< Back to the Future of Work Roundtable
Transcript
CLAIRE HAIDAR: What we're essentially doing now is we're taking the conversation down to the individual level, okay? So, the actual individual on the ground, what are these HR and legal policies that we need to be taking into account? There's some very, very serious work that companies need to do here. You know, simple things like people can't up and leave and go to any country that they want to go to because they may not be legally able to work there. And that becomes a liability for you as an organization, because you have an employment responsibility.
This is the piece where I really feel you can see the larger organizations, particularly the very legal savvy ones, are doing a lot of deep work around this and they starting to put policies into place, but I can definitely see that, what I would term the less legal savvy because they're not pushed into it. You know, so there's industries that are very, very regulated, okay, those industries are all over this because they know that they have to be because they face very serious consequences if they aren't. The companies in the industry that are not as regulated are not looking into these policies as much as they should be. And there is a lot of ownership that companies need to take into this area.
PETER KIM: Some of the questions that I received from, you know, some of the surveys that our company sent out is specifically about ergonomical chairs, you know, does workers comp cover an employee's home office if they're working from home.
I think there's just a lot of HR considerations that organizations really need to spend some time on and some employees are gonna move out of state. We need to make sure that they could get paid in that state as well, right? There's different city and state tax laws and regulations that companies needs to follow, right? And we're currently in the assessment phase and, you know, just gathering knowledge in terms of what other businesses are doing in this space.
ANGELA GIBBONS: 'Cause we also had people that were hourly that we had to deal with and how we were gonna, you know, clock in and clock out, make sure from that perspective. How were we going to measure them?
JOANNA ZABRISKIE: We handed out laptops like Halloween candy back in March and then we gave people an allowance for anybody who was going to be working from home and they could use it for whatever they wanted, whether that be a chair, a light and so forth. And that went over pretty well. That was very helpful.
SCOTT WESSON: Just rethinking roles and responsibilities, you know, or do we think about work the same way? Do we think about how we've divvied up those responsibilities the same way? What do the customers want, right? The customers, they don't want to go back. You know, if they've adopted to being able to talk with us digitally and engage with us digitally, to get things done, to get things fixed, I don't think they want to go back. And so do we need to redesign some jobs to make it easier for us to be very, very responsive yet, not necessarily have to be present?
HAIDAIR: We actually need to realize that the HR function that we used to just see as an administrative function, before, has actually become a very, very strategic function. If somebody goes to university and they study HR, there's like seven very specific buckets that essentially make up the work of an HR professional or industrial psychologist. There's compensation, there's hiring, there's performance management.
You know, there's these very strategic areas or buckets that make up the job spec of an HR person. Eventually, what we as leaders now need to do, entire leadership teams, need to go and take every single one of those strategic areas of HR and redefine them completely for our organization. Role design, Scott, which is what you've just mentioned. Peter, you know, the questions that you're coming around. It's a combination of job design, but also compensation, you know, like what does my compensation look like now that I'm actually leasing my office to you as an employer to work from? You know, those are all of the type of things and I think the companies that are going to really accelerate through this are the companies that are going to take that HR job role and not just push it off onto an HR person and say, "Solve this problem for us."
They're actually going to bring that entire HR function across the strategic leadership team and say, "Here is the committee who's going to drive the rework of our compensation structure. Here is the committee that's going to drive the rework of our benefits," you know? "Here is the committee," and we're actually going to have to sit and do the work around that, you know? So starting right back at the basic routes, doing the surveys amongst our team members, what do they want? What is industry best practice? But then very importantly, what do we need as a company to actually be able to achieve our objectives? And then how do we marry those three together? And I think it's only the companies who are actually going to take the time and effort to go and do that very specific work and set thinking time and design time around each of those functions that are actually going to accelerate out of this.
My advice to companies out there today is to actually go and take those very strategic functions of the HR role, and redesign that across the org. What I can share with you, what we do inside our organization is we actually have, people have come into our organization that've said they've never seen onboarding like ours ever before in their life. And it's simply because we've designed it because there is no molding. You know what I mean? There is no absorption of information. Like everything has to be explicit from day one. And so we actually have like everything, like there's a section in our employee onboarding just around, this is how you design an office optimally to actually be able to do work.
And as part of their onboarding, they're not just supposed to read that document, they actually have to show us a before and after photo. And they have to post that before and after photo into the channel to go, "This is how I started work. I read the manual and this is what my office looks like now." You know what I mean? And coming back to the core principle that I want us to come away from here is, we need to get very explicit about the experience design. We have to redesign from the ground up.