Recently, a friend of mine was telling me that she has had the good fortune to participate in an interesting digital skills upskilling project in the multinational organisation where she works.
She told me that at the beginning she was excited and saw it as a great opportunity to develop herself and, by the way, increase her employability. But a few months had passed and she was a bit disillusioned.
At the beginning, she participated in an assessment centre, which she says was very good, but she had some simulation of their systems that they had to do with powerpoint and it was, in her opinion, very lacklustre. She, who works in systems, says it would have been very easy to do a real simulation. In any case, she loved the final feedback she got from a fellow developer: “I had a great conversation and it helped me discover a lot of things about myself that I can continue to work with.
At that moment, she was highly motivated to improve and asked her colleague: “What do we do now? He referred her to her training partners. After a long series of meetings and requests, she managed to participate in a couple of programmes, but without feeling that they were 100% aligned with what she had to develop, but they were not bad for her to have a good basis. Some time later, he asked his jeja for advice, and it became very clear to him that what he needed was to participate in projects that would help him put into practice the things he had been trained on. This time, she had to talk to her HRBP who promised to talk to a colleague of hers to see if they could make it happen, although she warned her that it would be difficult because her department was running low on headcount and this could have many implications for her area and even for her target variable. With each new HR interlocutor he felt he was losing some of the motivation he had at the beginning.
It all sounded very familiar and at the same time quite wrong.
Modig and Alhstron wrote in their book “This is lean: Resolving the efficiency paradox” a very interesting concept applicable to people projects in a new, increasingly complex environment. The efficiency of flow To illustrate this, in a highly recommended TED talk, Modig gave the example of his experience in receiving a diagnosis of ADHD from one of his sons. He tells us about a long pilgrimage until he was able to get a diagnosis: teachers, psychologists, doctors…, which lasted for 4 anxious months. Most of that time did not help the doctors to give a better diagnosis, prolonged the parents’ anxiety and delayed the start of possible treatment. A real waste. None of the specialists wasted time or seemed to have little work to do, but by not talking to each other, by not having the full picture of the patient and by focusing on their own efficiency as if it were an island, they were terribly inefficient.
Now think about my friend’s story: someone does the assessmet, others do not involve IT people, others guide the development, others propose training actions, others try to find the space for implementation…. sounds a lot like Modig’s medical specialists.
HR departments are often organised by specialist functions that are developing useful knowledge, but also a subculture that is increasingly different from each other and losing sight of the employee to whom we need to give value.
We all work hard and with a vocation to give more value to the company and our colleagues, but focusing exclusively on the efficiency of each department in isolation does not work. Nobody has a global vision and much more efficiency is lost than is gained because nobody takes care of the efficiency of the service flow. We lose efficiency, we lose effectiveness and we lose value for the employee, why do we insist on working as islands?
It is a vicious circle, which also encourages the development of subcultures, with their specialist kings and queens who make it their cause to be more and more specialists… more islands, more separated, less efficient. Why don’t we work together to solve ‘s challengespeople?, but with an employee perspective, not a department perspective There may be specialists, of course, but if we all look at the process as a whole, work on the efficiency of the process flow, we can gain productivity and above all greatly improve the value of our work for people.
HR agility is meant to break all that down and bring us efficiency, low waste, employee focus and collective intelligence to innovate better. Do you really think that functional islands are going to do all that?
