RULE #10
10
BE A WORKPLACE ACTIVIST
It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
In November 2015, an audience of employees, manufacturers, and community members assembled together in Cleveland, Ohio, to celebrate Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics’s 350 years of business history. In his opening remarks, Tom Kinisky, president and CEO of Saint-Gobain, framed the key theme of the event as “If we want to survive the next 350 years, what would we need to do?”
Kinisky’s question is a provocative one and invites Saint-Gobain employees and customers to reflect on what makes a great future workplace. Saint-Gobain’s history began in 1665 when King Louis XIV signed the documents officially establishing the Manufacture Royale des Glaces de Miroirs (The Royal Manufactory of Mirror Glass) to compete in Europe’s mirror glass market. Entering 2016, Saint-Gobain was a $55 billion company, operating in 64 countries with over 180,000 employees. It is one of the leading producers of construction products in the world. Saint-Gobain leaders have a deep sense of pride about how they are part of a legacy of 14 generations of management that have worked in the business over the past 350 years.
Kinisky went on to share the secrets behind being in business for over 350 years: being able to adapt to change, having strong values, and being committed to ongoing innovation. But still Kinisky questions the status quo and invites employees, customers, and partners to be activists in creating the change they know needs to happen. This focus on questioning the present while anticipating the future is what we believe is needed in all organizations. This is the job of a workplace activist, someone who gives a voice to making the changes we all desire in our organization, industry, and workplace.
Workplace activists can lead these changes in three ways:
1. Recognize your job is not your job: Ask yourself, “What really is my job?”
2. Reframe your job description: What do I include to help my organization succeed in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (otherwise known as VUCA) workplace?
3. Rethink how to break HR: Which of our HR processes need to be reimagined for navigating the new world of work?
Recognize Your Job Is Not Your Job
Being a workplace activist requires taking an expansive view of your job in HR or as a business leader. The workplace experience you aspire to is often one that does not exist today in your organization. David Heath, VP of Global Human Resources at Panasonic Avionics, says, “Understanding the type of workplace experience you want to create is a massive opportunity to impact the company and position yourself and your company on the leading edge, ready for the future.”
Heath believes that HR will change more in the next 5 years than in the prior 20, and the entire profession has the opportunity to change its mindset, offerings, and value proposition for both employees and business partners.
Given the exponential rate and pace of change, Fred Kofman, philosopher and vice president at LinkedIn, often asks the question, “What is your job?”1 Kofman wants each of us to think carefully about how we answer this question. Kofman encourages people to try to answer in a concise sentence focusing on the outcomes you are creating rather than your current job title or description. Kofman says, “Think of it this way: Your job is not what you do, but the goal you pursue. So if you are a corporate trainer, instead of saying ‘my job is to design and develop learning programs,’ you should think of your job as facilitating continuous learning so your company wins in the marketplace.” Now ask yourself what your job is. Challenge your team members to ask the same question of themselves.
Brendan Browne, vice president of Global Talent Acquisition at LinkedIn, is a convert. Browne says, “For me, I’ve come to understand, my job is not my job. I’m not in recruiting. Rather I focus on helping the company win. This can mean finding talent in new geographies, sourcing them in new ways or re-thinking the entire candidate experience.” Brandon’s public profile on LinkedIn says it all—he lists his job, not by his title, but as “Connecting Talent with Opportunity at Massive Scale.”2
Reframe Your Job Description to Operate in a VUCA World
Consider how differently we communicate with each other today. Five or six years ago we were most likely sending and receiving text messages on our phone to communicate with friends and colleagues. Today, traditional text messaging is on the decline. Americans sent 1.9 trillion texts in 2015, down from a record of 2.3 trillion texts in 2011.3
Instead, Americans now increasingly rely on a range of instant messaging apps such as WhatsApp, which had over 1 billion users in 2016. Companies are now struggling to address the challenge of a VUCA world in which consumer messaging apps like Messenger, iMessage, Line, Snapchat, and WhatsApp are entering the workplace and transforming how we communicate.
