Adaptive HR - fit for a complex and uncertain world

For a long time now, I have read and watched in despair how the Human Resource function is struggling to transform into a future-fit, impactful function that drives organisational agility, capability, and experience – even more so now that we are managing a pandemic, hybrid work, reskilling and upskilling at scale, pressure to take stands politically and rampant inflation. The crisis has both helped HR shine AND put us under even more pressure to respond and transform. We are exhausted, but we must carry on.

In my mind, HR is a pivotal strategic function that helps leaders make sense of the chaos to create future fit organisations that can thrive in complexity and ambiguity. But we must become more complex ourselves. An Adaptive Human Resource function helps the organisation, and its leaders create value through people and a help create a resilient, capable, and adaptive workforce that can meet any future strategies and challenges the organisation faces. 

We must reimagine the employee experience, enable it digitally and hold leaders accountable for creating human centric, high-performance organisations that care about the people and the planet. We need to become digital and analytics experts that can demonstrate the business case and impact of this and we need to be experts in dual transformation – optimising the current business whilst building the future. We need to modernise and overhaul what we do, no longer depending on process and policy to get things done. To do this, we need to make time to build the future organisation, reshape our people strategy and remodel our own business model and skills sets.

I see this as an ongoing journey that flows as follows: We need to make sense of the future of work and assess where our organisation is, we then build a competitive and compelling people strategy and transform our own operating model, structures, and capabilities (including technology capability) to create more value and impact. 

Then we embark on a journey to:

• Co-create digital first, human centred employee experiences
• Modernise our key talent processes 
• Build our HR tech stack and analytics capability
• Lead dual transformation and generative change
• Redesign the organisation to achieve the business operating model in a flexible and adaptive way – embedding new ways of working.
• Develop future fit leaders and psychologically safe, high performing teams and
• Build our brand, demonstrate our impact and influence and partner with the C-suite and Board

If you would like to learn more about how to do this, grab a copy of my book Adaptive HR available here.