TALENTVANTAGE - HRMAU · selling digitally, learning online, and social distancing. What will...

Most of the time, the future arrives gently, giving us the chance to absorb, process, debate, prepare and acclimate. We usually enjoy the luxury of semantics and intellectual engagement - arguing on definitions and punctuations, before we accept and adopt. In fact, up to date, we have been changing at our own terms and pace. Then came COVID-19, and all of a sudden the business policies, protocols and procedures so carefully thought and painstakingly articulated, cannot guide decisions and actions. At the time of writing this article, the British Prime Minister who was working from home due to isolation is now hospitalized in the ICU; there are no international flights leaving and entering airports to more than three quarters of the world’s international airports; more than half of the world’s population is under lock down, and well over a million of the global population is infected. Unthinkable! The COVID-19 global health pandemic has been given so many descriptions and labels in an attempt to potray its ravaging impact on the global economy. Bob Zukis, writing in a Forbes column, compared it to a Category 6 Hurricane decimating global enterprise at an alarming scale and speed that its impact is unfathomable. This Article is written not necessarily for its OD insights and propositions, but more as a discourse of hope that after COVID-19 has run its course, there is business to run, hence human resource and talent to manage.

POST-COVID HR AGENDA

Recalibrating HR for the right discourse in the post-Covid era

TALENTVANTAGE thought leadership by Allaboard

By Chris Tenga - CTP, CODP, MSc. in Strategic Management

April 2020

Allaboard

TALENTVANTAGE

Snap Shot - COVID Context for the HR Agenda Firstly, any statistics on COVID-19 now do not make much sense other than put this article into some form of perspective. This is simply because the global COVID-19 picture is changing faster than anyone is able to snapshot it. Hence, the best one can provide is a blur of the global picture - a blur is all we can get from a photographic attempt on a moving target. For what it’s worth, here are a few numbers - at the time of publication of this article, WHO had reported that 1, 428, 428 people have been infected, and from this number, a staggering 82, 020 people have succumbed to the pandemic. On 23 March, Unicef reported that more than 95% of children were out of school in Latin America and the Caribbean due to COVID-19, while UNESCO indicated that nationwide closures are impacting 91% of the world’s student population (UNESCO; 2020). On the 30th of March, CNBC reported that the coronavirus economic freeze could cost the USA a staggering 47 million jobs and send the unemployment rate past 32%. Whichever statistics one can cite, they all point to a bleak outlook - burgeoning debt, bankruptcies, large scale disruption of supply chains, plunging global demand for products and services, significant weakening of consumer purchase power, and populations that will emerge from this pandemic compromised on physical and psychological health. Under such dire circumstances, how can HR Leaders manage this ‘burning platform’ to balance business continuity matters whilst preserving employee health and lives? What HR discussions, decisions actions are critical now, and what is the near-term and long-term impact of these decisions? In the Post-COVID era, what issues will become paramount, and how can we act decisively now yet with a future view in mind. Allaboard tapped into what is, to date, the most comprehensive perspective on the evolving COVID-19 situation and implications to companies – the McKinsey Perspective. This perspective, which was developed for business leaders, outlines the 5 horizons that constitute the impact trajectory of COVID-19 to business, and how business leaders must respond. We have pivoted our Post-COVID HR Agenda on this framework, and clearly outlined what HR conversations and interventions HR must lead. We have also timelined for your guidance which of these conversations and interventions are critical to deliver today, whilst laying a solid foundation for long term strategic HR fixes. Below is our illustrative adaptation of the McKinsey COVID-19 business response perspective, into an Allaboard strategic HR response perspective, which we have further elaborated upon, for clarity of action.


REFORM

Lobby for regulatory reform; monitor competitive environment, reform your business operating model; redefine key matrices around enterprise KPIs, talent, risk, etc.

