Building an Outstanding Workforce

Developing People to Drive Individual and Organizational Success

Paul Aldrich, Andrew Pullman

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780749497316
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

In an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world, achieving sustainable competitive advantage has never been more important, or more difficult. However, the key challenge for CEOs, senior executives and HR professionals is how to unlock the potential of their people, building a culture that allows employees to perform to the best of their abilities and effectively attract, engage, develop and retain the staff needed for sustainable business success. Building an Outstanding Workforce is a must-have guide for all professionals looking to leverage the potential of their people and maximise value for all stakeholders. Including evolutionary psychology, neuroscience and personality psychology, this book takes an evidence-based approach to people management. With practical guidance, expert advice and case studies from companies including Alibaba, Barclays Banking Group, Patagonia, Tata Group and Qantas, Building an Outstanding Workforce covers all the key issues including how to tailor people management to address the motivations of different generations, the impact of emergent technology on the workforce, the shift in the skills employees now need to learn and develop and how to handle the new challenges of remote and flexible working and the gig economy. There is also essential coverage of strategic workforce planning, people risk, people analytics, human capital reporting, the employer brand and employee value proposition and the benefits of embracing diversity and inclusion, well-being and other aspects of corporate and social responsibility. It presents a new people-focused framework for people management that redefines the structure, roles and responsibilities of human resource management and addresses the problems of role ambiguity and conflict associated with HR to deliver people management that everyone needs and deserves.

PART ONE

People

01

Evolutionary psychology and neuroscience

Introduction

To build a workforce that is outstanding means building one that will support individual and organizational success. However, before embarking on this journey it is important to understand something of our individual complexity. This opening chapter reflects on our shared evolutionary past, and the impact of genes, experience and learning on our emotions, thinking and behaviour. As with the other chapters, we draw upon a wide range of research to extract key points that support the practices of leadership and management.

To appreciate the complexity of people, we need to be familiar with:

• the brain and our innate instincts;
• the nature of emotions;
• the nature of the mind and thinking;
• cultural evolutionary psychology.

The aim has been to write explanations that are scientifically accurate, based on current knowledge, but introduced in a style that is accessible. A sound knowledge of the information in this chapter is fundamental to understanding everything that follows and to being an effective leader and manager.

Chapter summary

The following subjects are discussed in this chapter:

• our history:
  • Big Bang to the cognitive revolution;
  • turning points from the Industrial Revolution;
• our brains:
  • evolution;
  • structure;
• emotions:
  • evolution;
  • types of emotion;
  • constructed emotions;
  • emotions and behaviour;
• thinking:
  • evolution;
  • cultural evolution;
  • cognitive gadgets;
  • cognitive modules;
  • theory of mind;
  • the triune brain.

Our history

Big Bang to the cognitive revolution

In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari tracks the history of earth and its human inhabitants as follows:

• About 13.5 billion years ago, matter, energy, time and space came into being in what is known as the Big Bang. The story of these fundamental features of our universe is called physics.
• About 300,000 years after their appearance, matter and energy started to coalesce into complex structures, called atoms, which then combined into molecules. The story of atoms, molecules and their interactions is called chemistry.
• About 3.8 billion years ago, on a planet called Earth, certain molecules combined to form particularly large and intricate structures called organisms. The story of organisms is called biology.
• About 70,000 years ago, organisms belonging to the species Homo sapiens started to form even more elaborate structures called cultures. The subsequent development of these human cultures is called history.
• Three important revolutions shaped the course of history. The cognitive revolution kick-started history about 70,000 years ago. The agricultural revolution sped it up about 12,000 years ago. The scientific revolution got under way only 500 years ago.1

Harari states that:

from the Cognitive Revolution onwards, historical narratives replace biological theories as our primary means of explaining the development of Homo sapiens. To understand the rise of Christianity or the French Revolution, it is not enough to comprehend the interaction of genes, hormones and organisms. It is necessary to take into account the interaction of ideas, images and fantasies as well.2

Having quickly covered 13.5 billion years of human history with the help of Harari, we arrive at the mid-18th century and the Industrial Revolution.

Turning points from the Industrial Revolution

In Humans Are Underrated, Geoff Colvin notes that most people’s essential skills remained largely the same from the emergence of agriculture 12,000 years ago to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-18th century. Then came a series of turning points:3

• First turning point – the advent of industrial technology: In the 18th century, steam-driven industrial technology devalued the work of skilled artisans, who handcrafted their products from beginning to end. However, less-skilled workers were in demand to work the new machines.
• Second turning point – ubiquitous electricity: In the early 20th century, electricity became more widely available and enabled the building of far more sophisticated factories, requiring better educated, more highly skilled workers to operate the more complicated machines. Companies grew much larger, requiring a larger corps of educated managers. The trend intensified through most of the 20th century.
• Third turning point – ubiquitous information technology: Starting in the 1980s, information technology had developed to a point where it could displace many medium-skilled jobs, while at both ends of the skill spectrum the number of jobs increased and pay went up. This technology was not good enough to displace the problem-solving, judging, and coordinating tasks of highly skilled workers like managers, lawyers, consultants and financiers; in fact, it made those workers more productive by giving them more information at lower cost. At the bottom end, low-skill service workers were protected as technology was not good enough to displace repetitive manual tasks.

Colvin points out that so far, at each turning point, high-skill and low-skill workers had both prospered, but the fourth turning point, which heralds emerged and emerging technology such as artificial intelligence, robotic process automation and distributed ledger technology is encroaching on both ends of the skill spectrum. The impact of technology on the future of work is examined in Chapter 7.

However, before discussing technology and other trends that will impact work and the workplace, it is helpful to understand our shared complexity, what makes us human and therefore what sort of working lives we can hope for in the future.

Our brains

Evolution

We have evolved over millions of years, but how much of our behaviour is due to biological evolution and how much to cultural evolution?

In Beyond Evolutionary Psychology, George Ellis and Mark Solms write that while a number of brain modules are hard-wired, these modules exclude the whole of the neocortex and that the ‘existence of innate language modules and other innate cognitive modules is not biologically plausible.’4 They propose that key aspects of human knowledge are innate; for instance, a developing child does not have sufficient input data to deduce the rules whereby language is constructed and therefore that knowledge must be innate, the brain has

an initial structure that is genetically determined but rather loosely prescribed at a detailed level, their detailed nature then being precisely determined through developmental processes as a consequence of learning experiences and interaction with the environment.5

The hard-wired connections

refer to neurons where genetically based developmental programmes produce a fairly tightly prescribed se...

Table of contents

• List of figures
• About the authors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One People
• 01 Evolutionary psychology and neuroscience
• 02 Personality psychology and intelligence
• 03 Bias, stereotypes, group culture and decision-making
• 04 Motivation
• 05 Leadership
• Case studies
• Part Two The environment
• 06 Organizations
• 07 Technology and the future of work
• 08 Demographics
• 09 Culture
• 10 Social movements
• Case studies
• Part Three Workforce planning
• 11 Planning and people risk
• 12 Human capital metrics and reporting
• 13 People analytics
• 14 Employee engagement and experience
• 15 Well-being
• 16 The future of people development
• Case studies
• Part Four The future of people management
• 17 People functions
• 18 Professional people management
• Part Five Creating an outstanding workforce
• 19 HR disrupted and dispersed
• Notes
• References
• Index