why copying the HR practices that everyone else uses doesn’t lead to the positive outcomes you assume it will.
DISCLAIMER: If you like the HR strategy at your organization, you can probably stop reading now… If not, feel free to keep reading.
Context
Childhood wisdom: No one likes a copy-cat.
We all remember being children once. Kids are known to tease each other from time to time. One common reason to be teased when you were a child was being called a “copy-cat”. It didn’t feel good, often because we knew that if we were labeled a copy-cat, it was likely true. We were copying someone else. It felt bereft, unoriginal, and commonplace. We knew we were capable of being more, but we had settled for less. We were better than that. HR strategy can be better than that too.
Fast forward to the present, in HR being a copy-cat is all the rage. A priestly caste of HR influencers, HR tech consultants, FAANG companies, and sometimes even academics determine what is considered ‘en vogue’ as an HR strategy. Then, early adopter HR departments fall in-line; followed by the early majority and late majority after a few HR monkeys get “shot into space” without injury. The laggards may never arrive because they are still trying to move away from using paper files stuffed in filing cabinets, but nonetheless, being a copy-cat all the sudden became cool. Why be original when you could be doing what everyone else is doing? Perhaps, this is why Forrester is forecasting an EX winter coming soon…
In the African savanna, large numbers of herd animals, such as wildebeest, zebra, and gazelles, travel in packs. Why do they do this? Because there is safety in numbers. A zebra with a single imperfection or mark is easily identified and pulled from the pack by predators. Is the same true for HR? Are we safer in a pack? Is there wisdom in being a copy-cat? Would anything different make us stand out and therefore be put in danger? I think not. I think the opposite is true, in fact.
If you do all the same things as your competitors, how can you expect to get different results?
Does this HR strategy sound familiar?
“We’re going to try to hire the best talent, but only pay at the 50th percentile.”
“We’re a performance-driven organization, but we’re going to do performance reviews once a year on a 5-point rating scale, and we’ve got to implement a pay-for-performance incentive structure.”
“Our HR operating model is to use HR Business Partners, Centers of Excellence, and Shared Services.”
“We’re going to copy what Google did 10 years ago, or what GE did in the 80s.”
“We’re going to make data-driven decisions. I know! Let’s create another HR dashboard.”
If your organization wants to be radically better, it’s going to have to try some things that are radically different. Did anyone see Coinbase’s recent blog on Talent Density? I’m not saying I agree with the changes to their HR strategy, but at least they are trying to differentiate their HR strategy to be something different. They are getting into the game, for better or worse.
Source
What To Do, What To Do?
HR strategy should be composed of elements that are as unique to your business as your business strategy is unique to your business. It’s really as simple as that.
HR Strategy is upstream of people analytics. A vanilla, copy-cat HR strategy is going to lead to vanilla, copy-cat people analytics. In my opinion, people analytics doesn’t spend enough of its resources trying to familiarize itself, influence, and control HR strategy. People analytics should speak in the social currency of the organization. We should embed ourselves and influence key decision making, and have a seat at the table by speaking in the language of the business. There is social capital to be had, and the more I learn, the more I realize the necessity of this alternative currency. We should drive strategy.
With generative AI disrupting the value that human capital brings to organizations, who are the organizations that are going to be the innovators of tomorrow? Who are the organizations who will get the message early? Who will treat the need for differentiation with the existential demand that it dictates? Who will survive?
Source
“Best Practices”
I’m tired of the term ‘best practices’. I’m at a point in my career where I bristle when I hear someone say it. Perhaps it's one of the reasons why some people hate HR.
Organizational research is important, but best practices are a road to mediocrity. No one ever got fired for going with IBM, and no one ever got fired for using best practices… Until the whole firm loses to its competition, and everyone gets fired. Read it again, and think about that. It’s a short-term vs long-term thinking dilemma. Obviously, balance the two, but make sure to think with the long-term in mind.
