Hack:
Organic HR

By Kim Bechtel - Decision Maker at yourHRco

August 31, 2011 at 9:55am

Moonshots

Summary

Using traditional HR practices to achieve outstanding business success is like using gasoline to fight a fire. Most of the time you're doing more damage than you would have had if you had not used them. Stop interviewing people, stop doing performance appraisals, stop giving annual salary increases. Get rid of your HR shop and you'll likely experience a significant jump in profitability, performance and engagement. You pay your managers to manage, if you're paying HR to police your managers, get rid of all of them!

Problem

Your gut tells you that you don't have an engaged workforce, whatever that is. You stare at the ceiling at night, worried that your key talent is getting ready to leave. The thought of talking to HR about this has you thinking of tall buildings or bridge decks.

Solution

Start having conversations with your key people, not just senior management, but the key leaders you have across your organization. Don't survey them, don't ask HR to interview them. You, personally, go out and stand on the loading dock or by the photocopier or in the parking lot. Ask them how things are going, how do they 'feel' about working for you. Listen carefully, don't talk, don't explain, don't argue and don't dismiss. Say 'tell me more' a lot. Then start acting.

First, take away any burrs under the saddle, motes in the eye, bamboo under the fingernails that all your well intentioned management and HR people have inflicted on your people. Do the easy stuff first, don't worry now about what that stuff might be. If you have done the first step properly you will find out what it is very quickly. Just tell everybody to stop doing the dumb stuff - the stuff that you think is dumb too. Then, revise the stuff that is still important to do but is misunderstood, misinterpreted or misapplied by everybody. Simplify procedures, eliminate paper forms, do away with decision making levels, you only need one decision maker in each action - you need more than one if you don't trust the one you assign to the decision, if this is the case then assign the decision to someone else.

Stop conducting hiring interviews. Start having conversations with people about working with you. Stop using interviews to promote internal people, it is insulting to them that you don't have enough information about them from working with them to decide if they need and deserve to be promoted and it is embarassing to you that you don't have that information.

Stop doing performance appraisals. They are lagging indicators of what worked or didn't work six to twelve months ago, they place your managers and employees in artificial situations that even highly trained people screw up. Start managing your performance by drawing a direct line between each person who works for you and the business objectives of your organization, making more money and spending less, exceeding customer expectations and retaining key employees. Eliminate anything in their day to day work that doesn't deliver their part of achieving those results and then add more of the good stuff to the gaps that you have created.

Stop adjusting everyone's base salary on an annual basis. Base salaries should demonstrate to your people that you know how much it costs to live in your community and how much someone with their value to a company should be paid. Increases to that base salary should occur when they have added more value to their side of the equation, when they have gained new skills or abilities that enhance your customers' experience, reduce costs to your production or performance or they have brought a new idea or concept to your business that increases your market share or creates a whole new revenue stream, or if they have recommended an innovation to your business practice that will provide a sustained improvement in your business results. Provide performance incentives for one off or short term achievement of results.

Align your peoples' talents with the work areas that are critical to your success. Put the people-people in front of customers and other employees, put your analysts and organizers in front of your timelines and inventories. If someone doesn't have alignment with anything in your company, help them move to another organization. You'll be doing them and yourself an immense favour. Don't have job descriptions, instead have result descriptions, have accountability descriptions, have talent descriptions.

Don't train people out of their talent areas, and don't train people out of their weaknesses. Neither approach works, you'll invest time, money and effort and end up with everyone frustrated and worn out. Train for skills, demand that people be able to do something at the end of training that they weren't able to do at the beginning.

Hire fast and fire fast. Don't let anyone work for you that brings toxic energy to your workplace. Organic HR is about no artificial chemicals or fertilizers, sustained relationships and honest conversations.

Practical Impact

Implementing Organic HR will result in reduced costs by reducing the size of your HR shop, eliminating ineffective use of compensation and training dollars. It will result in increased performance by connecting your people with the work that needs to be done to make the organization successful, which will result in increased revenue and reduced input costs.

First Steps

Assume that any traditional approaches you currently have to hire, train, promote, manage and fire your people are wrong. Then get out and start having meaningful, one on one conversations with your key people. Listen carefully, and then act. Take one step at a time and keep focused on your business objectives.

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