Here’s how your organisation works: you hire people who are increasingly used to a world where they can do pretty much anything via an app on their iPhone, and you subject them to a blizzard of process, policy, antiquated systems and outdated ways of working which pretty much stop them in their tracks, leaving them unproductive and demoralised. Frankly, it's a miracle they manage to accomplish anything at all.
We’ve gotten used to the idea that if our organisations are to be successful in future, we need to develop products and services that customers find easy to use. Explaining a near-30% jump in profits last year, the CEO of Domino’s pizza attributed it in large part to a mobile app that ‘made it really easy for customers to order pizza’.
But this is only the external face of organisational usability; if we are going to be successful in future we need to make it much easier for our people to do their jobs: because they are going to be spending less time with us, and because we want engagement and retention, and because if we require high levels of capability (to work our complex systems) then our resourcing costs will go through the roof. We have to simplify ‘getting stuff done’. To put it another way: in an ideal world, any job in your organisation should be do-able by a 12-yr old.
This is a really big deal. It’s the future role of HR – making the organisation usable for employees. If we don’t, we won’t be in business.
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