New normal.
That’s the phrase everyone is obsessed with today. For everything from how we shop for groceries to conduct team meetings, it always comes back to the “new normal.” While some things will never go back to the “old normal,” much of what we’re being forced to think about isn’t “new” at all.
12 years ago I was helping craft a Work From Home policy that managers could use if they were so brave as to crack open the door to the chaos of virtual work. It was filled with all the stuff HR told us we needed to account for: How will you manage performance? How will you know people are working? How will the manager make sure not everyone (OH NO!) is working from home at the same time?
Today, what we should be thinking about isn’t the “new normal” thrust upon us by Covid-19, it’s the new that has been growing around us since our computers moved from our desks, to our backpacks, to our pockets.
Don’t miss this opportunity to rethink and push forward the things that can change the way people in your organization work.
When offices reopen and travel resumes, will we allow our HR processes and technology to simply go back to where we were before, or can we leverage this event to make lasting changes to how we work?
Here are a few examples of things we’ve seen that might resonate with your company:
Reduce Barriers in Staffing - For the businesses that thrived in this environment, it became a challenge to hire fast enough to meet a different kind of demand. For some, this meant shifting the recruiting process to allow managers to route candidates through the process faster, for others it was less assessments or interview steps.
More Personalized Onboarding - Turns out anyone can record a video, and adding a message from business leaders (e.g. from the CMO to new sales hires) creates a connection with employees without removing that executive from their job every time you bring in newbies to fill out paperwork. (Note: if you’re still spending lots of time on paperwork during in-person orientation, we should talk about that another time.)
Provide Better Real-Time Data - Within the context of submitting a job change or an offer, are you giving people information that can help them make a better decision? This might be the time to consider new reporting that can show managers what other people in that job profile make, or how an employee compares to his or her peers.
These are all things that were available before Covid-19. Things that could add value regardless of a global pandemic.
The point is, now is the time to push for innovation and find enhancements for your HRIS users. This is the moment to go back to that list of “nice to haves” you scribbled down and stuffed in a folder somewhere. Dust it off and bring to the top the things that should be in place now, and make them happen.
We find there are usually three buckets that these fall into:
Things that were scrapped at “Go Live” for budget or time constraints.
Product enhancements that weren’t prioritized during the normal course of business.
Good ideas to simplify or enhance processes and reporting that were just never important enough.
Don’t stop there though, also evaluate each idea for how much effort and how much return they’ll give. By the time you’re done, you’ll be able to look at your list and make an educated decision (or at least educate those who make the decisions).
What are the things you have been hoping for? How do you use this moment now to give them momentum? Nothing happens unless you start to plan for it.
If you could use some help making sense of your lists. Prioritizing the ideas. Coming up with a plan to execute them. Or actually making them happen. We’re here to help you take that first step, that Prossimo step.
After all, we’re all in this “normal” together.
Andiamo!