Outside-In: Is HR leading in 2020?

Dave Ulrich brought a challenge to the HR profession back in 2012 to deliver value from the outside-in. His core message was that HR performs at its best when it focuses on the needs of our organisation’s customers and external communities; building our employee experience with this at the heart.

Back in 2012, the needs of our customers and external communities seemed much simpler. We could talk confidently about customer needs, the value they sought from us, the supporting business strategy, translating that into a people strategy to drive results. It was about driving-up value and measuring the impact through the numbers.

In 2020, what does outside-in HR really mean?

Delivering value in 2020 looks quite different. We have learnt that the health of people and the health of our businesses are one and the same thing. As Joseph Stiglitz (Nobel prize winning economist) has pointed out, prioritising health is the pathway to economic recovery. So, to deliver value to customers our organisations need to put health at the core of the way they do business.

Health is an interesting word. At one level it’s about the absence of disease, but that is a very narrow definition. What if we took health to mean the conditions by which people are at their very best? This shifts us into wellbeing territory, not simply the absence of harm. The World Health Organisation has a similar drive for this broader definition of wellbeing, describing it as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”.

As a signed-up member of the HR profession, I see this as an opportunity for HR to lead a new approach to what outside-in really means in 2020 and beyond. As the people experts, we can initiate the conversation at the leadership level to re-examine how our organisations create value for their customers and external communities. If health, true health, is at the heart of value creation, what does that mean for business strategy? How will your business position itself to build confidence with its customers and communities that they live by this fundamental truth? 

I’ve been working with Digby Scott on how organisations drive and deliver value for people, customers and communities in 2020 and beyond. It’s igniting new thinking in the leaders we’re talking to and people are ready to explore and redesign the way we do business.

How do you see this conversation playing out in your organisation at the moment? Will you take the lessons from 2020 further and deeper to connect with our new-found understanding of how health and wellbeing drives value?