Srikanth Karra is Chief Human Resources Officer at Mphasis.
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As the new world makes it imperative to thrive in a new normal of uncertainty, a close partnership between the CEO and the CHRO can change the game. CHROs can take the first step and propose a new framework for people management in a constantly transitioning world while CEOs, with their power to execute company-wide evangelization, can enable the proposed changes to take off, from the ground up. Together, CEOs and CHROs can partner to create and advance a genuine culture of learning.
Let's look at three areas where the CEO-CHRO partnership can drive organizational transformation and enable businesses to lead the change by working together on introducing and mainstreaming a learning culture.
Fostering Company-Wide Learning
As businesses get accustomed to operating in a marketplace where change is the only constant, they are acknowledging the need to embed learning in their DNA. This is because this one quality can make a difference in how they adapt to swiftly evolving requirements from customers, investors, employees and other stakeholders.
But acknowledging this doesn’t translate into company-wide adoption. This is where a close partnership between CEOs and CHROs can make a difference. Such a partnership will ensure learning is given the gravitas it requires—from the leader who represents the brand and the one who stands for the workforce.
This is why having an open, adaptive approach to hiring, skilling, collaborating and pivoting to more responsive ways of working is going to be key to future-ready organizations.
But adopting a learning culture is easier said than done. In the case of startups, which usually have a few hundred employees, this is relatively easy. Startups are geared toward moving quickly with a smaller workforce, achieving business outcomes while learning on the go. Being agile and iterative is part of their brand value.
This is not so for legacy organizations. In having an established culture for several decades, with objective criteria-based performance management systems in place for years, large companies have a hard time acknowledging and implementing changes to introduce a new learning culture. While CHROs can propose a new model, the CEO must facilitate its rollout throughout the organization.
Mapping Performance To Learnability
Once that happens, an immediate outcome will be a shift in the approach toward annual performance management. This will help organizations measure the new learning culture better. Putting hyper-personalized HR systems in place to reflect each employee’s progress and learning in real time would be key. Such a system would acknowledge objective outcomes met and reward the "subjective" capacity to learn demonstrated by every individual.
The system could also use all metadata available within and outside organizations to deliver an all-around view of every individual while leveraging insights from AI and real-time analytics. This would pave the way for learning-centered, performance appraisals that map compensation, awards and other recognitions to workers, according to their ability to be adaptive learners.
Investing In The Future
If you think about it, today’s annual appraisals measure achievements that took place in the past. Expanding it to include "learnability" makes it future-oriented as it then includes what employees will do with their current capacity to imbibe new skills, apply it in new settings and progress toward being an agile, adaptive workforce.
Yet, the catch with this aspirational shift is that the predictive element in HR policies is lower than in the finance team. Senior leaders may theoretically get what adopting a learning culture signifies, but when it comes to investing in it, they will back off. This is because such a policy cannot predict returns in numbers. At best, what HR offers is a promise.
Building Each Other: CEOs And CHROs
This is where CHROs need support from their CEOs. They need their trust that such a policy with its intended pivot will pay off steadily in the long term because it is an investment in the future of every employee and the company they represent.
It is crucial that CEOs must look toward building a more sustainable and less myopic future. This will entail shaking off the "quarter on quarter" imperative laid down by Wall Street, investors and funders, which makes it difficult for CEOs to turn away from their company’s past productivity.
And in addition to CEOs needing to prioritize a different kind of work culture, what will really help tilt the scales is a robust partnership between CEOs and CHROs where both functions agree to see the long-term benefits of investing in a learning culture.
Incentivizing Learnability
Lastly, another practice that will prepare organizations for an ever-changing business environment is policies that aim at incentivizing learning. Simply offering opportunities for employees to pick up new skills is not enough in itself. Instead, recognizing and rewarding them when they successfully apply these new skills to a business problem will go a long way in inspiring employees to learn, adapt and grow.
There is no one path to adapting to a learning culture. What is key is that CEOs and HR teams stay on the same page to make each other’s success outcomes co-dependent on establishing learnability, company-wide.
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