What does this have to do with the future workplace? Everything. As Kelly Wojda, HR director of Caterpillar, says, “All of us operate in a VUCA world, defined as Volatile, having unexpected outcomes, Uncertain, where our impact is unknown, Complex, with many interconnected components and Ambiguous, fraught with unclear information.” Wojda uses the VUCA frame as a catalyst to reinvent the Caterpillar succession planning process.
Rather than rely on a static annual process for identifying talent to move into successive positions, Wojda’s new succession planning process focuses on answering five questions she poses to her internal business partners:
• Speed. How fast and frequently do we have succession planning discussions?
• Transparency. How transparent do we want to be with candidates?
• Visibility. How do we see around corners, to make sure we are looking far enough and deep enough within the organization?
• Diversity. How do we cast our net wider, not just from a demographic standpoint but also to include non-traditional candidates?
• Agility. How well do we institutionalize our learning back into the process?
The Caterpillar succession planning process takes into account a challenging business environment characterized by the unexpected and volatile business circumstances such as lower commodity prices and declines in sales and revenues in three of its sectors: energy and transportation, construction, and resources. It’s not surprising that managing HR in a VUCA world is a rallying cry for the Caterpillar HR team.
Rethink How to Break HR
In our Future Workplace Forecast survey, we asked HR and hiring managers to rate the ability of HR to attract the best employees.4 More than half, 53 percent, of HR leaders globally rated themselves as better than the competition. But when we put the same question to hiring managers about the ability of their HR departments to attract the best employees, the response was markedly different. Only 31 percent rated their HR department as better than the competition in attracting talent.
Jayesh Menon, the Singapore-based leader of Global Organizational Effectiveness at Micron Technology, believes the best way to deal with the gap between how HR sees itself and how its clients view HR is to reimagine HR through the lens of a customer. Menon sees the need for HR to assume the role of a workplace activist, identifying big and small changes that HR can create to develop a more compelling workplace experience. This may range from rethinking performance management, to abolishing rigid guidelines for personal time off and taking vacations, to creating opportunities for employees to learn when and where they desire.
It is important to move outside your comfort zone. As an example, consider expanding your knowledge beyond HR to areas such as wearables and mobile apps. Start a conversation with your team on the impact of wearables and apps on your future workplace. Challenge your thinking in each domain. For example, ask yourself how wearable health devices that track movement and health diagnostics will impact employers and employees. What could employers do with this information? If employers collect employee data that indicates an employee has a serious health condition, should they notify the employee?
Then ask yourself to think about what HR processes could be enhanced or replaced with an app. Is there an app your company could use for time reporting? Corporate campus locations? Employee culture surveys? New hire onboarding? Access to your learning management system? Performance check-ins? Matching coaches to employees? The list goes on. What’s on your list?
Next, to develop business acumen, we believe HR professionals should leverage business frameworks to rethink the value of HR. We suggest starting with the simple yet powerful Horizon framework outlined in the book The Alchemy of Growth. You can use this to concurrently assess current and future opportunities. The Horizon framework allows you to plot value against time horizon, as shown in Figure 10.1.
Figure 10.1 The three horizons of growth
We took the liberty of adapting the Horizon model to frame typical HR questions:5
• Short term (Horizon 1)
• What is our current value proposition to the organization?
• How well are we competing for and retaining talent versus our competitors?
• How is the composition of our workforce changing?
• How could we compete for talent?
• Where could we compete for talent?
• What enhancements could we make to the current value proposition? (How could we create pilots to test new products/processes?)
• Long term (Horizon 3)
• What is affecting recruiting for everyone?
• What might be the future challenges for talent engagement?
• How could we scale any of the piloted enhancements and commit to one or more big bets?
You can apply the Horizon framework to explore what you could do differently to source, orient, develop, and engage multiple generations of workers.
As you continue on your journey to become a workplace activist, you will benefit greatly from thinking, acting and solving for problems from the point of view of the prospective and current worker. After all, your job is not your job and HR is no longer HR! Rather, your job is to help your organization win in an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous marketplace and HR is the catalyst to do this.