Large scale workforce right-sizing; re-skilling and re-onboarding; reform the HR service model

REIMAGINATION

Reimagine the next normal: what a discontinuous shift looks like and identify all implications for how your business should reinvent

Human capital and Learning model innovation; Reengineer critical HR processes

RETURN

Create detailed plan to return business to scale as COVID-19 situation evolves and the knock-on effects to your business becomes clear

Dipstick talent, competency and culture audits, new HR strategy; establish new WOWs

RESILIENCE

Address near-term cash management challenges and broader resiliency issues during virus-related shutdowns and the knock-on effects to business

HR and employee cost management to ensure business sustainability

RESOLVE

Address the immediate challenges that COVID-19 is presenting to your workforce, customers, technology and business partners

Employee engagement and information focusing on critical /high value talent

McKinsey COVID-19 Business Response – The 5 - Horizons

Allaboard COVID-19 HR Response - 5 Horizons

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©llaboard Africa – 2020 adapted from McKinsey

Allaboard

TALENTVANTAGE

1. Resolve Stage Three key activities ought to be happening now, and these are (i) enablement for work, (ii) workforce communications, and (iii) workforce engagement. Why are these important? The answer is simply this - amidst COVID-19’s disruptive impact, certain aspects and routines of work and organizational life must remain the same. This is important for employees’ sense-making and sanity, and to help them move past denial stage. Firstly, provide meaningful work to employees. If certain critical work activities have been halted or scaled down due to lockdowns or market dictums, provide employees with alternative work to the extent possible. Commission R&D projects and constitute agile teams to drive these, launch wholesale business process re-engineering projects, and anything that can keep employees working but also has a potential payoff to the business. Providing work also includes enabling its execution. Provide critical tools such as online platforms and open resource points. Ensure connectivity and encourage physical work interactions and social life to continue in a virtual work model. Workforce engagement is critical at this point because, let’s face it, under the restrictive confinement of lockdown, everyone is disengaged as we all try to make sense of sudden significant changes to our lives. Work-life balance, which to date has been synonymous with spending more time with family, has been totally flipped over. Paradoxically, we now yearn for more work, and more more time at work, if not for the money, at least to escape the toxicity of too much time spent at home - with family. Call it it too much of a good thing…, everyone agrees lockdowns, isolations and quarantines have constricted our personal spaces and suffocated the much needed privacy out of our lives. The question is, how can HR Practitioners manage this inverted equation on work-life balance? Now might the time to measure all forms of employee engagement - general engagement on the traditional engagement drivers, satisfaction with top leadership performance, satisfaction with mentors and the mentorship programme, etc. In all this, the communication machinery must be cranked up to give every employee who is working from home a sense that he/she has not been forgotten.


OD INTERVENTION - HORIZONS ANALYSIS

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Allaboard

TALENTVANTAGE

2. Resilience Stage Best business rescue practices utilize a tried & tested intervention triad involving (i) avoidance, (ii) negotiation and (iii) focus when managing financial distress. What does this involve and how can HR Leaders utilize this intervention triad? The main objective under avoidance is cash preservation. This is premised on a simple rule which states that do not spend if you are not earning. The rule does not literally translate to zero expenditure or a zero-sum revenue-to-expenditure ratio. However it strongly guards against avoidable, discretionary expenditures or expenditures that have no cover through future revenues. This compels HR to critically look into how they are spending money. Explore in-sourcing, defer unavoidable but deferrable expenditures, and simply stop undertaking unnecessary HR activities that eat into your company’s liquidity. Simply help the business preserve cash - you will find out soon that cash is king What if workforce expenditures are unavoidable? Explore negotiation!. Globally, most institutions have already started this phase, hence if you haven’t, you are already lagging. Utilize data on actual or projected revenue downturn curves to agree on salary reductions. Renegotiate service fees with HR contractors and business partners. Negotiate with service providers to offer value added and ‘goodwill’ services i.e. at no payouts or on a cost recovery basis until you are out of the woods, and provide guarantees for future business as leverage. If you really have to spend, then focus by prioritizing expenditures that have a very direct bearing on production and sales and hence near-term revenue. The IMF, World Bank and other global financial institutions have declared that the global economy is already in a COVID-induced recessions, and heading towards a depression. We already know that consumer demand will take a very steep decline, while business financing will all but dry up. In such times, cash is king, therefore do not spend it, and if you have to, spend it very wisely. Resilience building is about inoculating your business by giving it a jab of vaccine so that it has a chance of outlasting the vagaries of COVID-19 and coming out alive.



