Transforming HR: Insights on Systemic HR with Kathi Enderes

In this HRchat episode we consider the concept of Systemic HR. Bill Banham's guest is Kathi Enderes, Senior Vice President, Research and Global Industry Analyst at The Josh Bersin Company.

Organizations face complex, ‘post-industrial age’ challenges, that have HR at the heart of them. These include: Designing hybrid work approaches; resdesigning job roles with AI in mind; and navigating through ongoing huge societal movements relating to inclusion and mental health.

Systemic HR is a new model emerging for how to design HR to meet these colossal challenges, being used now by the highest-achieving organizations studied in their research. Meanwhile, two-thirds of HR teams are currently primarily administrative functions; and aren't set up to meet these challenges.

Questions for Kathi include: 

• Tell us about the concept of Systemic HR
• How did you design your research on the concept?
• What did your research tell you?
• Has anybody used the Systemic HR concept with success?
• How can HR Leaders begin implementing Systemic HR in their workplace?

We do our best to ensure editorial objectivity. The views and ideas shared by our guests and sponsors are entirely independent of The HR Gazette, HRchat Podcast and Iceni Media Inc.

Feature Your Brand on the HRchat Podcast

The HRchat show has had 100,000s of downloads and is frequently listed as one of the most popular global podcasts for HR pros, Talent execs and leaders. It is ranked in the top ten in the world based on traffic, social media followers, domain authority & freshness. The podcast is also ranked as the Best Canadian HR Podcast by FeedSpot and one of the top 10% most popular shows by Listen Score.

Want to share the story of how your business is helping to shape the world of work? We offer sponsored episodes, audio adverts, email campaigns, and a host of other options. Check out packages here.

• Follow us on LinkedIn
• Subscribe to our newsletter
• Check out our in-person events

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

Welcome to the HR Chat Show, one of the world's most downloaded and shared podcasts designed for HR pros, talent execs, tech enthusiasts and business leaders. For hundreds more episodes and what's new in the world of work, subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit hrgazettecom and visit.

Speaker 2: 0:23

HRGazettecom. Welcome to another episode of the HR Chat Show. Hello, this is your host today, bill Bannum. Organizations today are facing complex post-industrial age challenges that have HR at the heart of them, and these include designing hybrid work approaches, redesigning job roles with AI in mind and navigating through ongoing huge societal movements relating to inclusion and mental health. And in this episode, we're going to consider the concept of systemic HR. And joining me on the show today is the amazing Cathy Enders, senior Vice President, research and Global Industry Analyst over at the Josh Burson Company. Kathy, it's my absolute pleasure no honor to have you on the HR Chat Show today, welcome.

Speaker 3: 1:15

Thanks, Bill. Thanks for having me Super excited to talk with you.

Speaker 2: 1:19

So I'll be on my reintroduction. Just a moment ago, why don't you take a couple of minutes now and introduce yourself to our listeners and for anyone out there who hasn't heard of it? I can't believe that's the case, but just in case anyone who hasn't heard of the Josh Burson Company, tell them all about that too.

Speaker 3: 1:36

Will do, will do so. Kathy Anderes, svp of Research and Global Industry Analyst at the Josh Burson Company. A little bit about me. If you hear an accent that's kind of a mix between American and some other things that you can't put your finger on, that's because I'm originally from Austria but lived in the US for quite some time. I live in California and have been there for almost 25 years. Lived in London before, but originally from Vienna, from Austria, where I started working and lived for quite some time as well.

Speaker 3: 2:11

My career has been pretty interesting.

Speaker 3: 2:14

I'm actually a PhD in mathematics, which is my I better swear I'm not going to be the weirdest person on earth because of my mathematician.

Speaker 3: 2:22

I started my career in management consulting with some of the big four management consulting companies and then went in-house, was leading talent and org effectiveness in very large organizations and then for the last few years I've been working on research and advisory on all the topics of HR HR technology, the whole area of talent, talent acquisition, learning and development you name it. Basically the whole kind of gamut of all of those kind of things. And the Josh Bisson Company we are the world's most trusted HR advisor as we say that we are providing research, advisory and also professional development for HR. And Josh Burson if you have heard of him, many, many people have he has been doing this for the last 30 years or so and we're still at it and still not slowing down and work with HR technology companies as well as corporate HR departments on improving work and improving the world of kind of employee experience. So that's a little bit about me and about the company as well.

