Have we over complicated HR? A function that was once reactive and empathetic may have become entrenched in processes and archaic practices.
Have we overcomplicated HR? A function that was once reactive and empathetic may have become entrenched in processes and archaic practices.
We spoke to Nahal Yousefian, chief people experience officer (CPXO) at MEC – Canada’s iconic outdoor clothing brand - who revealed why she’s committed to stripping HR back to the bare essentials.
“About three years ago I had an existential crisis,” she told us. “I began to realize that as an HR function, we have the spent the better part of our careers pulling away the core competencies and accountabilities for managers, and centralizing them under this empire called HR. By doing this we were telling management that they can’t do anything without us being there to babysit them. At times, we were even using legalese as a way of ensuring they would comply.”
The output of this was two-fold, according to Yousefian. One was that managers became too scared to do anything without the say so of HR, and as such became robotic with staff. The second was that organizations would end up with managers who would chose ignore HR and go rogue.
“They were almost vigilante in their ways of dealing with everything around the staff life cycle,” added Yousefian.
“After doing this for a few years, without really realizing it, culture and engagement began surfacing on massive headlines and invariably ended up on the HR portfolio. And so, now I was going out there saying, yes management do need our support to do their day to day roles, and although you’re the decision makers please make sure you’re consulting with us. But at the same time, I was wondering why they were being so robotic with employees, and why their teams were not engaged.
“I was holding both agenda items whilst talking to managers, and I realized how paradoxical it all was. I still have vigilante managers and there was still a culture and engagement problem, despite the amount of money and resources we spent building amazing leadership material and development programs and culture initiatives. That’s when I had a bit of an epiphany, that each issue was actually causing the other.”
From there, Yousefian wanted to further move on from the core competencies and accountabilities left with managers. Instead, she wanted to craft a system that was intuitive - less about policy and compliance and more about common sense – focusing on how human beings should interact together to resolve issues.
“That invariably influenced the experience people have in the organization,” she continued. “At this point I thought I’d written myself out of a job. But then I realized that there was this huge space that HR should be filling but wasn’t. And that centers on organization design and organizational capability. We need to be more focused on helping build organizational architecture so that it’s simple, intuitive and responsive in its thinking.”
Nahal wants to focus more on organization capability – not in the context of some blanket framework or leadership training, but specific areas in specific teams in order to help them become better at managing change. As Nahal told us, human beings aren’t built to like change, so we’re ignoring biology and lying to each other to pretend that we do. As consumers we have changed a great deal but because the change happened intuitively, we didn’t feel it. At a touch of a button we can make a great deal of the day to day tasks in our lives happen. However, once we come into work, we are hit with counterintuitive processes and change programs.
But does that mean all CHROs need to evolve into CPXOs? She believes it’s less about the name and more about the message behind it.
“The name is almost secondary – it’s about repurposing HR,” she explained. “I’m not just looking at it form an HR perspective, but organizational structure in general. How quickly we move and how we respond to situations has a lot to do with how decisions are made.
“At MEC, I was hired because of my thoughts on this, so I’m really fortunate in my position here. My colleagues are all aligned, even our management are open to this new approach. Of course, HR owning everything from recruitment to reward to compensation to leadership and development, means we’ve complicated it somewhat. We’ve not made it intuitive. My job is to have conversations with mangers to see how we empower them and remove ourselves from that dialogue.”
