How to Build an HR Team People Actually Want to Come to

Keine Notizen für die Folie

So I want to change things up a little bit… so instead of telling you what my title is and what I do, I’ll introduce myself by sharing who I am and what’s important to me.

Let’s connect as humans, not workers…

Now a bit more about who I am as a person:
I loooooove food
I am sensitive and empathetic
Because of those traits, I ask a whole lot of questions !
My family and people come first in all decisions I make
I bike to work everyday
I am at times very anxious.

My goal in life, why I do what I do:

Share my knowledge, passion and experience with others to create better workplaces (environments) and eventually, a world that is more human.

This story really changed the way I live and work and love and parent.

As I said, I was working for growing company in tech. Was my first job in HR. Started by doing that were more transactional such as pay, benefits, recruiting (which can be and should be strategic but when you’re a one person team…).

Full of challenges, building an amazing cultures, opening offices around the world. Starting to have management challenges, employee engagement issues which was interesting and challenging to me.

Had my kids, company had grown, needed to be more strategic, brought on a senior HR VP.

Was good for a while, until I started “growing out” of my job which for me meant a change in mentality. Our development team (which was over 75% of the company) started to shift towards a more agile way of working)

Became challenging to work with my boss because I realized we had very different visions of what the HR team should be.

We couldn’t work it out… after two years of trying hard o, so I went off to another department for a while an began coaching developers to work as a team.

And so I took all the courage I had a contacted our CEO to pitch him a new role : Head of Culture. I wanted to elevate who we were, what our values were, coach and work WITH people, not FOR people… Focus on engagement and culture. After thinking a loooooonnnnng time about it, he said yes. But there was a catch.

This ruffled some feathers let’s say… this was typically an HR function and so… M and I were told to “work it out”.
And there I was, confronted to the boss I had left a year ago. We negociated and when I saw that her ego was still right were we had left things… I said no.

There it was… it was at that time that I understood. Our visions and our values could not reconcile.

That’s when I truly understood HR’s real job. I’ll explain that a little later.

I was at a crossroad.

CONTAINER analogy.

Great job, great challenges, great people… but with a huge clash in vision and value. I realized this was about Culture… I was choosing values, things that were most important to me.

Meh job but with amazing leaders and inspiring vision.

What does HR have to do with all this?

So essentially, we go into HR because we care about humans, right?

But there’s a disconnect.

When you ask people what HR does, you’ll get answers like these…

Not what you’d expect people to say, right?

Let’s talk about the elephant in the room…

RESOURCES!!! Why do we call human resources, HUMAN RESOURCES?

Are humans really resources or are they not really just people? Aren’t they different then technical or financials resources? Have you ever seen money or a computer breathe, feel, or be happy?

Your role in HR is to accompany your leaders and managers to do this.

You role is to clarify this with your leadership team and then help leaders lead their team with these values in mind.

So.. I could go on and on but the essence of the point is this. (SWITCH SLIDES)

There’s no impressive answer here…

Ask yourselves what tasks you can automate? What can you empower other people to do?

GO BACK TO THE TITLE OF PRESENTATION….

What I have observed…

You can’t build culture in your own office. Culture is something that lives…

Speaking of values… I’ll share those that unite us at Officevibe.

Creativity, Risk, Openness, Vision
Failing is ok if we learn. Officevibe is a great example.

Making sure that this is actually in line with how people in the organization act on a daily basis is your role. Your job is to point out behaviors that go against your company values and ensure that the right discussions take place. You can only do this by spending time in the field.

Grit, Curiosity, Leadership, Being part of the solution

Also about self-awareness = growth enabler.

Competences, rigor, communication, craftmanship

Vulnerability, co-creation, community, caring

Explain how we went from Family to Build together. I was personally scared of this in the beginning…. Family for me are the people I talked about earlier.

This is probably where we have the most challenges.

Caring starts with HR and leaders… if you’re not modeling these behaviors, how can you expect employees to act as you expect?

How? Being present, never giving an employee then feeling that they’re bothering you when they reach out (really), admitting fails & learnings with humility, instill a sense of community by involving employees in your initiatives.

And so I’ll leave you with this question.

Culture are values…