Anticipating and Navigating the Future Workplace
When we look at organizations that are successful, often the distinguishing characteristic is how well they have responded to change. Consider the situation when Steve Jobs took over Apple in 1997. As he said, “The problem was that Apple stood still. Even though it invested cumulatively billions in R&D, the output was not there. Other companies caught up with it, and its differentiation eroded, in particular with respect to Microsoft.” And now consider what happened at Kodak. As computer science pioneer Jaron Lanier explains in his book Who Owns the Future, “At the height of its power, Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram.” Lanier continues, “Now think about Instagram, a company launched in 2010 as a free mobile app and acquired by Facebook in 2012 for $1 billion. Instagram was acquired by Facebook just three months after Kodak filed for bankruptcy and at the time of acquisition, employed only 13 people.”6
Our belief is that organizations are identifying the need to nurture workplace activists as one way to prepare for the rapid pace of change. As Salim Ismail, bestselling author of Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (and What to Do About It), says, “If you are not disrupting your business or industry, someone else is.” According to Ismail, large corporations are generally ill equipped to identify and harness disruptions for competitive advantage and are thus at serious risk of being disrupted by smaller, nimbler start-ups. Consider the latest report by Citigroup, entitled “Digital Disruption,” which projects that up to 30 percent of employees who work in the U.S. banking industry may lose their jobs to new technologies in the next 10 years. And an even sharper drop is predicted for European banks.7
What’s going on here? The Citigroup report said jobs would be lost to FinTech start-ups taking aim at many different parts of the financial services industry. In the “Be Future Focused” trait of Rule #3, we saw how DBS is creating hackathons for its bankers to build digital literacy skills and empower them to think differently about how to use mobile for the development of new financial service products.
The ability to anticipate the future workplace while looking at the present is what will differentiate winning organizations from the rest. Being an effective workplace activist requires the ability to recognize alternative future states occurring in your workplace. You will also need to become comfortable with working in the unknown and with bringing your best self to work every day on this journey. It’s still hard to believe that in 2007 when the iPhone was released, there were no apps as we now know them. The Apple App Store was not launched until 2008. Today on each of the Apple and Android app stores, more than 2 million apps are available for download. The rise of this app economy has massively transformed the behavior of consumers and organizations. Individuals are now accustomed to easily finding an answer to their question via an app. Organizations are taking note and developing Corporate App Stores to manage corporate sanctioned apps. While we have profiled IBM, Qualcomm, and Cognizant Technology in Rule #4, we see the appification of work intensifying as companies in industries as diverse as professional services, financial services, and retail launch corporate app stores to provide employees access at work to similar tools they use in their personal lives.
As workplace activists, we need to consider the convergence of the obvious with the not so obvious trends reshaping our workforces and workplaces.
Disruption presents both opportunities and risks, depending on how prepared we are. Everything we know about why people work, when they work, and where they work is being turned upside down.
Being a workplace activist requires honing our ability to anticipate the future changes to which our organization needs to adapt. While preparedness matters, so too will fostering the behaviors and norms by which we will operate in the the future workplace.
To help our organization win in the future workplace, we need to lead the initiatives to ensure our organization continuously and successfully adapts to change. We must all be workplace activists. This means agitating for change and responding to the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity we see happening around us. Being a workplace activist is both a challenge and an opportunity. Are you ready?
MY ACTION PLAN
Myself
• What is my job?
• Am I passionate enough to agitate for change to help my organization prepare for the future?
• How can I put forward more informed speculations about where our organization should focus? What business frameworks can I use?
• Am I able to competently explain the future to others and engage them to support our mission?
My Team
• Do all the members of the team understand our jobs?
• What changes in our business strategy have we made to get us to where we are today?
• How and when did we recognize these triggers to change our people practices?
• How could we maintain an ongoing practice of revisiting our team’s contribution to the future?
My Organization
• What changes do we see coming that we should be preparing for today?
• How could we compete differently for talent?
• What are the assumptions we hold about the future workplace?
• What changes do we see our competitors making to prepare for the future workplace?