Episode 19: What is Agile HR and How are Companies Adopting It? (Interview with Anna Tavis, Associate Professor at NYU)
Agile isn't just for Tech anymore. It's transforming how organisations hire, develop and manage their people. It's also transforming how HR interacts with the Workforce from doing things to employees to designing programs and Technology with and for employees. In many ways agile is the backbone of efforts to design, understand and improve the employee experience.
My guest this week on the podcast is Anna Tavis, a Clinical Associate Professor of Human Capital Management at New York University and the editor at People and Strategy a journal for HR Executives. She also wrote a landmark article in HBR with Peter Capelli on Agile in HR, so who better for me to discuss this topic in more detail.
You can listen below or by visiting the podcast website here.
In our conversation, Anna and I discuss:
What agile HR means and why it is becoming increasingly important
We look at the skills, mindset and methodologies needed to be successful
Anna also talks about examples of how agile is being employed by companies such as IBM and Adobe in HR
We also look into the crystal ball like we do with all our guests and ponder what the role of HR will be in 2025.
This episode is a must listen for everyone in HR, particularly those leading efforts in employee experience, people analytics and other leadership roles.
Support for this podcast is brought to you by Perceptyx to learn more, visit perceptyx.com.
Interview Transcript
David Green: Welcome to the Digital HR Leaders podcast Anna, it's great to have you and thank you for your time. So just a quick introduction really into your background and what you're doing now because there's so many different things that you're doing.
Anna Tavis: And so exciting to talk to you live David. I read your newsletters and I feel like you're in my life every day of my professional life.
David Green: Well apologies for that
Anna Tavis: No, no problem at all. My background… I think the interesting thing is no one really wakes up one day after high school and says I want to be in people analytics so I kind of stumbled into people analytics along my professional path. I started out believe it or not as a linguist. So I studied multiple languages, linguistics, everything from psychology to language disorders and everything associated with kind of language acquisition. Very interesting discipline. And from there, ended up somehow in psychoanalysis looking at the early 20th century emergence of psychoanalysis. My first publications were translations of first women psychoanalysts from German into English and so the long story short, I became interested in the business as a part of cultural landscape. I was in Academia, initially got my PhD. from Princeton, wrote a book on Rainer Maria Rilke, published. Was teaching successfully and then realised that my interest was really in more in doing things than just researching things.
Before I left Academia I did get an Executive MBA in international business just decided to kind of finish off my formal education and went into business and that's why I ended up in Europe. I was the Head of Organisational Effectiveness for Motorola. Living in your neighbourhood in the UK outside of London. From there I was recruited into Nokia and spent some really really interesting exciting years in Helsinki as the Head of Global Talent for Nokia and then returned to New York into Financial Services right before the financial crisis, and I joined AIG the right place at the right time. And as you know hell broke out with financial services, but you know, whatever we think experience is, it was a very interesting experience. So having spent a few more years in financial services after we kind of climbed our way out of the hole, I got a call from Columbia first and then NYU saying you've got your academic background. You already have put a few years in the business. You check the boxes. Why don't you come in and help us in professional education space and that's where I'm now at NYU. I'm the Head of Human Capital Management Department and very excited to be using all of my skills and experiences to join you and the community on this path to transform HR.
David Green: And tell us a little bit about the program that you put in place because it's very interesting, particularly to me.
Anna Tavis: I know, one of the things I decided to do coming into a fairly traditional HR department. We have a lot of students. It's kind of running day in and day out. We have SHRM aligned curriculum. That's kind of the program I inherited and my first thought was this is not what the future of HR is going to be. I really have no place of teaching my students who are going to be professionals 20 or some of them 30 years from now what I've done. It's not doing them any justice.
Let's look at the cutting edge. How do I help my students prepare for that future? And actually do a service to the businesses who are looking at the market and not finding people with the right skills. So I sat down to work right away and within a year created the first Masters and Science degree at least in the United States, specifically dedicated to people analytics and technology.