Speaker 2: 3:41

Wonderful. Thank you very much as well. Wonderful, thank you very much. Uh, so, listeners, if you haven't yet heard my conversations with josh, check out episode 600. That's a joint episode with josh and with dave orrick, and there's a separate episode with just me and josh, which I think is around 595, something like that. So so please do check those out. Um, by the way, kathy, my, my other half, was brought up in Graz in Austria. Beautiful place.

Speaker 3: 4:08

What an amazing country. Oh, awesome, that's awesome, very cool.

Speaker 2: 4:15

So I guess my next obvious question for you is what's it like to get to work with Josh on a regular basis? He is so well respected in the industry. I love him to bits. What is he like as a colleague?

Speaker 3: 4:26

Oh, it's fantastic. I mean, if you've listened to him or if you've met with him, he is the most approachable, but that's the most the smartest and most experienced person that I've ever worked with. So he loves actually ideating. So every day when, when you have an idea, that's his favorite thing, or when he has an idea, then we just get on the phone and we actually live very close to like physically together, but we usually only meet on video. It's just the way of the world actually how it goes. But we talk pretty much every day and he's always open to ideas, always has lots of ideas, ideas, always has lots of ideas um and um. I just love it. It's very active, it's very um, um, interesting and lots of exchanges and every day kind of we, we come up with new things, new ways of supporting our customers, supporting the market and changing the world of work.

Speaker 2: 5:20

So it's it's amazing, it's a dream so when I got to chat with josh on on this podcast uh, given that I knew that part of that was going to be used for a special episode episode 600, I think it was um it got me thinking about. You know, why am I doing this? What's the legacy of the hr chat pod? And a question I asked of josh was what does he hope his legacy will be? You know, when folks are talking about him in 20, 30 years time, what does he hope that legacy will be as someone else who's extremely respected in the industry? I'd love to throw that one to you if you don't mind. But why are you doing this? What do you hope people will say about you and your efforts and your work in years to come?

Speaker 3: 6:06

You know I love this question and on my LinkedIn profile, on my profile, usually, when you see that I state there that I'm passionate about making work better for many, many people, and that's kind of what I'm working towards. So I feel that we're supporting, of course, hr departments and HR leaders and HR technology companies, but really, at the end of the day, it's in service of supporting the world of work and every employee, every person really on Earth, to make their really a little bit just making their work life, because we spend so much time at work, of course, making that a little bit better, helping them accomplish what they want to accomplish, be who they want to be, enjoy what they're doing at work, because most people don't, and I think everybody has a right to do that. So that's what I'm powered by.

Speaker 4: 7:12

Thanks for listening to this episode of the HR Chat Podcast. If you enjoy the audio content we produce, you'll love our articles on the HR Gazette. Learn more at hrgazettecom. And now back to the show.

Speaker 2: 7:28

Okay, so your hopeful legacy is to help everyone on Earth. Not a bad legacy if you can manage that Good work.

Speaker 3: 7:37

Aim higher right.

Speaker 2: 7:39

Exactly, exactly. Let's get into the main focus of today's conversation now, if that's okay, and that's around this concept of systemic HR. Can you start by explaining what this concept is?

Speaker 3: 8:02

Yes, of course. So, as we look at the problems that that we are all facing I just talked about making work better at work and in HR we are facing lots of different challenges that are really unique to this moment in time. So there's four things that we are facing and why we thought systemic HR is actually needed today and we embarked on a very big study. So four things that are happening. First, the labor market is getting more and more challenging for everybody around the world. Whether you're like I just talked actually with a group, a very large group, that was located around the world. Whether you're like I just talked actually with a group, a very large group, that was located around the world, but most of the people were in Budapest, and when I said, do you feel labor shortages are there, they said absolutely. I mean we are, I'm in California. Wherever you are in the world, basically, most of the HR departments, most of the teams, say we just can't find enough people and it's just getting worse and worse. So that's one of the HR departments. Most of the teams say we just can't find enough people and it's just getting worse and worse. So that's one of the reasons why we said well, something is changing in the way, has to change in the way that we operate HR. Second area organizations are changing a lot too. Every industry that we talk with, every company we talk with, is transforming. It's merging with another industry. If you're a retail company, like, for example, you're also going into financial services, you're going into healthcare, you're going into, like, other products and services, and that's happening with every industry and at the same time, within organizations, companies become more and more agile and they become, they work much more in cross-functional teams. Meanwhile, the way that we set up HR is very functionally oriented, very siloed, not very cross-functional, not very agile. So this is the second thing. The third thing, of course that's happening is AI, and it couldn't be a podcast where we don't talk about AI, right? I don't think we have had any meeting with any client or anybody where we don't talk about AI. I don't think we have had any meeting with any client or anybody where we don't talk about EI. That's going to impact how we operate HR in a significant way too, because HR is changing and HR technology is changing, but then every job is changing and what's the role of HR to support the organization in these kind of massive changes of operating models and job changes. And the fourth area actually has to do with employees operating models and job changes. And the fourth area actually has to do with employees. Every employee is now looking for more from their company, so looking for a better work life, having more say in the company's products and their strategies and their offerings. So the concept of employee experience we call this now actually employee activation, where we can activate the voice of every employee to elevate how much impact they have.

