Read the best highlights from some of the case studies presented at HR Week 2021!
Why is evidence-based people strategy so important in a remote company?
Emma Atkins is the Director of People at Hotjar, a fully remote company. She had the challenging task of building evidence-based management in this company. The very first challenge she encountered was getting to know the company. Usually, she would dig into data about people, but now the data was a mess. So Emma went on a quest through the uncharted lands of Google and she found Orgnostic.
Orgnostic is a people metrics site where Emma got what she needed. She broke the process into a few steps. The first one was connecting all of the data through Orgnostic. Next came understanding that data. Once this initial process was over she realized that data suggests Hotjar to focus more on new hires than on talent they already have.
She came up with a new strategy based on the data collected:
- Standardize Talent Acquisition – the main goal was to shorten the time necessary for HRMs to green-light the candidates
- Change Talent Management philosophy – focus more equally on new hires and existing talents
- Diversity and inclusion – boost the number of women in certain positions
So all of this raises one important question: Why is evidence-based people strategy so important in a remote company?
Emma says:
“Everything I learn about the company has to come from conversation, from surveys, or from data I can see in front of me. It’s so important when you are working remotely to use your data to inform your strategy if you want to make real decisions that will impact the people who you never see, never speak to but still are responsible for.”
“The H is for Humans: How to Build Digital Consumer Journeys for HR?”
Dieter Veldsman is an HR Expert and Thought Leader at AIHR.
He mentioned three important questions to understand consumerism:
- How is consumerism changing the nature of HR?
- The rise of the digital era: What does this mean for HR?
- Designing digital journeys that matter: What is human-centric HR design?
He highlighted that seeing the employee as a consumer of HC solutions and designing for their needs, desires, and preferences, whilst also keeping the objectives of the organization in mind is really important.
He offered some advice on how to ease this design process. Dieter suggests asking your employees:
- If they had the choice – would they buy it?
- Would they come back and buy it again?
- Would they recommend the solution to people they care about?
- Did the end-to-end experience meet the expectations of a real human being?
What will this design do?
- Shift practice focus from efficiency and effectiveness to engagement and experience
- Shift technology focus from high touch tech delivery to memorable moments platform enabled
- Shift employee focus from an employee as a receiver of service to an employee as a consumer of a product.
Dieter also showcased his methodology for this process. The methodology includes several steps:
- Understanding why/determining who
- Defining what
- Unpacking Now
The key part of this methodology is the measurement of employee experience.
Here is a Call to Action for everyone to bear in mind when it comes to a consumer-driven approach:
- We need to adopt the consumer-driven approach to people as humans and not just participants, to be relevant in the future.
- We need to shift our approach from efficiency and effectiveness to engagement and experience.
- This is new for HR – we get so stuck in getting things done that we forget that our experiences create engaged and productive employees.
- We need to continuously be in conversation with our consumers – understand their needs, their wants, and the moments that matter.
- To be successful at this type of approach, we need to evolve it continuously.
Engage All Your Senses in Sixsentix Virtual Tour
Maja Davidov is a People and Culture Development and Ivan Ignjatović is a Delivery Manager at Sixsentix.
They gave insights into virtual tours of the companies. What does it look like?
You can walk around the company virtually to meet some of their staff and to get the essential information that you need whether you are a potential client or a new colleague.
Some of the key assets they had when it comes to bringing this project of virtual tours to life were:
- Budget
- People
- Ideas.
It took 9 months to fully finish the project and more than 70 people participated. They hired 6 external vendors, attended shooting sessions, and held a lot of meetings.
They highlighted some of the challenges they faced during the execution of this project:
- Busy schedule
- Coordination
- Line up ideas
- Stepping out of the comfort zone
- Budget limitation
- External factors.
Based on these, Maja and Ivan offered a piece of advice for all who want to follow in their footsteps – arm yourself with patience.
Rethinking Concepts for a Better Work Environment
Haris Dedović is a Creative Director at Doc.ba. In his case study about rethinking concepts for a better work environment, he offered us some statistics on productivity.
What happened to productivity during work from home?
A Stanford study of 1600 people showed a 13% increase in productivity with remote work. On average, a worker saves up to 8,5 hours a week when not having to commute to work, which, in a year, means 408 hours. It counts up to 17 days saved.
No matter how amazing this sounds, there are some downsides to it. As Aristotle said “People are social animals” and he was right.
The first downside is that remote work is not a long-term booster of productivity and learning becomes more difficult. Some of the factors that play into this are:
- Lack of human interaction
- 23% of on-site workers were promoted within their first 12 months of work, while the remote promotion rate was 10%.
Secondly, isolation decreases creativity and innovation, and detachment from the workplace occurs when people are working fully remotely.
- In 2019 56% of leaders felt that their companies were innovative with their products and services; this was true for 40% of respondents in 2022
- 60% out of 500 CEOs said that their top concern was managing the culture.
The third downside is mental health. A survey by Monster.com found that:
- 59% of employees are experiencing burnout symptoms while working from home
- 65% of employees worked longer hours while working remotely than they worked from the office
- 68% of workers said Zoom fatigue has added to their current stressors (a study by Tellus International).
After pointing out all of this data, Haris suggested some strategies to manage the negative effects of remote work:
- Shopify and Google gave 1000$ compensation to their employees for home office supplies
- Culligan Water made a virtual wellbeing portal and offered employee counseling; their support package includes weekly self-care videos, manager wellbeing calls, meditation sessions, resilience training, etc.
- Bank of Ireland made a “Career Development Program” aimed at fostering professional wellbeing and a “Colleague Wellbeing App” is also provided.
In conclusion, a hybrid type of work is the best type of work. Hence the idea for Nature Hub. This is a remote place in nature, or rather a group of different places, where companies can take their employees and work from there.
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