And what's really amazing David, that program was approved by New York State which is a pretty tough I would say accreditation body in three weeks. No one has heard about this speed of you know educational bureaucracy moving so fast, but the program was approved and we are launching 2019 in the fall our first cohort of students and the interest is coming from all over the world.
We're seeing a lot of Asia. We're seeing Middle East as well as across the United States because it's going to be a blended program where we're not just limiting ourselves to delivering in person content and I can talk about it more because my main challenge about creating this program was who's going to help me design the content because that's the most challenging part.
No one really knows what it's going to be. So I knock on the door of our neighbours down in Westchester and IBM, I know Diane Gherson very well and in fact, she's one of my I would say role models in HR and I look at how she transformed the HR department in IBM lo and behold I found a lot of PhDs who are actually thinking about the same things I was thinking and sitting at IBM so I really borrowed a lot of those talents from Diane, she blessed the partnership and that's how our curriculum came together.
David Green: We're going to probably talk a little bit more about some of the work that Diane and the team are doing at IBM a bit later.
Well, what's interesting I think is you said it only took three weeks to get certified or get approval. Which is incredible. So we did some research at myHRfuture earlier this year. And we asked HR professionals what are the skills that you want to learn and actually they didn't come back with comp and ben or recruiting or stuff like that. They came back with people analytics, strategic workforce planning design thinking, digital technologies plus some softer skills around stakeholder management, consulting and influencing and that seems to lend itself to what you're creating with the course at NYU.
Anna Tavis: Totally. I didn't tell you about the second program I created that is taking a little longer for accreditation, but it will be in Executive Coaching or Consulting.
Another Master's degree, which I think goes really well with analytics and technology, delivering the data, the evidence and then you have to have those consulting skills to be able to deliver.
David Green: Of course.
Obviously you're passionate about this space. You've been championing Agile HR and there was a great article that you and Peter Capelli collaborated on I think it's just over a year ago now in Harvard Business Review, it was on the cover.
Called HR goes agile. Not everyone would have had the pleasure of reading it but do dig it out. We hear a lot about agile in HR, but what does it actually mean? And what does HR need to do to adopt some of this methodology?
Anna Tavis: Yeah. What a great question. I tell you a little bit how we got to Agile because I think it's really relevant, especially for HR.
We got it by doing a whole ton of research and writing as well on Performance Management, the organisations were ripping out their old waterfall style Performance Management systems and putting in those frequent check-ins, etc. What was really interesting to me coming into that space was that very few organisations realised that they were just responding to the agile methodology that was already introduced across the organisation. I just felt you know, if you talk to Donna Morris from Adobe who kind of made a big splash in the newspaper saying where we are changing our performance management system and that became the trigger. So what we realised was that a lot of HR processes were changing to that accelerated sprint style delivery, but there was very little understanding of where it was coming from. And so looking at again Performance Management and then some other processes that were beginning to align with the much more incremental iterative way of working we realised that definitely it has to do with the digitisation of HR.
And if you ask me about what agile means to HR now, I see three tracks. First of all, and that's outside of those three tracks. I think a lot of people use agile metaphorically. They don't really understand that there is a specific methodology that is associated with it and there are some tools that are enabling agility in organisations that need to be introduced before we even start talking about agility. So agility for organisations and HR means a lot more than just being nimble and responsive whatever it means to different people, right? So the first track that I think has probably gotten a lot of traction in various HR organisations is that software development template. Scrum teams, Kanban, sprints etc. And it started out not surprisingly in technology companies like Adobe, IBM... Because guess what the business has been 90% working in that agile space and the businesses started to create their own alternative evaluation systems that were outside of a traditional HR process. The second group of companies that jumped on board of agility, especially in Performance Management space were Professional Services and that had to do with billable hours etc and return on investment. Deloitte, Accenture, looked at what it cost their partners to take time off to be completing performance evaluations that no one really cared about so all of that started in that space and I feel that in terms of where different industries are on agility, it's probably still technology companies that are leading and financial services are second or following. So the first track is agility through digitisation and software.
