Oracle HCM Cloud

Workplace 2.0:
The Healthy Option

Using the Cloud for Better Recruiting, Retention, and Compliance

VI.
Shaping Businesses to People

Turning businesses into platforms for excellence.

We expect creativity and flexibility from employees – so our structures should reflect that. The way we set our business models, manage employees and provide platforms (not discrete systems) to support them must be holistic.

In Workplace 2.0, we can rely on line managers to adopt new ways of working – and build up their confidence in a more dispersed, collaborative model with technology that supports clean, efficient delivery on projects.

But having in place the right structures and chains of command; clear processes and procedures; and the right level of insight into team performance are all vital tools to raise their confidence.

Flatter structures help. And a project-based approach to management – emphasising inputs, outputs and outcomes, rather than particular ways of working – can be supported with the right collaboration systems.

Above all, concise, timely, accurate data about performance can make all the difference to management agility. That doesn’t replace the old management skills – it hones them, like a sports team coach who knows the game; knows their playing personnel; and has the performance data to tune their approach.

Agile: top-down, bottom-up.

Agility and flexibility within teams is clearly important. As we've seen, clearly stated objectives, allied with well-structured autonomy and systems that ensure clarity between collaborators, can deliver on that score.

But that demands a top-down embrace of new approaches from leadership. Organisational culture and behaviour is dictated by leadership behaviours. Workplace 2.0 will place an intolerable strain on line managers if they’re expected to coordinate work-anywhere teams with flexible processes while the senior leadership expects them to deliver progress updates using old-fashioned reporting lines and metrics more suited to old office norms.

“Management by instinct”: great managers know what needs to happen and when; they know their teams and their strategic objectives, and can marry the two.
“Management by wandering around”: this remains a crucial way to pick up on team dynamics, behaviour, sentiment and practical challenges.
Evidence-based management: this is the third pillar, offering data and analysis to support team decision-making. Rob Briner at Queen Mary University of London School of Business and Management resolves this down to six As – and HR systems should support them all.

1

Asking

Translating a practical issue or problem into an answerable question
2

Acquiring

Systematically searching for and retrieving the evidence
3

Appraising

Critically judging the trustworthiness and relevance of the evidence
4

Aggregating

Weighing and pulling together the evidence
5

Applying

Incorporating the evidence into the decision-making process
6

Assessing

Evaluating the outcome of the decision taken
To increase the likelihood of a favourable outcome

Guide to diverse teams.

Harvard Business Review’s guide to managing global teams is an excellent checklist for businesses at any stage of building out a new workplace model. And one key theme from that work is that power dynamics must be respected. Dispersed teams can end up resolving into “in groups” and “out groups” – a problem as acute for office-based versus mobile workers as it is for, say, multicultural teams in which one culture heavily predominates.

Much of the advice to leaders here is based around communication:

Re-state the mission frequently, and contextualise the team’s contribution.
Maintain frequent, and low-level, communications – not just orders and recriminations.
Create unstructured time – the old office has its watercooler, workplace 2.0 needs an equivalent.
Channel disagreement – even the best collaborative tools can spur fights over control; but if disagreement is not aired, it can simmer and then explode.
Train for dialogue – cross-cultural teams, in particular, might need to learn how to communicate with different intensity. (Some might say the same is true of in-office teams…)
Conscious inclusivity – within the old workplace, unconscious biases in behaviour can be more easily monitored. With dispersed teams, they might be harder to spot.

Four building blocks to shape flexible structures.

Enterprise Systems. HR data stuck in silos means analytics is always going to be hobbled. You need access to all data under one roof. IT strategy should be looking at smarter data-warehouse solutions and consistency in formatting.
Accurate data. Some systems are great at managing unstructured data; most aren’t (yet). If the data isn’t timely and comparable, it’s garbage.
Easy-to-use systems. That IT staffer with a passion for algorithms and black-box mathematical models has her uses. But designing your analytics engine isn’t one of them. Simple, actionable analytical models are key. HR people need to get it; and communicate it.
Operational efficiency. The facts change in HR all the time. In big organisations, hundreds of people come and go every month. Data should match the needs of the business in each area – some updating in real time, some more strategic. Operational decisions can be enhanced with data pushed to mobile devices in some cases; in others, complex data from a variety of sources can undergo detailed analysis for insights relevant to strategic planning.

Building Your Action Plan

Use this checklist to build your action plan. As you select each item,
they will build into a comprehensive set of next steps for you.

Which of the following do you need to do?

Your action points:

1. Actively plan for a new kind of workplace.
- Mobile productivity is now a hygiene factor. It rests on cloud, secure mobile apps and integrated systems.
- Existing physical spaces should be re-tooled for more flexible teams. New spaces should be designed for agile working from the ground up.
- Employee engagement is now a productivity priority – avoid the "zone of pseudo-engagement” with deeper workplace analytics.
2. Engage IT and HR in designing virtual workspaces.
- Assess existing IT infrastructure and investment plans to prioritise networked teams and enhance management communication.
- Revisit cyber-security policies to safely adapt to distributed enterprise systems.
- Treat robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI) as separate but related projects. RPA should be an immediate priority; AI a watching brief.
3. Treat wellness as a must-have, not a nice-to-have.
- Assess the impact of stress and absence on team performance.
- Design physical and mental wellness projects as a cornerstone of employee engagement strategy. Consider financial wellness as a quick win for stress.
- Create simpler ways, such as portals, to connect employees to organisational wellness programmes.
4. Treat employees in the same way you would customers.
- Analyse the “employee journey” – including recruitment, onboarding, development and assessment – as you would a “customer journey”.
- Develop workforce analytic capability to create proactive strategies around employee engagement, both at individual and team level.
- Don’t overpromise and under-deliver: organisational vision must be credible and deliverable; individual and team goals should be attainable.
5. Create clearer connections between pay and performance.
- Create transparent and logical reward systems that increase engagement, loyalty and a sense of fairness.
- Deploy HR and team analytics to allow for highly targeted performance pay and the identification of high-value retention targets.
- Pay remains a huge motivator – but more granular analysis of employee sentiment and life-stage allows for non-salary remuneration and flexible benefits.
6. Break down negative hierarchies to create more agile structures.
- Management is the biggest potential barrier to agile workplaces – help them adapt with development support and new analytical tools to encourage evidence-based management.
- Make use of HR analytics to ensure hiring and promotion supports diverse teams and helps management deal with unconscious bias.
- Integrate HR, finance and line-management enterprise systems to create coordinated data on potential improvements to teams, workplaces and structures.

Oracle

Oracle HCM Cloud

Workplace 2.0: The Healthy Option

Using the Cloud for Better Recruiting, Retention, and Compliance

VI. Shaping Businesses to People

Turning businesses into platforms for excellence.

Agile: top-down, bottom-up.

Asking

Acquiring

Appraising

Aggregating

Applying

Assessing

To increase the likelihood of a favourable outcome