This document discusses challenges facing organizations in today's rapidly changing environment and the opportunity for HR professionals to help organizations adapt and thrive. Specifically, it notes that: 1) Hierarchical and rigid organizational structures are unsuitable for turbulent times and increased agility is needed. 2) HR can help organizations question past behaviors, develop unique human competencies, and enhance innovation, adaptability, resilience and an empowering culture. 3) By doing so, HR has the opportunity to make people management the ultimate source of an organization's competitiveness and truly contribute in a strategic manner.

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RECRUITMENT Deficiencies in
science and engineering is choking
the UK economy. STEM careers
must be more positively promoted
STRATEGICWORKFORCEMANAGEMENT
Hierarchical structures inherited
from the industrial age are entirely
inappropriate today
PENSIONPLANNING Highest
percentage of opt out rates in
auto-enrolment are 22-30 year olds.
Engaging the young is failing
THOUGHTLEADERSHIP Buyer beware?
Most thought leaders are not
attempting to sell snake oil, they
believe themselves to be right
ALSO FEATURED IN THIS ISSUE
THEOCAMURCA,HRDIRECTOREMEA-BURGERKING
{ F O O D F O R T H O U G H T }
“MERITOC R AC Y AND AN OWNERSHIP MENTALITY ALIGN S
IND I V I D U ALS W ITH BUSINESS OBJECTIVES ”
HRDthe
HRDIRECTOR
The only independent strategic HR publication
JANUARY 2015 I ISSUE 123
SPECIALREPORT
MACMILLAN CANCER
SUPPORT - 750,000 PEOPLE
OF WORKING AGE LIVING
WITH CANCER AND HALF
A MILLION CARERS INTHE
WORKFORCE. CANCER IS
ONTHE INCREASE
© First published in theHRDIRECTOR publication - Issue 123, January 2015

2. 28 thehrdirector JANUARY 2015
feature STRATEGIC WORKFORCE MANAGEMENT
What we do know is that those trends, among
others, are transforming how firms organise
themselves, and the dynamics of the
employment market. In short; how, where and
when people work. However, in many
organisations, the HR department is not
evolving at the same pace. There is a huge
opportunity ahead for HR professionals. But you
better start swimmin’, or you’ll sink like a stone.
A recent survey by McKinsey found that nine
out of ten executives ranked organisational
agility both as critical to business success and
as growing in importance over time. The
message is clear: to survive in an environment
where technologies, knowledge and business
models become obsolete in the blink of an eye,
organisations need to be agile. They must be
capable of integrating, building and
reconfiguring competences to adapt to rapidly
changing environments. The evolution of data
processing and communication technologies
is dramatically reducing transaction costs.
As a result, organisations can now get things
done by being more innovative, more dynamic
and more agile. As Clay Shirky says, “most of
the barriers to group action have collapsed,
and without those barriers, we are now free to
explore new ways of gathering together and
getting things done.”
However, many organisations stick blindly
to rigid workflows and hierarchical structures
inherited from the industrial age, designed to
maximise efficiency or quality in relatively stable
environments. In turbulent times, you need to
be more agile. Fortunately, many organisations
understand that there are alternative models,
more suitable for complex, volatile and
uncertain situations. For example, some
organisations flatten their hierarchies to bring
the voice of customers closer to their
executives, empower their employees to take
more decisions and allow employees the
chance of customising their work through job
crafting programmes. Others introduce social
networking platforms to promote collaboration
and a culture of transparency. Some make their
organisations more open to their environment,
crowd-source some of their business processes,
or increase the proportion of external talent they
work with; tapping into online workplaces to hire
and work with the best freelance professionals
the world has to offer. And a few organise their
teams in co-working spaces where they can
breathe fresh air, see the world with new eyes
and be disruptive.
Of course, not all organisations are equally
successful in these initiatives. Inertia is
common in larger, older and more hierarchical
organisations. Sometimes the blockers derive
from the individual interests of leaders not
Bob Dylan once famously urged: “keep your eyes wide, the chance
won’t come again”. Admittedly, his fifty-year-old protest song wasn’t
written specifically for HR professionals, but the sentiment is still sound.
It’s time to “admit that the waters around you have grown”. Nobody seems
to know for sure where phenomena like the digital revolution, an ageing
population, globalisation and the shift in society’s values will lead us.
STRATEGIC
WORKFORCE
PLANNING
your old road
is rapidly agein’
ARTICLE BY SANTIAGO GARCIA, MANAGING DIRECTOR - IOPENER INSTITUTE