The second is it's more up-and-coming. I haven't seen outside of individual examples, of a wholesale introduction of ONA technology or organisational network analysis, because I think that's a systemic view of how organisations really work and understanding where points of accelerations are, who the people are who are really enablers in that, a speedy delivery and it all has to do with change management. How do we accelerate change? So I think that's the second track where you can take agility.
And the third one I find has to do with design, because I think the influence for that would be behavioural economics etc. Where we're looking at organisations by design, understanding that if you put the wrong tracks in the sand, people are going to be... we're not going to be able to deliver to your expectations or to the required speed of change and a lot of that has to do with org design. So I think those three are the elements and I probably should write something, volume 2 on agile HR and see where the opportunities are but still in the majority of organisations there still needs to be education around what agile is, it's not just being responsive or wanting to be responsive.
David Green: Let's talk about some of that education that HR needs and skills they perhaps need to acquire and maybe it's a slightly different mindset as well. What advice would you say?
You're an HR leader or you meet an HR leader? They were actually passionate about getting some of this stuff in place. Where should they start?
Anna Tavis: Where should they start? You know, David, I think what works best if HR looks inside their own organisations. Where I saw success... obviously getting ideas about what needs to be done and educating themselves in a more general fashion. But from the change management perspective, look at what everyone else, other functions, are doing inside your own organisation. Where I see success is if HR partners with IT. If HR partners with marketing or customer service and actually breaks down what creates success in those functions because in the majority of cases in every organisation, there will be pockets of innovation that are already operating in the agile way, and I think it's a combination of educating yourself on what's going on generally externally, but really grounding yourself and what works for my culture and who are potential allies in my organisation who can actually help us move in that direction. And I can give you multiple examples of I'm just most recently I was in Toronto with BMO, Bank of Montreal.
Very very impressed with that organisation. And that's exactly what they did. They took on an HR leader out of the HR function. Created a separate function in transformation, cultural transformation. And the alignment was across IT, some of the financial services functions that were already looking, and customer service and they created these diverse teams and were learning from each other. And embedding HR people into these either IT groups or customer service groups and the other way around, bringing technologists on the inside of HR worked beautifully for them. I think they were able to move really fast on the curve of transformation because they were very authentic to what their organisation could do.
David Green: And it's quite frustrating when you see that a lot of companies, they'll look at things like culture. Look at things like employee experience, almost keep it within HR and you're only really going to create a culture is if you work across functions bringing different skill sets different parts of the organisation's, as you said learn from them as well. An employee experience is another thing, where we actually need to design employee experience with employees for employees rather than to employees.
Have you seen good examples of that as well. Is that something that Bank of Montreal have been doing?
Anna Tavis: Yes, they've been doing that as well. And the other thing I am seeing... You know what doesn't happen often enough David and I think its HR's fault as well? That we are not invited into these innovative initiatives.
It has to go both ways. Not just we bring technology or customer service or marketing communications, whatever on the inside of HR function to try to think ourselves out of the box, but we also need to parachute ourselves into other functions and often times. I don't think that those functions are thinking of HR as a potential ally and accelerator to what they need to be doing. And to give you an example of the successful merger of these different skill sets would be for example the same, Donna Morris at Adobe. She has been made... Somebody who was the Head of Employee Experience is now the Head of Customer Experience as well because of what she was able to accomplish on the employee experience side, the business saw transferable skills to improve the customer experience as well. So, I think that we're not seeing enough of that back and forth and the validation that HR has really made it and joined the club will be that invitation coming in from other functions.
David Green: So you mentioned Donna Morris at Adobe and obviously we talked briefly about Diane Gherson at IBM as well earlier, a lot of the initiative is coming from the leader. The HR leader, what are the qualities that Diane and Donna and others like them have that other HR leaders could learn from?
