The direction that HR areas take in the coming years will be critical for organizations, their workers and for the professionals in the sector themselves.
This is due to the fact that "here and now", a paradigmatic change is taking place in the organization of work, driven by the change in the business model in force during the 20th century.
This material presents a series of daring hypotheses, which obviously cannot be considered “urbi et orbi” but indicate a probable direction of human work and the mission (“business”) of HR in the coming years.
Working model in the 20th century
Work models, at least in large organizations, were governed by internal times and delays were considered reasonable based on the safety of the processes and work comfort.
Until 1991, when the fall of the Berlin Wall inaugurated globalization, work in organizations presented characteristics differentiated by at least four basic indicators:
1. Resources adequate to the goals
In general, there was some equivalence between the work objectives to be achieved and the resources necessary to achieve them. The Organization & Methods areas dealt with the rational design of the procedures to make better use of the resources whose magnitude was calculated from the beginning according to what was expected to be obtained.
2. Risks on tangible assets
Risks in work processes were predominantly located on equipment and materials or on people. The control model aimed to preserve the physical assets of the companies.
3. Predictable logic work processes
Each new process was designed, tested, stabilized, and then implemented on a regular basis. Each worker had explicit instructions on detailed procedures for the tasks relevant to their duties.
4. Individual obedience
The selection and training processes, as well as the qualification and development processes, followed a “one-to-one” logic, establishing personal parameters contrasted with a desirable standard, also individual. In this context, worker obedience to instructions was the basic measurement standard.
Globalization
Globalization introduced an incomplete break, that is, HR continued to use the aforementioned parameters but the changes in the context indicated its precariousness to explain and predict collective behaviors. The incomplete break was visualized in the precarious work environment within most organizations.
In large companies the implicit agreement was broken that indicated that a worker moderately obedient to the instructions could develop his entire working life in the same Organization.
The body work model (oriented by effort) migrated to a model where the worker had to reconfigure their perception of the environment to stay within the model.
The four indicators indicated for the 20th century began to show cracks, as follows:
1. Increase in goals and decrease in resources
The equivalence between objectives and resources changed, increasing the former and decreasing the latter. The worker had to create his own options to manage this imbalance by changing the logic of his work behaviors. This led to violent staff turnover as older workers failed to adapt quickly to the new model.
2. Intangible risks
Hand in hand with the computerization of the processes, the risks ranged from the protection of machines and materials to the protection of information. By increasing the integration of the processes, the impact of a possible error increased proportionally.
3. Uncertain processes out of range
The distance between the speed of changes in the markets and internal times forced us to implement changes without being able to respect the planning spaces that were used before, which transferred the dynamics of trial / error adjustments to the operating environment. The launch of products to the market soared before stabilizing the post-sale and without detailed internal procedures, naturalizing the gap between commercial logic and operational logic.
4. Collective added value
The contribution of worker initiatives to the improvement of internal processes began to occupy more space not as an expression of wishes, but as a consequence of the worker's own need to gain efficiency so as not to succumb to the lack of control of the multiple processes in his charge.
But in an unstable and integrated environment where not always complementary functions were added to each position, the best individual performance was not enough to achieve the new standards of expected results. Teamwork transformed their desirable competence entity to settle as a requirement of permanence.
Perceptual work
2005 marks the definitive entry of China to the "dashboard" of the world economy. This incorporation, far from calming the waters, will reproduce new international adjustments and rearrangements with greater impact in the regions with more open economies.
The previous stage can be defined as a transition from the work model guided by effort in the 20th century to a new model, guided by the early perception of signs that are not always clear or always tangible.
Perceptual work is not the “knowledge work” defined by Peter Drucker, but rather the ability to re-construct from isolated stimuli, a scenario, an image of the Organization, from which it is possible to couple one's own behaviors and strangers.
This type of mechanism is independent of the job qualification and therefore is valid for any position and any specialty in an organizational environment.
The perception mechanism is mentioned, considering it a prior and necessary basis for understanding, learning and, ultimately, the construction of operational consensus in the work environment.
In reality, the evolution towards perceptual work has already begun, forced by the competitive position of some companies or by the dynamics of the market in which they are located.
Based on what is observed in leading companies and the logic of globalization that is estimated to worsen in the coming years, it is possible to infer that the evolution of work will point towards criteria similar to the following:
1. Recreate priorities.
Priorities will overlap between urgent, everyday, and annual goals. In a work environment that is more saturated with objectives and lacks resources, the worker must assume a greater share of autonomous decision-making in order to achieve a “possible map” (always situational) between his multiple obligations and internal / external changes.
