Top Five Responses to the New Problem of HR
Megan Purdy | Business, HR
| ByEach week Blogging4Jobs brings you the Top 5 #HR Blogs in the #Workplace. These blogs come from all across the internet and highlight important topics being discussed in the space. We serve as your weekly recap of top blogs that we’ve read throughout the week. If we’ve missed any, let us know.
The New Problem of HR
While Harvard Business Review was Rethinking HR, HRE Online was convening a roundtable discussion of CHROs to discuss The Road Ahead, and Frobes was looking for insights into the coming HR Culture Revolution. This week’s top five blog posts tracked the new “problem” of HR.
1. HBR is Getting it Wrong: The Internal RISE of HR
Trish McFarlane isn’t satisfied. Why, she asks, didn’t HBR talk to HR practitioners? Why is so much focus put on outside ideas and not the transformative work already underway within the discipline?
Meanwhile, Tim Sackett reminds us that there’s a reason HR solutions need to be tailor made: you can’t copy culture. You can’t force it to change quickly, either.
“Don’t fight the culture you have. Work with it, make it work for you. Culture evolves, it doesn’t change quickly. That’s your biggest problem. Too many leaders think they have the power to change culture overnight, but they don’t.”
3. Developing A Learning Culture
Now, how do you tip that incremental cultural change in the direction of a learning culture: one where managers and employees are excited about change and discovery? There are no easy answers but here are some starting points.
4. Pushing the Rope With Learning
But can developing a learning culture be the wrong decision? When you decide what learning is supposed to like, it can be. “Learning is a choice, not a force or mandate. If you want me to learn how to sing music, you can force me and I will do it to keep my job, but not because I made the choice. Find someone to inspire me with music. More on singing below.”
5.Decision Making in the Real World
Wally Brock, writing about how ideal versus real decision making processes differ, hit upon something germane to the above conversation:
“In the textbooks, you start with facts. But in the real world you usually start with opinions. Some of those opinions are about how the problem should be solved. Others are about who or what caused the problem. Some are about what the “real problem” is.
To get to a less-opinionated description and start moving toward a solution, you need a common way to describe the situation. I suggest asking everyone for their story of the problem.”
What exactly is the new problem with HR that so many are trying to solve?
The Devil Is in the Details: The Limits of Big Data Analytics
And finally, here on Blogging4Jobs, Mike Habermann cautions us from stumbling into reliance on new technologies and techniques before understanding them – if we don’t know the human and technical limits of analytics, well, the analysis produced won’t be very good. It’s just as Wally Brock suggests: the best place to start with analytics – with any problem – is figuring out what the problem is.