Anna Tavis: Obviously they're visionary leaders meters for who they are, but I think what's really interesting for us is to kind of break down their tactics. Because we can talk at a high level and these are the only outcomes but what's really amazing about those two women CHROs is that they actually deliver. In the most difficult environment of transformation, creating business cases to their CEOs and earning the respect of all different businesses in their big organisations.
So what I think works for both Diane and Donna so well, is that they trust the data. I think they are both data-driven evidence-driven leaders to be kind of consistent with the theme of this podcast. Let me break down an example. I was just doing an interesting study again on the digital transformation of Performance Management with MIT, and I took another look at Diane's strategy, Diane Gherson at IBM's strategy.
And it turns out that she really operated at two different levels. Often times HR thinks that we need to get the Senior Management approval for anything we do etc. And Diane understood that, but she also was very aware that she would not get that approval if she doesn't get all of her people on the same page.
So her strategy actually didn't start with going to the most senior business leader and trying to convince them to fund, to sponsor etc. Her strategy started with earning the trust of her organisation. Again taking the example of Performance Management, clearly, the engineers working on the agile teams etc had absolutely no use in time for Performance Management. On top of that this also came with a distrust of the HR organisation that they felt was disconnected, didn't really listen to their feedback, etc. So she had a whole new approach toward engaging her main constituents, all the 400,000 people in the IBM universe, and the way they did it, they did multiple design thinking sessions. They introduced employee listening. They collected a ton of data on the sentiment of the organisation where they understood where the pain points were. And in their redesign they also didn't go directly and immediately to the Senior Management, they actually took the pulse of the organisation. What their response was of the people etc and they made a particular effort to earn the trust and prove to her groups that their feedback matters. In fact Diane shared that when negative feedback came in. They made a point of reaching out to those people who chose to identify themselves and having deeper conversations trying to find out where the frustrations came from. So that whole massive effort that she put in really earned her the trust.
So when she went to the senior leaders for approval and sponsorship she already had the full support of her organisation, but even then to those groups, she made a data-based case where she could demonstrate through the evidence in a very logical way why that change was necessary. So two-track strategy that really addressed the need to bring the entire organisation on board of what was going to change. So the change went much smoother than the traditional kind of top-down change and the Senior Management saw that already the proof of concept of what she was able to do. So I think that having the intelligence in responsiveness to different segments of the organisations and understanding the complexity of their jobs...
Unfortunately, too many senior HR people are only looking up and managing up and that's where a lot of the initiatives derail and eventually it would derail their careers as well. So my recommendation would be, look at the entirety of your constituents and create specific segments, specific strategies and don't think that by winning the senior leadership you're going to close the deal. That's not going to be... It shouldn't be the goal.
David Green: Yeah, as you said, you mobilise the workforce and you use the data to actually help you make the case
Anna Tavis: Totally. Both the data that the employees help you gather and collect and experiment and give you feedback and all the information you need to really create still a minimum viable product. But something that is going to work and then you bring that data to a senior management and that's what they want to see.
David Green: And if the employees have helped you create the MVP, then they're more likely to want to actually use it.
Anna Tavis: Exactly and that's where there's a significant return on that investment and that's where I think it's really important. As I said, it's not just a vision. It's the tactics and how you go about it.
David Green: So Performance Management was almost the entry point certainly at Adobe and IBM for using agile methodologies for HR programs. Where are the other HR programs where this methodology is being applied as well now so the kind of... Doing it with employees rather than to them.
Anna Tavis: Right. You know what I've seen, again it varies in different organisations. First, there are a few leaders in the agile space that went wholesale entire organisation goes agile. That could be IBM as the example and ING, ING is also a bank in the Netherlands, a global bank.