Speaker 3: 10:34

Meanwhile, all of this going on, hr departments the way that we have run HR departments is actually from 1995. So 30 years ago, almost 30 years ago, the traditional HR service delivery model set it up as an HR service organization where we say and Josh calls it the 80s IT department where somebody has a problem, an issue, they call it in and we block off that ticket, right, that's how we set up our HR departments. We said we have a service delivery organization HR operations of our HR departments. We said we have a service delivery organization HR operations. We have, like each of the centers of excellence that are supposed to like focus on talent acquisition, learning and development, talent management, total rewards, diversity, equity, inclusion you name it basically all of these silos, these domains, and then we have local HR business partners that are supposed to work with business leaders on localizing anything that the HR department sets out to do.

Speaker 3: 11:35

Well, in this world where every problem that we are hitting is actually cross-functional in nature and I'll bring up just one of the problems that we hit for example, skill shortages Everybody sees them, right, we talked just about AI. Everybody says, well, how can we find enough people that have kind of these future-facing AI skills, for example, in our organization? Well, the people don't exist. So it can't just be a recruiting issue, right, it also has to be a reskilling issue, because maybe you already have people in the company that have those skills.

Speaker 3: 12:06

How can you retain the people that you already have? How can you create a better employee experience? Maybe you need to have new compensation solutions for them, give them better rewards. Maybe you need to focus more on inclusion, because they don't feel like they have a say in the organization. All of those problems that we have skills problems, talent problems they're all cross-domain solutions. So we need to think about HR in a very different way than the 80s IT department and much more in an agile, problem solving kind of consulting way. So that's kind of what we wanted to study there and what we set out to study and where we discovered systemic means. Basically it's not like disconnected parts of the puzzle but really connected pieces that all are in service of solving the biggest business problems that the business encounters. So that's kind of in a nutshell what systemic HR is.

Speaker 5: 13:08

Fidelio Inc is a consulting firm specializing in improving human performance and we're proud to support the HR Chat Podcast. We help identify strategic competencies and behaviors that drive results. Our team offers an HR web software to manage systems, reports and data for HR people that need the best insights to make the right decisions and achieve better results. Learn more at Fidelocom.

Speaker 2: 13:34

Okay, very good, thank you very much. Okay, so you've got this wonderful systemic HR model. You're getting out there, you're sharing it with the masses, you're educating the masses. Who's using it? Has anybody used the concept so far with?

Speaker 3: 13:49

yes, we wouldn't say that it's a model or this framework if nobody was using it. Of course, for us it's always who has applied it. Many companies have applied it, but in many different ways. So very important to say and I'll bring some examples in a minute very important to say this, and I'll bring some examples in a minute. Very important to say this is not a rigid model where we say, well, the old service delivery model was like this and now here, ta-da, here's the new one. Because what we realized is every organization is actually customizing this model to their organization, to their business priorities, to their culture, to their leadership. So one of the examples is the Lego Group and of course we all know and love Lego, right, the Lego pieces, the Lego toys who has actually, on the surface, their new systemic HR model might not look all that different to what they used to have really brought in some very groundbreaking ideas how they changed, for example, the role of their HR business partners. They said our HR business partners, they did a study and they realized their HR business partners were actually not spending enough time on the cross-organization enterprise problems that were most important to the Lego group. They did a study and said how much time could our HR business partners spend on, maybe like digital transformation of Lego, for example, which is a cross-company thing, and of course, they had their HR business partners, set up by each of their business groups. They have seven different business groups and they said you know what? We can't operate the same way that we used to have, where we have a senior HR business partner that leads a team of more junior HR business partners and they all do what kind of each of these business groups want to do. We have to pull them together into cross-organizational teams and the senior most HR business partners now function like consulting partners that actually don't have direct reports, but they're the most senior kind of client advisors to their business partners. So, although it might not look all that different from a structure perspective, the support that Lego gets for the most pressing enterprise problems is significantly different. So that's one example of what they did.

