So I admit that I use multiple methods to dull the noise when I\u2019m on a plane.\u00a0 The first are the industrial grade ear plugs from Home Depot.\u00a0 I love these things, but by themselves, it\u2019s not enough.\u00a0 Second in the line of defense are the Bose noise reduction headsets.\u00a0 Combined with the ear plugs, this method eliminates most of the unwanted external noise.\u00a0 However, it\u2019s really not until the music of choice is on that I\u2019m surrounded by what I want to hear, and not all the random conversations and buzz that I want to filter out.\u00a0 The point is that on the plane, I\u2019m usually trying to focus.\u00a0 I don\u2019t read or watch the movies, I almost always work the entire time.\u00a0 The random conversations and hiss from the plane is distracting.<\/p>\n
We deal with the same thing in HR.\u00a0 We get distracted by the little things that seem like big things.\u00a0 All too often, we focus on the details of why we can\u2019t get a person transferred from one department to another, or the fact that the payroll taxes seem to not balance.\u00a0 Don\u2019t get me wrong, these are urgent matters in many cases, and sometimes they border on the severe.\u00a0 We sit around in vendor selections and debate the relative functionality of one core HR system versus another, or our technologists scramble to add a field to some integration somewhere in the HR ecosystem.\u00a0 Again, don\u2019t get me wrong, we have to do these things.<\/p>\n
The problem is that fabled 80\/20 rule.\u00a0 We spend 80% of our time chasing the fires, battling the tactical.\u00a0 We get so driven by the tactical that we forget to take a breath and focus.\u00a0 Everything we do, from transferring employees, to filing taxes, to selecting vendors and creating integration is about delivering a service that is so seamless, managers and employees don\u2019t know it exists.\u00a0 We need to fix the fires, but if that\u2019s all we do, we never fix the root causes.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a hard balance to make.\u00a0 When I do activity analysis around HR service delivery, I inevitably find out that organizations are actually spending more than 80% of their time being tactical.\u00a0 The other 20% is mostly internal consulting, which is actually a good thing.\u00a0 The bad thing is that the best of companies will spend 2-5% of their time being strategic.\u00a0 What is more of a wonder, is that often, that tactical time is often spent in department meetings \u2013 not solving anything, not discussing problems and solutions.\u00a0 Just meeting.\u00a0 It\u2019s like we all know we\u2019re supposed to say we\u2019re getting more strategic, but none of us really have enough guts to actually make it happen.\u00a0 Fact of the matter is, we like the tactical \u2013 we like the noise.\u00a0 When we say we\u2019re going to outsource something, people scream.\u00a0 Even when all we do is outsource the administrative crap that supposedly nobody likes, we can\u2019t get buy-in from our HR practitioners until some VP signs a piece of paper and makes our complaint a moot point.<\/p>\n
We need to focus \u2013 and we need to realize it\u2019s not that we can\u2019t focus, it\u2019s that we don\u2019t want to.\u00a0 Sometimes the change management is within, not without.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So I admit that I use multiple methods to dull the noise when I\u2019m on a plane.\u00a0 The first are the industrial grade ear plugs from Home Depot.\u00a0 I love these things, but by themselves, it\u2019s not enough.\u00a0 Second in…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1826,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[37,8,2],"tags":[453,296,298,297,295],"class_list":["post-1818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-change-management","category-strategies","category-hr-technology","tag-change-management","tag-distractions","tag-focus","tag-noise","tag-root-cause"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1818"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1818\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1827,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1818\/revisions\/1827"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}