Commentary
HR Transformation as the Engine for Business Renewal
Commentary by Anna A. Tavis
Industry disruptions have headlined business news since the early 2000s. With the cloud revolution driving change in global markets, traditional built-to-last companies have had to rapidly transform themselves to survive, adapt, and compete. Market-facing customer service, sales, and marketing functions reinvented themselves in the new digital image a decade ago. Although HR is a latecomer to the digital scene, it stands ready to undergo its own reinvention armed with smart technology, data-driven insights, and a renewed sense of purpose.
To paraphrase Diane Gherson, IBM’s chief human resources officer, talent is unquestionably the new economy’s number one competitive asset. HR, as a traditional caretaker of talent, has to leapfrog generations of evolution, moving from intuition to reporting to predicting and ultimately to prescribing — all in a matter of a few years. Some companies, like IBM, are successfully making this leap. Critics, so ready to question HR’s relevance and viability, should take note.
This case study describes HR transformation at IBM. It is particularly instructive for companies embarking on their own HR digital transformation efforts. IBM’s most important lessons are less about the specific solutions they introduced and more about the way they went about finding their new philosophy and their new operating model. The IBM story is as much about what they decided not to do as it is about what they ended up doing.
Diane Gherson’s most consequential first step was to abandon the practice of benchmarking other companies and not to rely on HR experts to renew her strategy. She turned instead to IBM’s own employees for answers. Not surprisingly, the message her team heard from employees was not always in line with the view of senior management, which did not believe much in HR could change. It became clear that IBM’s transformation was to be anchored in agile ways of working. The company’s traditional performance management (PM) was seen by employees, however, as an administrative chain holding back the adoption of fast agile ways of working. The decision was made to radically redesign PM with employee experience in mind. In the process, all other functional areas in HR were redesigned and realigned to serve HR’s new purpose.
The following 10 decision points are worth considering when reviewing the IBM case in the context of your own organizational transformation:
1. Decide where to start. IBM’s first and highest priority was to redesign its PM system. The team turned to its own employees for redesign ideas, not HR experts or senior leaders.
What you can do: Identify the weakest link in your talent management system. If it’s your PM approach, this is where change should begin.
2. Connect your transformation to an existing element of your strategy. IBM used its adoption of agile practices across the organization as the primary catalyst to overhaul its entire talent management system.
What you can do: Choose the one key performance indicator (KPI) that intersects with talent that will have the most impact on your business.
3. Renew your talent/HR purpose. By committing to employee experience, engagement, and learning, IBM shifted away from an earlier focus on differentiation and high potentials.
What you can do: Decide what type of culture you want to have. Assess how fast you can move from an administrative compliance- and appraisal-based approach to being employee-centric and learning-focused.
4. Decide where to start: Identify the most consequential first step with the broadest possible impact. IBM made a PM redesign the priority in its talent transformation process and had the capacity, capability, and political capital to go global with its minimum viable product (MVP) for the entire organization.
What you can do: Identify whether performance management is the weakest link in your talent management system and where the pain points are for your employees and management.
5. Select the design method consistent with your new purpose. For IBM, agility and design thinking became key methodologies HR successfully applied.
What you can do: Select and agree on design principles and method(s) consistent with your talent philosophy and aligned with your purpose. Teach those skills and test to see if they work for all.
6. Get your organization’s buy-in to support your transformation effort. IBM took a two-tiered approach to secure buy-in: (1) It earned employee trust and engagement by crowdsourcing design ideas from across the company. (2) It won over senior management by running successful experiments proving that attrition could be predicted by data.
What you can do: Learn to listen. Generate insights and communicate decisions supported by the evidence you collect. Engage key stakeholder groups with data relevant to them.
7. Decide how to test and improve the designed product. IBM went for speed, customer feedback, and continuous improvement. Having designed and released their crowdsourced PM process, Checkpoint, in record time, the company “proceeded through numerous iterations and playbacks, with employees continuously participating in the design process.”
What you can do:
Choose one of three approaches:
- Launch a company-wide MVP: Your priority initiative is based on your company’s KPIs and readiness for the company-wide rollout.
- Experiment and create a proof of concept. Run a series of experiments starting with the business units most ready to innovate. Show results to others.
- A combination of the above two approaches.
8. Go beyond performance management: Decide on your next steps. Successful implementation of the redesigned PM process revealed further strategic talent needs for IBM:
- Accelerate and personalize skills renewal.
- Customize decision support for managers.
- Create an internal marketplace for jobs.
What you can do: PM renewal has a domino effect on all HR processes and tools. What comes next on the renewal list will have to be decided by your company depending on its strategic priorities. Meanwhile, HR will have to renew and upskill itself as the transformation process continues.
9. Assess how to turn technology and data into the greatest enablers of transformation. IBM HR fully leverages its tech and AI capabilities, often creating its own tech tools. My Career Advisor, for example, is IBM’s mobile in-house career coach created by employees at a company-wide hackathon. Blue Matching serves IBM employees with notice of new internal job opportunities tailored to their qualifications and aspirations.
What you can do: Technology and automation are central to the transformation of HR. Yet, no two companies’ technological and data capabilities are alike. Choose your tools wisely, develop technical expertise internally, or borrow your experts. Do not overspend on systems unless you understand how they will deliver.
10. Integrate tools, platforms, and processes with employee experience in mind. IBM’s case shows how to bring all processes, tools, and platforms together into one renewed talent ecosystem. “It’s not about having a learning platform and…an internal jobs platform,” noted Joanna Daly, IBM's vice president of global talent; it’s how they integrate together with AI-enabled advice for employees to explore what jobs they should do next.
What you can do: No matter where you decide to start, integration should be your final destination.
IBM’s case could be the timely accelerator of your own company’s HR transformation. There is a lot to learn here, but no one’s “best practice” is a replacement for your own discovery. The best lesson to learn from Diane Gherson and her team is their innovative attitude and openness to experiment in the face of the unknown. Learning to innovate, take on risks, and show courage is what IBM’s HR has shown us how to do. It is now the right time to take the right lessons from IBM and apply them and scale. Best of luck as you begin.
Anna A. Tavis is a clinical associate professor of human capital management and academic director of the human capital management program at New York University. She tweets @annatavis.