Speaker 3: 16:10

Another example is MasterCard, of course, a US financial services or fintech company who has also changed their or is on a journey basically to changing their HR operating model and their HR operating system, as we call it, significantly around actually a two-year journey. They set out a two-year journey where they said, the first year they focus on within the organization, how they are changing roles to make them much more product oriented, much more consultative in nature within each of their groups, within each of their total rewards group their total rewards group, their talent management group, their learning and development group. And the second year, which they're in now, they're changing cross-domain collaboration, basically to really address the problems that the business have. Because they were growing so fast in terms of employee headcount. They said our growth exceeded the capability that the HR department had to support the business changes that we have to do because, of course, with AI coming in, their products are going to change, their services are going to change, and so they said the business is already very agile. We need to be much more agile in HR as well.

Speaker 3: 17:22

Another example is New York Presbyterian, a very large healthcare organization in New York in the US that really thought about they were actually on the whole journey from the least effective HR service all the way. Now they're moving into systemic HR where they are measuring the success of their HR organization actually by the success of the business. So usually your success measures in HR kind of I don't know cost to fill, for example, for hires or it could be how many people like your learning programs or any of these, maybe employee satisfaction, employee engagement, those more internally facing measures. But they said we have three priorities as a business this year we have to digitally transform our offering, we have to expand our footprint and we have to increase patient satisfaction, basically with our healthcare services. And they said the chief HR officer said we measure our success of the HR organization by accomplishing those success measures, not internal success measures. They might be important for us to know if we're on track, but for the business, we're only successful if the business succeeds. So a complete mindset shift.

Speaker 3: 18:42

For example, many different other organizations TomTom is another one who are, of course, based in the Netherlands. Their business has completely changed. If you're familiar with them, they used to provide kind of GPS tracking on your personal devices, on your running watches I had one of those as well for running and now they are more in the mapping business. So they're more competitive with Google Maps, for example, and so business is completely different. Meanwhile their HR department was very static and their chief HR officer said we can't afford to do that. The business is moving in a very agile way and so basically they broke up their service delivery model completely and now they only have four very flat teams that look nothing like your typical HR silos, because every one of these teams is just basically focused on either creating, designing products, delivering products or basically providing consulting services to the business or communicating to the business. So very cross-functional, very agile team structures that they have moved to over the course of two years, by the way. So this is not a one step thing. It's not a simple journey.

Speaker 2: 20:01

Excellent, kathy, I am very sad to say already we are coming towards the end of this particular conversation. I've got a lot of respect for you and I'm going to hound you for more interviews in the very near future, I suspect. But before we wrap up for today, thank you Great. Ok, I've got that on record. Everybody, cathy, just said that would be fantastic. Ok, good, please. Before we do wrap up for today, though, for for those hr leaders out there who are looking to implement a systemic hr uh practice within, within their workforce, how can, how can they connect with you and learn more?

Speaker 3: 20:37

yeah, so me personally. You can find me on linkedin, of course, kathy andrews. Uh, you can probably see my, my, my name, um, online online, so please connect with me. And, of course, if you want to follow joshbursoncom josh's site, we have also actually a separate page on there where you can learn a little bit more, and then I'd love to engage with you and and support you basically on this journey to systemic hr wonderful.

Speaker 2: 21:04

Well, that just leaves me to say for today kathy, you are a super awesome human being. Keep doing what you're doing. Thank you very much for being my guest today.

Speaker 3: 21:13

Thank you so much, Bill. I really appreciate it. It was fun.

Speaker 2: 21:17

And listeners as always. Until next time, happy working.

Speaker 1: 21:24

Thanks for listening to the HR Chat Show. If you enjoyed this episode, why not subscribe and listen to some of the hundreds of episodes published by HR Gazette and remember for what's new in the world of work? Subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit hrgazettecom.