Nokia’s HR Challenges + survey still open!

 

  One of the consequences of not having been blogging for a while (having been pretty ill the week the HR Directors Summit was on, and travelling since then) is that I’m going to keep my short survey open for yet another week!  Sorry to those who have already completed this, but I’ve just not had any time to analyse the results as yet.

So – you can still win a ticket to come to the Economist’s Talent Management Summit with me – and with Matthew Hanwell from Nokia who I was presenting with – who’s coming with me too.  I made Matthew complete the survey as a price for giving him a ticket, and here’s his explanation of his responses (or at least my recollection of these) – which also relate to the presentation we gave together (I’ll need my ticket winner to undergo a similar conversation too!).

 

Key business challenges?

• Transforming the business, especially from a cultural point of view.  It’s like the iceberg metaphor, people only think of the things they can see above the surface – the systems, processes etc.  But we need to look below this too – at peoples’ attitudes, behaviours etc – particularly the new leadership behaviours required to support a move from a product centric focus to one based on service attributes, and one based on a wider ecosystem of partnerships.

 

Key HR challenges arising from these?

• There’s a shift needed in the culture – and HR owns this.  We need to change the attitudes and behaviours to support the new strategy in the business.  This means actions to build capability, in reward, holding people to account, collaborating between teams etc.
• Engagement is also important – especially in light of this transformation.  People are uncertain given the disruption.  They want more clarity about their role.  We need to make the strategy relevant for them – what it means they are not doing, or are also doing now.  And where the company is going – and where they’re going to need to go to support it.
• Also HR agility.  Our processes and systems were built for a certain way of doing things – managing product marketing.  Now our focus is much more on agility.  We’re learning from agile and lean software development methodologies and their focus on two week sprints, the use of co-located scrum teams etc.  And this is an attitude too – one that HR needs to embrace.  So we’re changing the organisation, and HR itself.  Our processes aren’t as agile as possible and need to change to support that way of working.

 

What would you say are going to be the major challenges for your business and HR team this year? (yes, OK, I know it’s February already, but what can I do?).  Complete my survey here.

 

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