"What happens to HR in an agile journey?"

I'm at another Agile Singapore meetup, this time in Titansoft's offices - ah the smell of freshly-decorated office, it's so... cephalagic.  Anyway, I'm in Titansoft's offices listening to Titansoft's HR & Operations manager talk about what happens to HR in an Agile journey and I'm taking notes with a Titansoft 3-colour pen I'd picked up at a conference a couple of years ago.  I'm not, however, wearing a Titansoft T-shirt, nor a T-shirt with Titansoft's name on there as one of the sponsors - basically, I'm not wearing a T-shirt.

This is a talk about a journey, so there are travellers on that journey who encounter obstacles and have to navigate twists and turns along the way.  Not everyone was ready for the journey, people were happy where they were, but then difficulties were found with their situation at the time, and there were voices in the distance indicating a new and different situation that might just be better.  Along the journey some people found particular paths to be hard-going, particularly when they were still carrying so much other baggage that made it harder to navigate those narrower paths.  The main path was quite wide and generally inviting, but it was mostly muddy - sticky and slippery, not the kind of ground you want when you're carrying that historical baggage.  Not everyone followed the same paths, but each group seemed to find what most suited them, or what they were most comfortable with, or rather what became their new comfortable situation.

What stuck out?

Kids today(*) want their work experience to include the following: autonomy, flexible working hours, learning opportunities and challenges, meaningful work, and frequent feedback.  I don't know why that list should be exceptional, they're all the kinds of things that I like to find in an employer, and I'm supposed to be a member of Generation X.

So much like Plato's reporting of Socrates' complaints against the youth of 2400 years ago, the comments about the kids of today would appear to be the same view of every generation.

There was one other desire that the younger workers want from their work experience: early promotion.  Though history is littered with stories of ambitious (and exceptional) young characters who found early promotion, the emphasis is on them being exceptional, which is also why there are stories about those characters in the first place.

This is something I have trouble with because it potentially sets up an unrealistic set of expectations for repeated promotions.  If so, then there are going to have to be many more rungs on the promotion ladders than there are now - you want to move up from Junior Assistant Junior Clerk to Assistant Junior Clerk and then on to Senior Assistant Junior Clerk?

Surely there was more about HR in general?

I was struck by some of the default mindsets that I'd deduced from the presentation.  (It was only an hour's presentation and I did not grill the speaker so I may be wrong in some of my assumptions.)

The focus was on the shift from performance appraisal to no performance appraisal and from fixed hours to flexible hours, which suggested to me that the default mindset of HR was very much one of command and control, that people are resources - hmm, the clue's in the term HR itself... - and not thinking of how one cultivates an environment for knowledge workers to thrive.

The HR manager was only recently introduced to Douglas McGregor's Theory X and Theory Y theories of motivation and management.  I would have expected an HR manager to be fully familiar with the various theories of motivation and management such as Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, etc

Performance reviews were removed but the experience was that there was reduced feedback, which suggested to me that the managers were not conducting regular (and frequent) one-to-one meetings with their staff - something which I'd been taught in my first line management training course many years ago.

Flexible hours is something that I've come to expect over the years in non-customer facing roles, and that teams are well aware when one or more members are not pulling their weight.

It was also interesting that more developers were included in the recruitment process - after overcoming an HR concern that people were not qualified to conduct interviews.  (Which leaves me wondering what magical skills interviewers have or why one did not think about how people can learn how to conduct interviews.)  However, I understand that the recruitment process then reverted back to the previous framework because the developers had complained that recruitment work was getting in the way of their day-to-day development work.  My immediate reaction to that would have been to ensure that there was alignment in terms of expectations regarding the balance between the effort required for (the very important) recruitment activities and the effort for day-to-day activities.

What else?

Looking at the slide on the workforce demographics I was surprised to see that the age bands stopped at 45.  Hmmm.

What about the food?

This was an after work meetup, so how could I not have some comment on the food?  Well, there was no greasy pizza.  In fact, there was no pizza at all, but there were plenty of doughnuts.  I decided to give the doughnuts a miss.

(*) So-called Millennials, Generation Y, Generation Whine, the (latest) Me Generation, etc