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Allaboard

TALENTVANTAGE

3. Return Stage State 3 represents the start of serious OD intervention as a direct response to the changes taking place in the business environment. As your organization studies and gains a better grasp of the nature, quantum and direction of the key changes happening in its competitive business realm, HR must begin to diligently decode how these changes translate into a new talent and critical competency matrix for the organization, as well as install new Ways of Working (WOWs) in order to decisively confront COVID-19’s highly disruptive headwinds - diagnostic OD. It is also important to identify business, work and workforce shifts that are temporary and hence require short-term fixes, against those lasting changes that will require long-term, transformative OD intervention. In particular, gain a full understanding of the impact of business changes relating to products and services, production processes and methods, take-to-market model, and the new business partner matrix. On the WOWs side, understand the impact of working remotely/virtually, selling digitally, learning online, and social distancing. What will underpin your success during the 3rd horizon of COVID-19 HR response is studying, analysis and insight, all of which are aimed at formulating detailed yet responsive workforce plans to return business to scale as the COVID-19 situation evolves and the knock-on effects to your business become clear. Two OD activities are imperative in this horizon; (i) developing a new talent and competency matrix for your organization, logically followed by a dipstick auditing of your current talent, competency and culture strength in order to develop a timeline and resource plan for scaled workforce development, based the size of the gap; and (ii) establishing new WOWs based on permanent changes to business, work and human life in general - transformative OD. In the Return horizon of COVID-19, you are planning to return the business to ‘a new normal’ and ensuring that previous efforts on resilience building (survival) are further extended to build effectiveness and competitiveness. The Return horizon requires a different breed of HR - one that understands technical OD at both diagnostic and transformative levels, whilst demonstrating a solid understanding of business and industry changes.



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TALENTVANTAGE

4. Reimagination Stage The sweeping pace and sheer scale that COVID-19 has authored involuntary changes into our lives mean that even the staunchest critics of digital and agile models now have their resistance broken to the weakest point - as Lewinists put it, they are unfrozen. When people are unfrozen, you have an ‘express pass’ into their minds and their emotions to effect change, provided you have exciting alternatives to put to the table, since they are in a ‘so what can we do now’ mode. Now is the time to harness every stakeholder - from employee to the Board, to business partners and customers - to reimagine how this abnormal can become our new normal. If truth be told, we have all learnt new habits and skills, and developed new mindsets, that we won’t want to unlearn. According to McKinsey, the 4th horizon involves helping the business reinvent itself so that today’s crucible experiences are translated into a DNA for future success. Let us learn from marketing - to reimagine customer experience, marketers start with what customers want. Hence, it follows that if we want to reimagine employee experience, our point of departure is what employees want. Across the Human Resources Delivery Value Chain (HRDVC), we can eliminate, streamline and digitize up to 60% of processes thereby improving turnaround time, reducing cost and optimizing employee experience. We can virtualize interviewing, several aspects of on-boarding, significant chunks of the work itself, learning, mentorship and coaching, and even conferencing. We can hire on gig terms and streamline contractual obligations so that we never have to ever again invoke force majeure like we are doing now as we seek relief from payment of salaries due to dried up revenue streams. We can restructure salaries and establish employee-funded safety nets so that none of our employees is ever one month’s salary from poverty or destitution. The opportunities are limitless. In fact, there has never been a stronger imperative to reimagine work and employment as there is today. At Allaboard, the big challenge we lay today is – if COVID-19 has forced us to reimagine turning hotels in hospitals, we surely now can dream. HR role is to create the right environment for all stakeholder to reimagine, as well as help your business become an early adopter. Yes we maybe at the crossroads, but the future is still very much in our hands