What if instead of copy-catting, you:
A/B tested your HR strategy against those of other firms
Used opposition research to understand your competitors HR strategy better, so you can do something different
Implemented evidence-based practices on commoditized work, but experimented with firm-specific practices in the most strategically-relevant work
Focused on first-principles thinking as to how firm value is derived by its talent
Choose function over fad, when it comes to HR strategy
Rebuild HR strategy like the Oaklands As (and the Houston Astros) tore down and rebuilt their teams based on talent derived from data. Embed data, measurement, accountability, and the “improvement feedback loop” into every single workstream that HR engages. Henry Ford once said “if you always do what you’ve always done, you always get what you’ve always got.” HR could be convicted of being mediocre. Average is over (or maybe even above average is over?). Differentiation is king. Strategic neglect (i.e., neglecting things that don’t add value) is also a valuable tool. Where do we need to be world class? Where can we be average? Answer those questions, then execute.
Source
Rebuilding HR Around Data & Measurement
In most HR functions, data is only used to validate, not to guide. No one thinks for themselves. Mimicry and mimesis abound.
People analytics is a competitive advantage for firms who use it properly. People analytics is the future of HR. Proclamations such as this have been made consistently in the past (e.g., HR is over, remote work is the future, there is no need for management, human tasks at work will be automated with AI, etc.), but this one is for real. Firms who are not embedding data into the way they do business, evaluating what they do with data, and projecting the future with data are going to be irrelevant.
In the future, even in the age of generative AI, there is only one currency, and that is truth. Truth can only be derived as data put into practice. Classical test theory states that all measurement is “truth-plus-error”, with error being any deviation between measurement and the truth. Some stakeholders believe that to mean that truth can never be attained because error will always exist. Practically, this is a misinterpretation. Organizations that can manifest the best data with the least error will be the closest to truth, and therein lies the root of competitive advantage via data. People analytics is not inherently useful. Data is not inherently useful. Only accurate data, with analysis and cogent results, derived into a form that facilitates timely and accurate decision making, and that is put into action, is useful. And across the aggregate of thousands, if not millions of small decisions made leads one organization to prevailing over another. May the odds ever be in your favor.
Source
Moving Forward
“Traditional HR” has been on the way out for decades. This article is for HR people who believe in challenging the status quo. Deep down they know there is a better way; a way forward for their organization. To not outsource their originality to others. To not be a copy-cat. Let’s focus on what the pathway forward looks like with a new highest principle – no longer “what is everyone else doing?” – but with data and measurement at the center. This article is for the HR professional who knows that HR can be smarter, faster, and better at their organization, and they are bound to make it happen. Join the movement. Don’t be a copy-cat. Let’s see how high we can fly together.
PS - I’m thinking of writing a book on this topic. If you’re a publisher and you are interested in this topic, or others I’ve written about before, please contact me directly.
Special shout out: Thanks to Brad Harris & Pat Downes for our previous conversations on this topic.
I hope you like this article. If so, I have a few more articles coming out soon. Stay tuned. If you are interested in learning more directly from me, please connect with me on LinkedIn.
Cole’s recent articles
What’s Old is New: The Quest for Excellence in Workforce Planning
A Historian, Demographer, & Data Scientist Walk Into a Bar…
The Phoenix & The Dragon
Why Buy When You Could Rent: SEC’s Push for Human Capital Disclosure
Elephant Hunting: Weighing Human vs. Algorithmic Input to Decision Making
For access to all of Cole’s previous articles, go here.
