Prompt for HR Professionals: What lessons have you learned in 2020?
People have always been at the heart of our business, but 2020 put that to test like never before. Weathering COVID-19’s impact on our business without layoffs while making the transition to temporarily remote and then Remote First forever had waterfall effects on my time and priorities this year.
I learned to be flexible, but keep looking forward.
I’ve had to change my plans and change them again and keep changing them based on what we needed now and in the future. For example, we had planned an intensive internal training series this year that I scrapped to instead focus on communicating what how the company was responding to the economic crisis, putting together health information and supportive policies for those impacted by the pandemic, and pulsing employees to see what they needed from both a logistical and mental health standpoint to work remotely.
But then I had to step back enough to be proactive again. There was so much necessary reaction in 2020, I had to learn that I still needed to balance that with forward planning to best support our team.
I’ve learned to ask for feedback more often and to be more responsive.
We had always asked and encouraged employee feedback, but with the pace of change this year it became clear that I needed more of it and I needed to do more to prove we were taking action on it. Additional surveys on working remotely and anonymous feedback submissions are a couple of channels we use, but we’ve taken to reminding people weekly to speak up. And I’ve taken to reminding myself and our leadership team that while we may not get it perfect, it’s better that we listen and keep trying to get it right.
I’ve learned that what we thought we could never change, we could.
I never thought we’d be able to work remotely successfully. Our culture was always so tied to our physical office space and we struggled to integrate the few remote employees we had. But when we were forced to go remote we found that not only were we set up to work virtually, but the majority of us liked it. Our culture changed, but the core of who we are has not. It was never about the office; it was about the people. This lesson has applied to many things this year. No matter how much we’ve said we didn’t want to get stuck in the mindset of “we’ve always done it this way” we were getting stuck in that rut.
I’ve learned that there is a lot to learn.
This year has challenged me to stretch my idea of what it means to be a people leader. And I’m not coming out the other side of it feeling all-knowing, but rather humbled at how much I’m learning from the feedback, responses, innovation, and pure backbone of the individuals on our team.
The important thing is that I (we, companies) keep trying. HR is the bridge between the company and our people. We are both the policymakers and the relentless reminder that there are humans at the other end of those policies. It feels easier in times where you have to make hard business decisions, as so many have had to this year, to try to depersonalize and treat humans as resources. But it is important to make those hard decisions while holding onto employees’ humanity when they can’t be in the room to represent themselves. It may not change the outcomes, but it reinforces or changes who you are as a company.
With Love,
Natalie