3. JANUARY 2015 thehrdirector 29
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ORGANISATIONS
STICK BLINDLY
TO RIGID
WORKFLOWS AND
HIERARCHICAL
STRUCTURES
INHERITED FROM
THE INDUSTRIAL
AGE, DESIGNED
TO MAXIMISE
EFFICIENCY IN
RELATIVELY
STABLE
ENVIRONMENTS.
IN TURBULENT
TIMES, YOU NEED
TO BE MORE
AGILE
willing to stray from their comfort zones, and
sometimes from compensation structures that are
often designed to reward short-term achievements
rather than the development of organisational agility.
Some organisational setups and people management
practices are the result of isomorphic forces such as
trotting out standard responses in an uncertain
environment because there’s no clear best option,
conformity leading to professionalisation, or the
imitation of what managers consider best practices -
best practices that don’t exist in a volatile, uncertain,
complex and ambiguous environment. But for a world
in permanent beta, a good solution for one
organisation may not work when implemented in
a different organisational context. It could even have
a detrimental effect. Many managers become
prisoners of cognitive frames of their own building.
These have been developed throughout their
professional lives as a result of the education they
have received, the behaviours they have copied and
the solutions that may have worked for them in the
past. But it is madness to believe that applying these
cognitive frames in a radically different context will
achieve the same results.
The world has changed and today’s leaders
need to balance apparently contradictory priorities
such as control and agility, efficiency and flexibility,
security and resilience. We are heading towards
a future where leaders cannot have answers to all the
problems. Nor can they have everything under
control. We face a future where organisations cannot
be managed as machines, but as complex adaptive
systems whose behaviour cannot be explained as the
sum of the behaviours of their components, and
where cause and effect relationships are not
commonplace. This brave new world of work is made
up of complex roles where the difference between the
contribution of a top performer and the contribution
of the average employee is much wider than for the
simpler roles of the past. A world in which
organisations and countries are fighting a global war
for the best talent. Talent which is less dependent on
organisations for employment, is looking for
meaningful jobs and has ready information about
what working for a specific organisation is like. We
are in the era of the "Knowmads", a term coined by
John Moravec to refer to a new class of knowledge
professionals who, thanks to technology, can work
with anybody, anytime, anywhere.
It is also a world in which organisations require
employees to have more than just technical expertise,
loyalty and obedience. As Gary Hamel, founder of
Strategos once said: “In a world where customers
wake up every morning asking, ‘What’s new, what’s
different, and what’s amazing?’ success depends on
a company’s ability to unleash the initiative,
imagination, and passion of employees at all levels”.
And since most people act under the influence of
their emotions, it is a world in which organisations
need to pay more attention to another important
element: employees’ “psychological capital” - how
happy people are at work. We have to remember that
FOR FURTHER INFO
www.iopenerinstitute.com
people are not like technologies, processes,
or business strategies that become obsolete at an
accelerated pace and can be easily copied. An
organisation’s human, social, and psychological
capitals form a highly complex social system
developed over time. This is difficult for competitors
to observe, analyse, understand and imitate.
Everything suggests that we are moving towards
a future where people - and people management -
may become the ultimate source of competitiveness
for more organisations.
This situation offers HR professionals the
opportunity to contribute to the competitiveness of
their organisations. And therefore truly be “strategic”.
Their privileged perspective means they can leverage
to help their organisations gain self-awareness,
question their past patterns of behaviour and develop
a suite of human competencies that sets the
organisation apart from its competitors. For instance,
the HR department can enhance the potential for
innovation within an organisation by implementing
diversity programmes, fostering a change in attitudes
towards failure or mobilising the talent of a greater
number of people through collaborative work and
knowledge management initiatives.
In terms of adaptability, HR can of course
facilitate the assimilation of new technologies and
other changes. But beyond that, the HR department
may stop being the voice of Orthodoxy and start
being a function that enables the organisation to be a
little less structured, hierarchical and rigid-minded.
For example, let HR be the voice that challenges
decisions that benefit the efficiency of the
organisation at the expense of its resilience; or
question exaggerated investments in risk prevention
that in the long run leave people underprepared to
deal with adverse situations. HR professionals can
also help the leaders of an organisation abandon the
culture of control and distrust on which the
governance structures of many organisations are still
based, embracing a vision of the organisation as a
community of people. A community whose leaders,
rather than being controllers and decision makers,
act as architects and catalysers of relational contexts
in which people come and go and work
autonomously.
And last but not least, HR can contribute in ways
that transcend the boundaries of the organisation:
playing an active role in the regeneration of moral
values within their organisations; recovering a climate
of trust that, in many cases, has been lost, and
helping people to develop their employability in
a context of longer professional lives, but in which
organisations die younger.