RE-IMAGINING HR

WHITE PAPER

www.roffeypark.com

The future’s agile, systemic and already here

Systemic and Agile: the terms seem inescapable at the moment, as organisations, HR and OD professionals navigate unfamiliar business and organisational landscapes.

Imagine a business facing escalating competition, potential for new markets and a merger with a local producer elsewhere in Asia, the challenge of sourcing, retaining and developing talent across cultures and within virtual teams, an aging multi-generational workforce, multiple stakeholders, and contractors. Sound like ‘business as usual’? You’re not alone. In Roffey Park’s work with clients and our research, in Asia and globally, we see HR and OD professionals looking for fresh ways to address challenges for which traditional HR has nothing to offer. A re-imagining of HR.

But HR has been transforming itself for decades. So what’s changed? Pretty well everything; and all the factors interconnect.

• Global Economics: Forecasts are for slow economic growth globally, with the strongest growth continuing to be in Asia and parts of Africa. ‘The World in 2050’ (PWC, 2017, p.25) reveals that out of the top 15 fastest growing economies over the next 35 years, all of them are emerging and developing nations, and nine from South and Southeast Asia.

• Global Demographics: Population growth and economic growth are powerfully linked, and long term projections are for a reduction in global population growth, from an average of 1.3% during the period 1980-2014 to 0.5% from now to 20501 with working age population growth forecast to drop to 0.3% between now and 2050. According to a report by Natixis2, the Singapore working population will fall by 2% every year after 2020 with adverse effects on GDP and economic growth.

• AI and talent shortages: Shrinking working age populations and talent shortages accelerate business’s pursuit of efficiency and competitiveness through wider use of AI. A recent Boston Consulting Group (BCG) study predicts that 25% of all jobs will be “replaced by smart software or robots” by 20253. In Singapore around 96 per cent of businesses report struggling to find the skilled individuals they need4, with non-employed ‘freelancers’ and contract workers making up 11 per cent5 of the resident workforce.

1 EIU (2015) Long-term macroeconomic forecasts: Key trends to 2050. A special report from The Economist Intelligence Unit

2 http://sbr.com.sg/economy/news/singapore%E2%80%99s-work-ing-population-shrink-2-yearly-after-2020

3 http://www.hrmasia.com/content/manning-machines-hr-age-ai 4 http://www.hrinasia.com/recruitment/skills-shortages-contin-

ue-to-worry-employers-in-singapore-in-2017/ 5 http://www.todayonline.com/commentary/time-singapore-em-

brace-freelance-contract-workforce

SO WHAT FOR ORGANISATIONS AND HR?

In a nutshell, in this changing landscape, forecasts are of an increasingly polarised labour market and increasingly polarised society of ‘haves and have nots’. We can also expect:

• Two-tier workforces - combining scarce well paid talent, and insecure low pay low skills roles.

• Increased diversity - age, culture and gender

• Highly competitive labour market - benefiting employees in the highly skilled, scarce talent category, and favouring employers in relation to the low skilled and low paid.

• New ways of ‘organising’ - traditional norms of location and time based employment are diminishing, the proportion of the workforce describing themselves as working flexibly and through collaborations are growing, in response to which a new organisational paradigm has emerged in which businesses function as ‘network orchestrators’ (CIPD p116).

NEW LABOUR MARKETS AND WORKFORCE

The labour market of the future has been described in the shape of an ‘hour-glass’.

The top represents the highly skilled, highly sought after workforce, commanding favourable work-life balance, progressive work environments, and greater autonomy.

The middle represents the squeezed and disappearing traditional white-collar professional jobs, that digital technology and advances in AI are eroding.

At the bottom are the low-skilled, facing ferocious competition for jobs, and intergenerational tensions in the workplace as low skilled young people compete with older workers staying in employment longer, to supplement inadequate pensions and rising living costs.

DEMISE OF TRADITIONAL CAREERS6 CIPD (November 2014) Research Report, HR: Getting Smart about

agile working’ In association with The Agile Future Forum

“The job-for-life culture of the last century, already ailing, will be dead and buried by 2030.”7

The norm is becoming a career, or even multiple careers, built between multiple jobs, some simultaneously, multiple organisations, project to project, boosting skills, experience, and networks along the way. And not surprisingly the core skills increasingly sought by businesses include flexibility, and collaboration.

THE FUTURE IS AGILE

Larger organisations in all sectors will be less and less built and organised in the ways we’ve been used to, with implications for Organisational Design, hierarchy, and employment relationships, as predictability and stability give way to the need for flexibility, agility and high trust, autonomous working relationships.

For some, all this requires unfamiliar values, different cultures, and new leadership behaviours. For example, at the moment, although HR leaders worry about the quality of work of this rapidly expanding non-employed workforce, a CIPD survey found only half of organisations provide training for casual staff, only one third have appraisals, and less than half include them in internal communications or recognition awards (CIPD 2014 p11)8.

Organisations are also needing to build ‘environments geared for collaboration, innovation and ongoing – rather than intermittent – adaptation’ CIPD 2014 p2) not least to attract Generation Y, 92% of whom identified ‘flexibility as a top priority when choosing a workplace.9

7 Raconteur (November 2017), The Future of HR. https://www.raconteur.net/future-of-hr-20178 CIPD (November 2014) Research Report, HR: Getting Smart about agile working’ In association with The Agile Future Forum9 Adaci, B., Gretczko, M., and Pelster, B. (2013) Human Capital Trends 2013

Implications for HRAs HR professionals, if we’re honest, we’ve got some catching up to do. In fact, among the organisations Roffey Park is working with, we see a polarisation in the HR function. Some are doggedly clinging to a ‘commodity management’ paradigm of HR, still acting as if humans are ‘resources’, focused predominantly internally rather than externally, prioritising ‘controlling risk’ rather than ‘flexibility’, while others have already made the shift to an agile, systemic approach, with a focus on the external as well as the internal. So what does that mean in practice?