Among these priorities, “lifelong learning” will be a requirement for survival, even when the pace of the internal training offer does not manage to accompany the operational transformations in the work environments.
If some private studies define that today 50% of the knowledge available in a company is informal, it is expected that this percentage will increase in the next five years, in the same way that non-traditional training offers will increase.
2. Manage risks
In increasingly flat structures and more vertiginous work dynamics, supervision will be an increasingly scarce input and the worker will be forced to assume a greater share of risks in their operational decisions.
Not only should it be considered that the worker will increase the risks of their behaviors; If not, under the conditions mentioned, any behavior (to do or not to do) will increase the chances of a threat being made. Therefore, workers will need to incorporate risk analysis into procedures, but also into their day-to-day decisions.
3. Imagine scenarios
Workers will be driven to anticipate events that affect their employability and define behaviors adjusted to internal and external changes, based on inferences and “concept maps” that broaden the perspective of their work, even without having formal details.
The speed of the changes will encourage the workers themselves to organize their perception of the dynamics of other internal areas (suppliers or internal clients) to adjust internal links in the most unfavorable conditions, as a mandatory strategy to guarantee their own results.
Also, job performance should be "linked" with the market to distinguish the external impact of internal behaviors (ISO Standards, HACCP, Service Quality, Environmental Quality, etc.), but in addition, it will be imperative to anticipate the internal impact of changes in the market, even for internal areas without any direct link with the outside.
The dynamics of large organizations that respond internally the following year to the changes produced the previous year will be difficult to sustain.
4. Stay integrated and lucid
If the ability to adapt to changes in policies, structures, or teams will define the measure of successful membership in the Organization, the ability to maintain personal balance will be the other side of that adaptation effort.
The adjustment experiences of the last twenty years have left a collective learning in the labor market: The exaggerated effort of adaptation to the work environment does not guarantee stability, but it can radically deteriorate the physical and emotional balance of the worker (together with the deterioration of the internal climate).
In this context, the personal development of emotional capacities will have a higher status in companies, based on a base of essential technical skills.
The organization of business in the 21st century
The increase in competitive conditions will force companies to specialize each of their sectors in the areas and environments in which they carry out their essential task.
In other words, if each organizational specialty must be more efficient, it is logical that it adhere more to the conditions of the sector in which it works, perfecting the logic of that specialty.
In a luxury ship that carries passengers, the command bridge operates under a logic of planning routes and times, the drivers operate under a specific engineering logic, the accounting and purchasing sector operates under accounting legality, and the service sector of clients operates under a commercial logic oriented by the quality of service.
These logics necessarily show contradictory aspects, which can only be resolved (not easily) when in all sectors there are consensual perceptions about the characteristics of the business that brings together all.
Consensus perception is not passive adaptation, because each sector must defend its sector objectives. It is not "we all think alike", nor is it "we all have a single style", because each specialty requires differentiated skills.
The "core" of the HR business.
The formation of business units with decentralized administration and centralized support has been shown to be an efficient scheme to regulate operating costs and discriminate commercial performance.
Under this model that seems to be consolidated in many organizational experiences, there is a sustained trend towards the administrative autonomy of business units to define their investments in learning, their moments of personal development, their own “fine tuning” of compensation and benefits.
Considering HR an internal service and taking into account the possibilities of decentralized administration offered by technology platforms, it arises as a possible drift that HR services are increasingly operated from the business units themselves, at their own pace, with its approaches and under its operational responsibility, within an increasingly flexible corporate “umbrella”.
From this perspective, and once the policies and standards are well defined, it is possible to imagine that much more than half of the standard HR workload will be automated.
But then, where is the HR "business"? Of course, training, development, compensation and internal communications can be considered some of the key HR activities, but that has to do with the “how”, not the “what”.
There is a focus of activities that cannot be trivialized by computer systems or delivered to business units or outsourced outside the Organization.
If the trends we mentioned earlier expand, the HR core business should aim to manage perceptual working conditions.
1. Model collective perceptions
In companies that today aim to model collective perceptions, internal consensus is triggered, a “truth effect” is produced that spontaneously mobilizes people towards available resources or towards the spontaneous creation of resources to fulfill their objectives.
