The missing piece
Most (smaller) organisations have a crucial piece missing.
It's a piece that seems like it ought to be part of operations or HR, but 99% of the time gets missed out of both. I refer to that piece as "way of working".1
It includes things like:
- how do people get to know what they should focus on?
- how do they find out what other people are working on?
- how do they re-orient to where their team has got to and where it's going?
- how do they stay engaged in their work in a rewarding way?
- how do they learn and develop in and through their day to day work?
I was recently discussing this problem with a potential new client who are a social enterprise. They started out thinking they wanted something like a staff handbook, but the more they talked to even the best HR providers, the more they realised that wasn't what they were after. They didn't want policies covering the compliance side of employing people, or even the procedures that underlie great 'employee experience'. They wanted something that captured who they are as an organisation, so they could collaborate better with each other and with any future team members. That's why I suggested the problem might be one about 'way of working' and that we could produce a short and powerful guide to that together.
In what sense is this piece 'missing'?
1. Most organisations do not know that there is a piece there at all. They are not thinking about 'how to be an organisation', or putting effort into consciously developing their culture. Remember: culture is not beanbags and benefits. Culture is: getting great work done together.
2. Minimally, HR and Operations focus on compliance questions. Employment law, insurance, risk assessments, etc.
IF they expand a bit, they widen out to "getting employees to subscribe" on the HR side (which as I have said before is a smart perspective to take on the whole employee lifecycle) or to handling "conveyor belt issues" on the ops side (dealing with those one off type problems that don't fit into anyone else's role).
In other words, any bandwidth you put into these functions tends to get filled up before you can get to 'way of working'. At least some of this work is unavoidable, and will have real world consequences if you don't do it.
So how do you fill this gap?
One answer is you work with someone like me, to get you started.
But what's a more sustainable answer?
There are two parts to it.
First, that you need to invest in your line managers. You need to see that managing people is an important activity, and it needs some time to do it (in a little-and-often way), and some time to plan (away from the work, without distractions). If you can move more towards this, where you are starting to plan for 'managing' being an activity that takes time, you are getting more people involved in finding the missing piece.
The other part of the solution is one of mindset. The kinds of practical problems that occupy HR and ops people - and CEOs! - can be opportunities to strengthen the organistaion's way of working. But you have to recognise the opportunity, and then approach them with this framing in mind. Then the systems that you build for your organisation will steadily strength and embed the way of working you want to see.
More technically it is known as 'organisational development' or 'org dev' or even 'OD'. This is a great term to signal to fellow OD nerds, but I think less useful to leaders.