RE-IMAGINING HR

For decades as HR practitioners we’ve had a preoccupation with the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of the profession. Over the last couple of years, given these new challenges facing our clients, Roffey Park’s focus has been more on the ‘why’, taking a fresh look at HR’s ultimate purpose and value.

So, for today’s context, here’s a useful definition of HR’s purpose.

“To facilitate the fulfilment of an enterprise’s purpose through, and for the people working with it, both individually, and collectively as a dynamic human system.”

• Facilitate – Literally ‘to make it easy’ for people to join, develop, stay if they want, make it easy for the enterprise to fulfil its purpose.

• ‘Fulfilment of an enterprise’s purpose’. ‘Fulfilment’ of purpose is increasingly more necessary than simply ‘achievement of results’.

• ‘Enterprise’ – ‘Organisation’ can imply structure and hierarchy, which we increasingly see enterprises across all sectors shifting away from in favour of more flexible, agile forms.

• People ‘working with’ it – Those participating in the work of an enterprise increasingly do so through a range of relationships other than a traditional employment contract, and HR need to manage these alternative work relationships more effectively.

• ‘Individual’ and ‘collective’ – Historically, HR has been preoccupied with the individual, their recruitment, performance management, learning and development, succession, and talent planning and neglected the ‘collective’. Given the reality that enterprises are dynamic human systems, this calls HR to be skilfully attentive simultaneously to the personal, the interpersonal and the whole system, including the external environment.

• ‘Through’ and ‘for’ – It’s obvious that an enterprise can only fulfil its purpose ‘through’ the people working with it, but any humane, ethical enterprise also has moral, if not contractual responsibilities ‘for’ those people. And how it fulfils that responsibility will enhance or undermine its attempt to be an attractive place to work - especially significant for attracting millennial talent.

In real life we see this translating into three ‘buckets’ of value contribution.

• Policy Drafters – helping codify, not police, agile people processes

• Culture Shapers –facilitating the culture the enterprise needs in order to flourish. In Roffey Park’s 2016 Working in Asia survey, Singapore HR respondents identified ‘Culture Change’ as the competence most needed by HR professionals (see Figure 1). Peter Cheese, CEO of the CIPD commented recently that “In this future, the academic consensus is that HR’s role must be as change agents, continually identifying where the best human-capital value is and creating the right organisational systems that facilitate it.” 7

• Capability Builders - e.g. building emotionally intelligent leadership capability, building capability through organisation design. Lucy Adams, former BBC HRD and chief executive of disruptive HR, that will see HR “build capability not compliance”. 7

64%39%38%28%27%16%15%12%

Change management / Cultural changeTalent management

Employee engagementOrganisational development

Leadership developmentRecruitment / Talent acquisition

Compensation and benefitsCommercial / Financial

Base size (n) = 213

Figure 1

Summary

Everything on the horizon is facing HR with choices. Humans aren’t resources and organisations are complex, dynamic human systems, increasingly required to be agile in their relationship with their external environment, customers, stakeholders and workforce. The era of the ‘commodity management’ paradigm of HR is over; or at least it can no longer credibly promise the success it once did.

The imperative for ‘people’ functions right now is agility, and a systemic focus. This requires a re-imagining of HR’s value to the business; its role not only in relation to individuals but the whole system, internally and externally; a re-imagining of its coordination of a range of contractual arrangements; of careers, reward, recruitment, retention, and diverse generational expectations.

The future is without question agile, systemic and already here. And for HR functions which have already re-imagined themselves, never has their contribution to the enterprise’s success been greater.

About the authorBased in Singapore, Alex Swarbrick is an experienced manager, consultant, facilitator and executive coach, combining a strong background in HR with over 15 years in leadership development. Prior to moving to Singapore, Alex was Programme Director of Roffey Park’s HR Business Partner Skills programme, our Business Partnering Graduate Certificate, and co-facilitated our Strategic HR Programme. Alex works with organisations across sectors helping develop their HR practitioners and HR functions, and regularly writes on HR topics, most recently on the ‘Re-imagining of HR’, exploring the impact of global trends on organisations, working life, and the future for HR.

About Roffey Park

Passionate about people, serious about performance

Based in the UK and Singapore, Roffey Park Institute delivers high impact training programmes, organisational development, qualifications and research customised to the needs of our clients.

We’ve been working with organisations in all sectors across the UK and beyond for over 70 years, improving individual and organisational performance by developing leadership, management, human resources and organisational development capability. We equip learners with the skills, resilience and agility they need to navigate the change and uncertainty of today’s organisations.

We want to make the world of work a better place. So we are unapologetically and passionately people-focused, as we believe this is key to sustainable organisational performance.

Let’s talk. What change are you seeking?

www.roffeypark.com

+65 6549 7840

singapore@roffeypark.com

www.roffeypark.com

For more information about Roffey Park’s services, please contact us:

ASIA PACIFIC OFFICE

Roffey Park Asia Pacific Pte Ltd, 3 Temasek Avenue, Level 21 Centennial Tower, Singapore 039190

Tel: +65 6549 7840 / 7841 / 7842 Fax: +65 6549 7011 Email: singapore@roffeypark.com

Company registration 201015595E

UK OFFICE

Roffey Park Institute, Forest Road, Horsham, West Sussex, RH12 4TB, United Kingdom

Tel: +44 (0) 1293 851644 Fax: +44 (0) 1293 851565 Email: qualifications@roffeypark.com

Roffey Park Institute is a Charity, Registered No 254591