How do these companies shape perceptions? They propose a public agenda, in a similar way to the action that the mass media defines in public opinion on a daily basis. It is not an “internal communications” process, although it does include it. Concrete actions, visible facts and appropriate mass messages are combined.
The advantages they obtain with this strategy are very interesting, because perception is the gateway to belief, motivation and learning. In this way, the impact of training is multiplied, real communication channels are generated in both directions and what the HR structure does not manage to produce is created in some way by the pressure of the workers themselves.
2. Anticipate the social future of the company
The past does not exist. People have traces, stories, versions of the past. Existence as humans on a timeline is an act of faith. People rebuild their past at every moment of their present. That is why it is often possible to re-create your own or someone else's versions of the past.
The future does not exist either. People live under the illusion of medium-term immortality. This illusion allows them to create consensus on the expected future. Just as they rebuild the past they can and do rebuild the future.
The most interesting conclusion - perhaps obvious - is that the future is not given, it is not an inevitable destiny, but the possibility of affecting that future depends on the position that is acquired in the present.
HR will be increasingly involved in the configuration of profiles, practical knowledge and social relationships that guarantee adequate and timely support of business plans.
We have observed that in some companies their top managers lead these movements of “creating the future”, in some cases exceeding the rhythms of the initiatives that HR generates in the same direction. More than a trend, this marks the imprint that some senior managers impose on the entire Organization they lead.
3. Define sectoral alliances
If workers need to take more initiative with regard to problem solving, priority setting, risk management, and scenario setting, it would be contradictory to assign them a passive role in the relationship with the company.
Workers progressively oriented to self-management will be encouraged to consolidate relationships of trust and cooperation with their managers, rather than relationships of submission.
In the 21st century, the salary agreement is only one of the points of the "social contract" between employers and employees. The conditions to maintain employability (updating, specialty, responsibilities, corporate image), non-remunerative recognitions, compensation for results, the work environment, the suitability of managers, occupy a space that is increasingly valued by the best-profile workers relative.
The degree to which the employer / employee relationship focuses on remunerative aspects, will indicate by opposition the degree of deficiencies in the other factors of the employment contract.
The paradox of this situation is that the most valuable staff for the Organization will be those who are in the best conditions to choose other sources of work. Since it will no longer be enough to achieve compliance, HR must coordinate the will of the workers and this means achieving an alliance rather than an authoritarian pact.
The alliance relationships between business units will also be an inherent responsibility of the HR business.
4. Create mystique
The complexity of the operations, the coexistence of differentiated logics, the speed to conquer or defend the market share from different positions, will require an intangible but solid as steel cohesion factor: That is the mystique.
If the consensual perceptions define the community of images about the organizational reality, the mystique defines the energy quantum, the passion, the collective affections referred to those images.
The creation of mystique, an issue that requires solid “seniority” rather than mechanical recipes, is noticed to a greater or lesser degree in all companies that are oriented to the administration of perceptual work and will probably be one of the irreplaceable pillars of the function of HR in the coming years.
Shared mystique, intention and pride of belonging, satisfaction with work and with the team, will become an essential input to achieve that "plus" that allows extraordinary results to be achieved with ordinary people.
Conclusions
In Chile there is a small group of national companies that today organize their own "perceptual work" management model. We know some and surely others will exist.
Similar movements are also observed in transnational groups whose influence in Chile is very low or non-existent.
These initiatives do not respond to the ideology of any guru on duty or any media paradigm. The most obvious common parameter in the cases detected is that they respond to the competitive demands of your business. That is why we understand that they will tend to reproduce, at least among successful companies.
Basic bibliography
Feyerabend, Paul. Ambiguity and harmony. Ed. Paidós Ibérica SA Barcelona 1999
Hofstede, Geert. Cultures and organizations. The mental software. Editorial Alliance. Madrid 1999
Levy, Alberto. Leading in hell: The competitiveness of companies, clusters and cities. Ed. Paidós. Buenos Aires 2003
Luhman, Niklas. Sociology of risk. Triana Editores. Mexico 1998
Maturana, Humberto. Transformation in coexistence. Dolmen Editions. Santiago. 1999
Todorov, Tzvetan. The conquest of America. The problem of the other. XXI century Editors. Buenos Aires 2003
Watzlawick, Paul. Is reality real? Editorial Herder Barcelona 1994
Recommendation 195. Recommendation on the development of human resources: education, training and lifelong learning. ILO. Geneva. 2005
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