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Lean Management and HR in Turkey
I was pleased to have the opportunity to speak during the Lean HR Summit organized by the Lean Institute of Turkey, in Bursa, in December 2018. I am grateful to the managers of Lean Institute for giving me this opportunity and would like to thank the other speakers who had interesting ways of approaching the same issue from different perspectives. They taught me a lot.
While there we also happened to have intensive meetings with the IT and HR managers of many current and prospective customers of BILIN. As a result, I realized that Turkey is in a serious “enlightenment” phase in HR management. I would like to share the observations that led me to this conclusion.
1. “Lean” concept in corporate management is similarly prevailing in HR management, too
The excessively complicated manual HR processes have always frustrated us as BILIN HR implementation consultants and our customers as our counterparts trying to complete an HR software implementation project. Many requirements that had been put together without proper thinking just to get quick results did not lead us to very successful solutions. However, with the increase in awareness of the need for a lean HR management, the requirements in the processes are becoming less and less complicated and more and more results-oriented leading to a clearer focus and workable, sustainable solutions.
2. Like in other parts of organizations, the risks of forming siloes around HR management processes are now understood by more and more HR managers. They are now trying to avoid siloes from the very beginning of HR digitalization projects
I witnessed many organizations encountering many repetitions, inconsistencies, overlaps and gaps in HR processes especially in organizations approaching their Organization Management, Performance Management, Recruitment, Learning & Development Management and Career Management processes in the form of siloes with separate sub-departments under an HR manager. I am now starting to see more and more organizations who are well aware of the intensive collaboration and communication needed in order to place all HR processes in one strategic and holistic HR system.
3. The necessity of HR management with data and numeric figures is better understood
“Data Driven HR” concepts have been discussed for quite some time. However, issues like; determining the data that has the greatest impact in our HR management decisions; identifying where, when, how and by whom this data should be collected has just recently being resolved in organizations. Therefore, the number of such managers who used to claim that “HR management needs more hearts people as opposed to finance or production management where numbers people are needed” are now accepting the fact that they used to say that because they could not really understand and/or manage the type of data required for HR. Consequently, I now see more and more HR managers trying to keep the balance between people-oriented vs. data-oriented HR management.
4. The importance of a unified HR management system supported with a consistent user experience and a single common database is increasing
I am happily observing that HR managers are becoming more and more cautious about arguments on “Exciting and exaggerated – Hype” best of breed applications that cover only a small specific portion of HR processes without a solid integration capability to their HR backbone technology platform. Especially those organizations that did not already have a thoughtful, settled, organically integrated technology support for their core HR systems suffered a lot because of such disparate HR applications. Now, I see that more and more organizations are setting their priorities on reaching a certain maturity level with their core HR systems supported with leaner HR management policies and procedures before they start to play around with some “awesome new technologies”. Further, I noticed that many companies are even establishing an “HR Systems Management” sub-unit under their HR departments (which was an important part of my organizational design advice in my PhD thesis written in 2000).
Such “hype” applications will and should be used to create a competitive edge, of course; but only after the organizations reach this maturity level in their core HR processes. Such approaches will certainly be more useful and add value to the HR management services when the organization already has meaningful and consistent data to supply into such systems. I am seeing that this approach is already gaining ground.
5. HR managers are now considering employee engagement scores as a guidance for improving HR management processes
Employee satisfaction and engagement surveys used to be (and still are, for some organizations) carried out only as some kind of a performance measurement tool for all the management units. This approach did not help the organization improve anything. The increasingly saddening employee engagement statistics became one of the most used figures in infographics, because they were really outstanding figures. Almost all of the management units started to blame each other for low employee engagement scores, but no specific management unit wanted to take the blame. Consequently, these surveys have become some kind of a routine practice even though no one really wanted to learn the results and/or do something about it. Nowadays, I am starting to see more and more organizations’ HR departments taking responsibility for the employee engagement results and trying to identify potential problem points/complaints that the organization can resolve/avoid to improve the results. Having mature “Data Driven” HR systems in place, such organizations are now more capable of finding about the root causes of problem areas and either resolve them directly by inserting new technology and/or processes that create a much better employee experience within the organization or help other management units improve themselves if they are the source of these root causes. Being able to do this repeatedly and consistently with solid data is surely increasing the level of employee engagement in such organizations day-by-day.
I observed many organizations at this summit and from my recent visits with HR managers who have already reached this understanding, it is clear that their organizations are benefiting from it. Some organizations and their managers are still struggling to reach this maturity level and it will take time. My purpose in pointing out such examples is to create awareness about the possible results of such efforts and hopefully increase the number of organizations that start the journey to reach HR nirvana
