HR Observations: February 10

If you are going through transformation, the skills your organization needs today are not the skills you are going to need a year from now. Too often organizations say they want to transform but then focus on hiring the same kind of people they have in the past with an overemphasis on soon-to-be-obsolete technical skills. Tomorrow's successful organizations require tomorrow's ways of doing business and that comes by building a diverse group of thinkers who see things in a new and different way.

So many companies that consider themselves transformational or agile are old school at their core. Their technologies may represent a leap forward but their internal systems are anything but. It's GE in a shiny new jacket.

If you want to transform your organization, the hiring and training and rewards systems need to keep pace with your technology.

If you want to be agile, you need to hire and reward agility (spoiler alert: it's not people with the steady, linear careers your resume software seeks.)

There are so many amazing innovations in talent management that go far beyond putting a modern looking technology interface on the same archaic practices. It starts by looking at the biases in your systems - because you cannot fix what you cannot see. It involves shaking up the old way of doing things. If you feel uncomfortable, you are likely on the right track.

If you want to get started, I can help you with your thinking processes and run some bias checks.

When we think of trauma, we often think of events we see on the news. People are often surprised to learn that everyday events can build and the impact can be just as harmful. The workplace can be filled with harm-causing behaviors and events and knowing how to identify and eliminate them can make work better for everyone. The goal is to create psychological safety so that we can all tap into the part of the brain responsible for decision making, creativity, and collaboration. Becoming trauma informed does not mean you need to become a mental health professional. It means that you have a new empathetic lens through which you can see the impact of decisions and behaviours on other people so that you can help people bring their best selves to work.

Layoffs are traumatizing for those impacted directly and left behind to pick up the workload. Layoffs cause financial trauma and threaten our ability to take care of ourselves and our families. From the perspective of the nervous system, layoffs feel very unsafe. Layoffs should be a last resort to save a dying business. They should not be the go-to move for companies to manage the quarter or move the share price. The data shows that over the long term, the results are very bad. Engagement suffers, burnout increases, and bad decisions are made. And people are getting tired of it. 62% of Gen Z are pursuing or intend to pursue entrepreneurship (The Center for Generational Kinetics/WP Engine), and 48% have a side hustle (Small Business State of Mind, Microsoft/Wakefield Research.) When companies cannot be trusted to be there for you, you learn to be there for yourself. There is no talent shortage. And people are working hard. They just aren't willing to work hard for organizations that see them as disposable.

I started to study trauma based on my own lived experience and quickly realized how applicable so much of the learning was to the workplace. Here are some of my favorite books on the topic of the trauma-informed workplace as well as some general backgrounders on how trauma can impact our lives. Some of these books are not easy reads (particularly the van der Kolk and Maté works which speak to some heavier types of trauma) but they are worthwhile reads. I found them to be personally healing as well as informative.

If you are going through transformation, the skills your organization needs today are not the skills you are going to need a year from now. Too often organizations say they want to transform but then focus on hiring the same kind of people they have in the past with an overemphasis on soon-to-be-obsolete technical skills. Tomorrow's successful organizations require tomorrow's ways of doing business and that comes by building a diverse group of thinkers who see things in a new and different way. So many companies that consider themselves transformational or agile are old school at their core. Their technologies may represent a leap forward but their internal systems are anything but. It's GE in a shiny new jacket. If you want to transform your organization, the hiring and training and rewards systems need to keep pace with your technology. If you want to be agile, you need to hire and reward agility (spoiler alert: it's not people with the steady, linear careers your resume software seeks.) There are so many amazing innovations in talent management that go far beyond putting a modern looking technology interface on the same archaic practices. It starts by looking at the biases in your systems - because you cannot fix what you cannot see. It involves shaking up the old way of doing things. If you feel uncomfortable, you are likely on the right track. If you want to get started, I can help you with your thinking processes and run some bias checks.