They were very determined to turn the whole organisation into the agile way of working. Right now I think they're reporting that they're about 80%. The other culturally, I think agile works really well and that's my experience with Nokia. Also I think is a proof of what I'm seeing is Northern Europeans seem to be culturally more flatter organisations, more collaborative, consensus oriented. There's a lot of feedback that's being very much more direct and so I'm seeing... For example, Spotify is again in a different industry, but a poster child of this agile entire organisation working the job. For bigger companies that are trying to experiment and feel their way into the agile space. They are HR functions that are much more easily transformed into this agile working would be Talent Acquisition, Learning and Development. Clearly again, these areas are much more technology-based and evidence-based.
There's a lot more data generated in the front end as well as in the Learning and Development space with all the tools available to us. And on the other side of the coin, the functions that are most reluctant and may be more cautious and conservative about this will be definitely Rewards and Compensation and Benefits, particularly financial compensation.
And that is for a lot of companies that would be a real return if they don't know how to resolve their reward systems and then are willing to experiment and try different ways. Even if it's not just financial compensation, but looking at the total rewards portfolio.
I don't think they're going to be in the long run successful because we know how important incentives are and what you incentivise or what incentives and disincentives you put in. Those will be the behaviours you're going to get. So I think that that's the main challenge for those companies that are trying to experiment on the small projects but the incentive systems prevent people from really going agile.
David Green: It's interesting a lot of the organisations that you mentioned, IBM, Adobe, Spotify, all the CHROs there, Katarina Berg for instance who's actually a guest on an upcoming podcast....
They're all data driven. What is the importance of data and people analytics and it's link to going agile, as it were?
Anna Tavis: I think it's absolutely central to the agile project, period. Because you cannot... Agile doesn't operate in a hierarchical political structure. It is about getting frequent feedback, really looking at what's not working what's working for what it is not for what you want it to be. And really having the authority and autonomy to change things. Based on the feedback, based on evidence.
And so these are simple but very fundamental and critical elements of agile operation and it's not just about going about the motions of setting up Kanban, transparency or going scrum and building scrum teams and training people on agile if you are not willing to look at the evidence and act on it. You're not going to move any faster than before, it doesn't matter how much training you're going to put in place.
David Green: Of course one of the challenges is the data literacy of HR Professionals is not normally that high in most organisations and a lot of the educational programs bringing the next generation of HR professionals through also have an absence of analytics and data, which is something that you're changing with the program at NYU. Obviously we talked about how it's recently launched and you've got the first cohort coming in in 2019. Can you tell listeners a little bit more about the program and some of the areas that are going to be covered in it?
Anna Tavis: Yes, so I think what's really important is that we're not just educating Engineers, you know, we are not necessarily building a lot of coding capability in HR because we do not think that necessarily is the centre of the HR agile project. First of all, there's definitely a level of literacy that we need to build and that is not necessarily the Masters level. We've created a boot camp, most people are talking to us about the program and in principle are very interested in developing a skill sets, have sort of a phobia against numbers and you know what? HR is getting beaten up by a lot of folks for not being numbers oriented. But I also blame the whole culture of how numbers were taught, how they were delivered and for people who are more, psychology oriented and creative etc. It just didn't allow the connection. But that space is changing so radically. With the data visualisation that's coming in, and more brain friendly ways of teaching these types of disciplines, I think we're going to see people have a lot more access than before and fewer barriers to entry.
So what we are doing, we are breaking down that Chinese wall that was created between what HR does and what numbers mean. So to your point a lot of it has to do with a mindset and just to give you a point of comparison how much it is a part of culture than actual capability. I grew up in the Soviet Union and started my career in Russia, not career, just I was in school in Russia, and it was the first time when I got to the United States that I heard that the girls were not good at math. That was just such a big shock to me because the first women mathematicians, there were a lot of women in sciences and math, etc.