By: Cole Napper
原文来自：https://directionallycorrectnews.substack.com/p/dont-be-a-copy-cat-people-analytics
generative AI
2023年11月30日
generative AI
微软首席人力官Kathleen Hogan：员工如何充分利用人工智能
Kathleen Hogan Chief People Officer at Microsoft [Photo: courtesy of Microsoft]
微软首席人力官 Kathleen Hogan表示，人工智能对我们工作方式的影响将比个人电脑更大。
AI是我们时代的决定性技术，创造了一个巨大的范式转变，它将改变我们的工作方式，影响力甚至超过了个人电脑的引入。我们曾经有一个大胆的愿景，“每个办公桌上、每个家庭里都有一台电脑”，而今天，我们希望在“每个人的口袋里都放一个副驾驶”。
当然，AI的影响也伴随着挑战。我们必须解决关于工作流失、算法偏见以及组织快速培养技能的真实担忧。但最终，我相信AI的潜力太大，不能采取观望态度。
领导者需要创造正确的环境，让AI获得积极的势头。这将需要准备和有意识的方法，以便这些新的AI工具不仅帮助员工提高生产力，而且帮助他们茁壮成长。我建议关注这三个方面，以更快实现这些好处：培养基于敏捷的文化、重新想象我们的工作方式、投资于更深层次的人类技能。
培养基于敏捷的文化
为了充分利用AI的承诺，团队必须保持敏捷。
即使是那些多年来一直在内部使用AI进行数据分析、预测建模和任务自动化的公司，生成性AI也代表着一个重大转变。通过能够理解人类语言、导航大量文档知识并创造内容，更多职能的员工现在可以使用这些AI工具。
一个基于敏捷的文化还将加速组织建立推动AI价值的更广泛基础和最佳实践的能力。我相信，在AI时代培养这样的文化意味着拥抱适应性领导力，领导者必须愿意深入未知。
重新想象工作方式
20世纪80年代和90年代的机器人自动化进步使制造业生产力翻了一番。这不是仅仅通过给工人提供更高效的工具实现的——公司通过重新思考生产技术和重新设计工作流程，优化人与机器之间的流程，实现了机器人自动化的全部价值。
同样，要充分利用AI采用的价值，领导者需要重新想象工作是如何完成的。这始于将工作分解为更小的任务，以确定AI能做什么，以及或者比人类做得更好。除了自动化一些重复或乏味的工作任务，我们还需要确定AI可以如何协助员工处理更复杂和微妙的任务，如研究、写作和分析。
这个想法是让领导者利用这段时间，不仅是自动化流程，而且是与AI一起重新想象流程，寻找新的工作方式。这将最终帮助人们更聪明地工作，而不是更努力地工作，给他们带来更多的精力，并发现更有意义和更令人满意的工作。
关注人类技能
生成性AI已经被训练了大多数人类语言，所以任何人都可以使用它。但就像任何新技术一样，仅仅给人们新工具而不提供使用它们的技能是不够的。
而且，尽管这似乎与直觉相反，人类技能与技术技能一样重要，以有效使用AI。这包括分析判断力、灵活性、情商、创意评估、智力好奇心、偏见检测和处理能力，以及委派任务的能力。
事实上，我们现在发现，基本的管理技能是发掘AI副驾驶的全部潜力的关键。就像委派给人类员工一样，与副驾驶合作需要能够清晰地沟通，设置背景和参数，定义期望，分析结果，并提供反馈。
一个好的起点是根据学科开发AI技能培训和实践。随着我们从自动驾驶AI转向副驾驶AI，对人们来说，仍然扮演飞行员的角色，用批判性的视角评估他们从AI工具中获得的输出是必要的。这包括验证准确性和评估偏见。最终，飞机的船长有责任成功着陆。
我相信，解锁AI的全部潜力是领导者的责任。AI的创新正在以惊人的速度发生。当我们导航AI对工作场所的影响时，组织领导者必须立即开始培育正确的环境，以确保没有人被遗留在后面。仅仅将AI工具放在员工手中是不够的。当我们培养基于敏捷的文化、重新想象我们的工作方式，以及建立获得AI最佳效果所需的人类技能时，我们可以帮助我们的组织和员工在这个新时代中茁壮成长。
对我来说，能够成为这个令人难以置信的时刻的一部分，既令人兴奋又令人振奋。
英文原文来自：https://www.fastcompany.com/90982077/microsofts-chief-people-officer-heres-how-workers-can-get-the-most-out-of-ai
generative AI
generative AI
generative AI
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