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TALENTVANTAGE

5. Reform Stage Reform has 2 levels (i) internal reform that is termed operating model reform, which is solely in the hands and control of your organization; and (ii) external reform, which essentially is industry reform that must eventually be supported by regulatory reform, and one which, you as an industry player, must play your diligent part to drive. It is critical to refrom internally first and fast, as this is a matter of long term survival and viability. Imperative to business operating model reform is organizational redesign and workforce right-sizing (a polite way of advising that you must downsize your workforce). This obviously involves the technical OD prerogatives around (a) business quantitation or volumetric analysis to understand changes in work quantums, (b) decision flow analysis to understand new reporting relationships and information flows, (c) digital and process superimposition to understand machine-to-human replacement and process-to-human replacement, and finally (d) the actual organizational redesign which focused on delayering and creating a flatter, faster, malleable organization. Large scale workforce reskilling and on-boarding on the new WOWs also becomes a key part of embedment of your organization’s new operating model. External reform involves iterative benchmarking by HR leaders to monitor the competitive business, employment and talent environment, whilst also actively lobbying for the necessary regulatory reforms around employment laws. Policy experts content that even though the law is the last to reform, it is always the first and biggest threat to viability in situations of large scale business disruption such as COVID-19. Legislative reform is driven by critical mass, hence your active participation and your voice are necessary to the change agenda on employment laws. Professional HR bodies will become key to the reform agenda, which simply means they must demonstrate capability to learn fast and change fast in order to lead early adoption of professional and legislative reforms.



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Allaboard

TALENTVANTAGE

Priority Mapping - Securing Tomorrow The 5 Horizons discussed above have been plotted into a priority matrix in order to give you a sense of which HR actions and interventions are truly important in the scheme of COVID-19 business and people management. As you can note, the urgent / strategic box is pivotal to HR success. In short, resilience and return horizons are the 2 phases that will secure our tomorrow. Discussion on business and people resilience, and concrete HR plans to enable business to return to scale, are 2 conversations that must be happening now. However the fire-fighting mode we may find ourselves in today, we must never relegate HR resilience building and return planning - or else ourselves, our business and our people will not be here tomorrow to reimagine and reform.


RESOLVE

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©Allaboard Africa – 2020 adapted from McKinsey

Allaboard

TALENTVANTAGE

Post-COVID HR Capabilities In the COVID-19 era and beyond, as we count the losses and pick up the pieces, it is also important to reflect on the HR skills we require in order to land organizations and people back into production. We are going to have to talk business first before we talk people, and that is going to be the toughest phase for most HR Practitioners. It is hence no coincidence that the first capability we require is operating model design acumen, based on an HR Leader’s understanding of the business and its operative industry trends. This capability will make it easy for HR to co-create and shape with other business leaders, the operating model for their business. Any HR propositions independent of business direction and operating model will erode your credibility amongst senior leadership and the Board. Technical OD skills will then become important once business direction and operating model become clear. These skills will mainly be in the area of design analysis, and will include business quantitation, activity (volumetric) analysis, work simulation and role mapping. The 3rd and final capability requisite to bring business and people together is technical change management. I make reference to the technical element in order to clarify that this is not a generic skill for people that have undertaken a module on change management during their MBA classes. A far more advanced skill is requisite for success, as this stage involves a level of psychological transformation that most organizations have never yet encountered. This level of change will be anchored on enterprise-wide embedment, renegiotation of roles and power, breaking down of complexity wherever and in whatever form it exists, and re-onboarding into new WOWs. HR Leaders will be requires to help everyone - from the Board to the cleaner - to make sense of work post-COVID, and this will also involve the softer aspects such counseling and coaching. We will run short of OD expertise and those with these skills are going to be in demand. Regardless, every HR Practitioner will require an operational understanding of OD, if not to directly lead reorganization and change efforts, but at least to understand when these are being done by someone else. HR can, and must lead business back to effectiveness, and ultimately to competitiveness post-COVID. Let us start in enerst today! CONTACT CHRIS Chris Tenga is CEO at Allaboard Africa (Allaboard), a pan-African firm that is focused on strategy, organizational development and talent management. Chris can be reached on Mobile / WhatsApp number: +27 63 809 3077 or Email: [email protected] or Skype ID: chris.tenga


Allaboard

TALENTVANTAGE

Sources Referenced Cox J. (2020) - Cononavirus Job Losses; CNBC (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/30/coronavirus-job-losses-could-total-47-million-unemployment-rate-of-32percent-fed-says.html) McKinsey: 2020 - COVID-19 Implications for Business (https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/risk/our-insights/covid-19-implications-for-business) UNESCO; 2020 - Covid-19 Educational Disruption and Response (https://en.unesco.org/covid19/educationresponse) Zukis; 2020 - A CEO Cheatsheet For Business Strategy After COVID-19: Forbes (https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobzukis/2020/03/30/a-ceo-cheatsheet-for-business-strategy-after-covid-19/#21b27b8e330c)



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