So it is a cultural phenomenon I think and so that's what we're trying to break down. Second thing. What we're trying to do is find, a ramp into much more analytical disciplines, but for example, I will be teaching an organisational behaviour class, which will have significant elements of data in them because even Behavioural Sciences right now is based on, getting this evidence working with technology. Look at the whole Neuroscience, etc. So getting people into the space through a familiar pathway, but getting them to understand that they need those tools now everywhere. And I think once we develop that level of comfort in the first introductory courses, we are going to then put them into a much more rigorous training, but we are revising... This is where I think what's really going to be very important for us is to introduce very different instructional methods and instructional tools and technologies helping us again with visualisation, videos, creating communities, using all of those user-friendly student-centric methods of teaching these disciplines that bring much broader population into the field of analytics and technology. And the other thing is and that's my particular theory of the case is that technology is going to meet us where we are. In fact because technology is developing so much faster and the humans are not that we are going to actually get technology come to us much faster than we catch up with technology. So as we're developing this program, I see the technology is going to help us and get the majority of us out of this space of fear, anxiety, and some bias against the numbers and evidence.
David Green: So obviously you have quite a unique background, you've spent time as an HR leader and obviously now you're helping educate the next generation of HR leaders and also the current generation I guess as well. What excites you most about HR when you look towards the future?
Anna Tavis: What excites me most is that the possibility and opportunity for HR people to really lead the business because the reason I'm in HR is because I think that this function is so critical to the whole business agenda and so understated and underserved in terms of the tools that we have, the roles we play. And even the people we attracted. So all of that is going to change we're going to get the tools. We are going to get the roles, businesses are going to be looking to ask to help accelerate their agenda and we're seeing more and more talent coming into HR that do not discover HR again on their graduation from college, but when they come to organisations and see what HR mostly can do, we see tremendous talent coming into the function.
David Green: Yeah I think it's an exciting time. But what about any worries? What are your concerns? What's your biggest concern or concerns about where things are going?
Anna Tavis: The concern I think we probably all share is that if we do not jump at this opportunity, if we do not take advantage of what's available to us right now when we still control the access to talent when the business still listens to us, even though we're using in most cases outdated tools. But we still make decisions about people. That if we do not live up to the need of the business and the expectations of us, somebody else is going to step in and take that role and I certainly don't want this to go to robots or some machines because as we know it's the robots and machines are going to deliver information to us but the decisions at least for the foreseeable future is going to be with the people and with the humans and hopefully HR, so I am at times worried about losing that opportunity if we do not step up and bring the right talent to the business.
David Green: Well, let's assume we do. Let's assume we do step up to the plate. If we do, where do you see HR in 2025 and I know it's not that far away. But let's say, we start getting more agile, using data more. Where do you see HR in 2025?
Anna Tavis: I think, and this is my hope that we're going to see more Diane Gherson's and Donna Morris's, we will see HR heroes. We are going to see the business press writing about CHROs, that we are going to get the visibility and recognition and that will create a tidal wave of new talent coming in because we all need our heroes. And we have not seen those heroes portrayed. Let's make a movie about CHRO and see how that goes, that which is not going to be something. And you know cast some big-name star, Lady Gaga, playing a CHRO of a company because we do not really see those positive role models around us. So I hope that by 2025... and by the way, thank you for doing these podcasts because that's part of creating that collective cultural environment where these talents are going to grow.
So I think that's where we need to do a lot of work and by 2025 let's be more visible and more attractive to the right kind of talent and prove ourselves to the business. That's all achievable I think by 2025
David Green: We are starting to see it happening in some companies. Hopefully we'll see it more widespread.
Anna Tavis: Exactly
David Green: Anna, thank you very much for being a guest on the show. How can people stay in touch with you?
Anna Tavis: LinkedIn is a good place to find me and obviously at NYU. I'm at NYU. We're going to be rolling out the programs and we're going to be doing a lot of great things and hopefully in collaboration with David Green and the company and the community of people analytics professionals.
David Green: Thank you Anna.
Anna Tavis: Thank you.