Kevin Rustici is a strategic human capital consultant obsessed with the future of work.
He asks the hard questions and collects the necessary data to find out the relationship between the individuals and what work means to them.
Is HR the 'No Fun' Police?
HR can definitely feel like the no-fun police! Often HR will tell you "no"... or if HR was around your desk you were in trouble.
Kevyn jokes about this quite often, for when he asks most HR professionals, "how did you get into HR?" most people say, "I tripped into it... it wasn’t my first choice"
For Kevyn, he became infatuated with the people behind the work. How are culture, purpose, and passion cultivated? He dove into people analytics and it opened his eyes to what’s right in front of us and what we experience every day.
So... HR can be sexy! It can be fun!
Transitional Period of HR
Unemployment rates are at their lowest rate ever. This is when the competition heats up for talent. Often businesses throw gasoline, kerosene, and some TNT on it and hope it works.
With the pandemic, everybody took that social pause collectively, and that's pretty powerful. It's mass trauma. And now, we will see how humans utilize that experience to their advantage or disadvantage.
We've seen some rise to the expectations and grow from them, and others carry out the other way. But the real question is: how are we going to respond?
Suddenly we’re talking about work balance in new ways. We are stepping into this transitional period and it's reframing the conversation. People are actually listening now because it's harder to get people involved with the workforce.
Why Data in HR Matters
When initiating change, there are ways to do it. A lot of businesses have projects they spent two years on that don't look like it worked, but they felt like it worked.
We can't come in there and destroy the project - we're talking about something very emotional!
This is where the data comes in.
Kevyn looks at the data to form a hypothesis and to know where to start. By charting the culture of choice or the employer of choice, it becomes the guiding star or guiding principle for the business.
When we change our intention it drives our attention.
Sure, compensation is probably the quickest and easiest way to draw people in... but soon they realize it's not why they stay.
We have to evolve. It's no longer a work-life balance, but a blend.
Culture of Choice
In the companies that are doing it right, there are no silos.
Finance has a relationship with HR, HR has a relationship with finance, operations, and middle management. That's a company that is going to be more in tune with its frontline employees. They have more influence and they have purposeful multi-levels.
HR are the people who understand how people influence the business and influence the outcomes that a business is looking for. They effectively translate and communicate that to any business unit and tell them why that's applicable to them and how that is going to help enable their success.
For Kevyn, that's HR.
Developing Talent
The organizations that are putting themselves into the talent management category firmly understand that they're buying, renting, growing, and botting talent.
They ask the question: Where can technology be leveraged?
The generation behind us is not going to do a job because it's required by that company simply because they failed to invest in the technology that would eliminate that particular role.
- People don't want to do administrative work!
- They don't want to take one thing and put it in one area
- They want to start using what's in their head
- They want to get creative and innovative
When HR is firmly in that talent category, it gets into the technology. It gets into the people and gets a part of their human capital and understanding where, when, and how to upscale and rescale.
Culture of Immediacy
We come from a world of immediacy. People want to know if they did a good job on each project. Did they do a great job this week or this month?
They don't want a review one time a year when they can barely remember what they had for lunch last week! How is it possible to remember the whole year and be graded on it? People don't want that.
What people want right now is transparency. They don't like hard lines in the sand.
Future of HR?
Kevyn has a few questions moving forward:
- Is it going to fall on the employers to upscale and re-skill the general population because the business community is going to evolve at such a rapid rate?
- Or will this fall on the individual?
- Will the individual have to spend their own cash for courses?
- Where are we going?
That's going to be interesting on whose shoulders that falls on.
Kevyn is willing to bet that the employers that understand this and offer their culture as a continuous learning environment with four-day work weeks... will have a long line of people waiting to work for them outside the door.
