I don’t want to die in my office; I’m gonna die on the beaches. – Jack Ma
That’s so sweet of Jack Ma, but the reality stands harsh. To work at web giant Alibaba, you must work at least 12 hours a day, six days a week. Jack Ma argues for a 72-hour working week. That is what the billionaire expects from his employees.
We are human, not resources
Anybody running any company must realize that the most valuable asset is people. Too often companies seem to put their shareholders first, and then they put their customers second, and their staff last. That makes the workplace full of confused people because they struggle to bring their best selves forward, but it doesn’t have to be this way. There is a better way.
Investing in employee experience advances organizational effectiveness and profitability. It’s critical that the leader realizes it’s not just the people at the top, the switchboard operator, or the person cleaning the floors, or all these people are as important as the people at the top, and often, they’re the most important people. They’re out there doing the hard work, and they’re the people that are in touch with the customers. Having a plan for employee development is essential to ensure the performance and productivity of the organizations and the departments.
Online HR platforms vs. bringing the H back into Human Resource management
Everything around us is evolving with the dynamics of digitalization and globalization. We must integrate data and technology into our game today, but don’t forget, human touch has a dramatic impact on administration, in improving confidence and creating bonds. Human Resource is such a broad topic, so not everyone is supposed to understand everything, but we’re expected to have an opinion. When you’re an HR manager, on one side you have the employee population, on other side you have the management, and anyhow we have to stay right in the heart and balance different agendas and expectations all across.
We are entering a new age of automation, unlike anything that’s come before. Now it’s a time of uncertainty and change. There’s a clear progression in terms of what humans did for a living for the longest time; humans shifted into service jobs, and then in human history, the information age happened. The world of work is changing. Suddenly the rules were different; our jobs are now being taken over by machines much faster than they were in the past. We communicate with friends and colleagues often by devices rather than sitting with them talking face-to-face. Tablet and smartphone adoption is growing by 50% every year. We’re no longer governed by the nine-to-five, we’re choosing where when and how we work. That’s why we see hundreds of companies and all types of businesses use the latest evolution of online HR platforms all over the world. Some systems are remarkably flexible and cater to all sizes of companies. They can be in a single location, or they can be in locations around the city, country or even globe. You can access from anywhere you have an internet connection whether that be in the office, at home, at a hotel somewhere else that allows you to get at the data and action whatever things you need.
There’s a lot of discussion going on right now around which should be the future role of HR and we are required to understand how the businesses are running and what the human associations of that are. We talk so much about consolidation of sourcing digitalization, and that’s all fine. Successful companies inside they mind their employee experience and externally they care about their customer experience, but the net is they are focused on people first.
I for one stand behind keeping the “Human’ in Human Resource management. I understand the need for HR Platforms and do offer one myself BUT you can never take away the real human approach and the intrinsic consequence of feeling valued to your employees. To prove my point take the Hawthorne Studies – Well-lit lighting increased productivity, as did a few other variables, such as having a clean workstation, allowing employees to build and work in teams, and having regular breaks. While these were the direct findings from the Hawthorne study, none of them were groundbreaking.
What the researchers in the original studies found was that almost any change to the experimental conditions led to increases in productivity. The results were surprising and the researchers concluded at the time that workers were actually responding to the increased attention from their supervisors. Researchers suggested that productivity increased due to attention and not because of changes in the experimental variables. Landsberger defined the Hawthorne effect as a short-term improvement in performance caused by observing workers.