In this eye-opening episode of the Transform Your Workplace podcast, we tackle the topic of the inevitable changes in the world of HR. Brandon Laws interviews Lars Schmidt, business expert and author of a new book that brings a fresh perspective to all things HR. Lars challenges “legacy HR” practices and proposes shifting our approach when it comes to our people, our teams, and business as a whole.
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ABOUT THE GUEST
Lars Schmidt — HR advocate, podcast host, and founder of Amplify— is the author of the 2021 book, Redefining HR: Transforming People Teams to Drive Business Performance. From recruiting to team consulting, Lars has had his hand in virtually every aspect of the world of HR. He is passionate about building progressive people teams and shifting perspectives about the role of HR in business.
ABOUT THE BOOK
“At its core, redefining HR is drawing a line in the sand from legacy HR practices to modern HR practices,” Lars explained. It’s also about “illustrating where those shifts occur in terms of how we think about people, analytics, recruiting, representation, and diversity and inclusion, and the employee experience.”
When people hear the title, Redefining HR, they tend to approach it from the wrong angle — a “macular standpoint,” according to Lars. But he insists, it’s more about the substance of HR. Specifically, it’s about “how you think and what you deliver to the business, to your teams, and to each other.”
PODCAST EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
Change is inevitable
“The way that we’ve gotten our information as an industry, historically, has been through these large organizations or societies or bodies of knowledge. And they’re just not equipped to keep up with the pace of change that’s happening right now. And so I was somewhat deliberate in the book to not spend too much time drilling down on deeply specific practices because that does change. But I also think that part of how we learn and develop and grow now is through iteration.”
“So, if I’m building a performance program within my organization, I don’t want to emulate any one company. I want to find three or four companies that are all having success, but they’re all doing it differently. And then I want to take all of those and I want to put them through the own lens of my company, my culture, my location, my team, my employees, my budget — all those variables that allow me to build within my own organization.”
Hitting the “RESET” button on inclusivity
“My first steps were to spend a lot of time with my employees of color and really talk to them, listen to them, understand what their reality is in the workplace, what challenges they face, what institutional and embedded and systemic programs are in place that hinder their growth or their ability to feel like they belong. I think that you have to have a deep and honest introspective look at the organization. And the best place to get that feedback is from your employees of color. You’ve got to understand.”
“And I think this is part of the broader challenge that HR faces right now. Based on the numbers, HR is roughly 70% white, from the practitioner standpoint and, much like in society, we’re dealing with systemic racism and systemic issues. And they’re systemic because they’re engineered to produce uneven outcomes. Oftentimes, they’re invisible to white employees because they’re built to favor them.”
HR shareability
“HR Open Source as a practice is something that was born from software development. Basically, the idea behind it was this: if you write a piece of code that does X, you could upload that to a common platform and allow anybody to take that code, so they don’t have to build it from scratch. And now everybody has access to it. And in doing so, they’re able to make the code, in some cases, faster, more efficient, more impactful. Then, they upload their version of code.”
“We [wondered], what if we tried to take that principle and bring it into HR — where we created a platform and encouraged people to give away their templates, toolkits, case studies, practices — and it was all available for free.
Anybody around the world could contribute. They could take from it. They could access it. They could make things better. And so that was really where that was born. In the last seven years, it’s grown into over 10,000 members around the world.”
Embracing “Open Source”
“To me, that’s probably one of the most transformative shifts from legacy HR to modern HR is the fact that we turn away from silos and we embrace Open Source. In doing so, it’s going to accelerate our capabilities, our learning, our impact. And it gets us out of that bullshit mantra of ‘war for talent,’ where we’re all competing with each other. We can actually all win and we can, by sharing this, […] we can all live. We can all better serve our organizations.”
Finding the right talent
“We’re bombarded with pings and alerts and notifications and content and all kinds of stuff — all day, every day, constantly. And so you’re not just competing with other recruiters at crafting a message. You’re competing for attention with all of that. Again, it’s easy to find people, but it’s really hard to capture their attention. And so I think in terms of what that means for employer branding, you’ve gotta be able to cut through the BS and articulate a pretty clear value proposition of why somebody would want to work for your organization.”
The “culture fit”
“I think when you talk about “culture fit,” that term has become — in not all cases, but in many cases — a weaponized method of excluding people. I can’t relate to this person. We didn’t go to the same school. We didn’t grow up in the same area. We all like the same music. All of these things that I’m using to misalign you with my personal expectation of what this job should be here. So I think companies […] glamorize this idea of “culture fit. […] I don’t think companies should allow that. If you have a monoculture, you’re going to have a mono-product, and your products will have all kinds of blind spots and all kinds of gaps because your team can’t see it that way.”
Performance management goes agile
“The idea is moving away from that annual retroactive approach. That’s just not valuable anymore. It’s not realistic. It doesn’t align with […] the need for ongoing regular feedback. The shift to agile is basically more ongoing discussions than annual expectations. A couple of years ago, that was the exception. I think it’s less than the exception now. I think more and more companies are moving away from those annual programs, and I certainly encourage them to do so because I don’t think an annual retrospective approach to performance just fits with how people work today.”
LEARN MORE
Lars Schmidt is the author of Redefining HR: Transforming People Teams to Drive Business Performance. You can check out his HR consulting company at amplifiedtalent.com or find his book, podcast, and links to social platforms at redefininghr.com.