Welcome to The HR Pioneer Blog – Wowledge’s weekly contribution to your team’s expertise in building and advancing HR Programs.
We use this space to educate, stimulate, and differentiate your thinking about how to improve the HR processes, practices, and programs in your organization. Our team is composed of career-long HR leaders, consultants, and subject-matter experts with a shared passion for progressing the Human Resources field.
As experienced consultants, we understand that telling a client what to do doesn’t yield the same results as guiding them towards how to do it. That is fundamental to Wowledge’s main value proposition as an HR Leader’s (and team’s) expertise partner - helping HR Pioneers understand how to plan a route to their aspiring destination, outfit their wagon train and avoid dangers and obstacles along the way.
To give you a sense of how we accomplish all those things, let us share what Wowledge is all about and our approach to supporting you, the HR Pioneer!
At Wowledge, we think of HR Pioneers in two ways – by the competencies they exhibit first, then via the actions they take:
- Pioneers are curious, courageous, and innovative leaders. They are willing to take calculated risks to lead their companies to brave new worlds of practices and processes that drive business success.
- Through their actions, they blaze new trails in their organizations, introducing new or upgraded HR practices, approaches, technologies, processes, and programs.
Perhaps the challenge is building a new or improved talent management process. Maybe it involves supporting a new business line, product, or service. Or it could be creating a totally new HR capability in the company or business unit, such as establishing a Hight-Potentials (HIPO) program for principal data scientists or robotic manufacturing shift leads.
If the concept is new to a particular company, then it becomes a new trail that needs to be blazed. Each company has a different culture, management capabilities, process designs, and enabling technology configurations that need to be managed through and integrated into.
We believe that all companies, from start-ups to Fortune 100s, can design and implement HR programs and practices with equal levels of sophistication. We’ve done it ourselves – many times. While it can take different paths and varying approaches, it always requires an understanding of the unique attributes of an organization’s culture, management philosophy, and readiness for change. It may be a slimmed-down version of what was written up in the Harvard Business Review or the MIT Sloan Management Review, but it can leverage similar elements and produce similar results.
We trust in the concept of “equifinality” – that there are multiple pathways to a similar end – and that there exists a reasonable and business-based solution to every problem. The insights offered in this blog propose not only trends and challenges but perspectives on types of solutions as well. Our goal is that the blog will challenge existing and inspire fresh thinking and problem-solving on our reader’s part.
We know that the path to credibility and impact as an HR professional is through a comprehensive understanding of the business and its key drivers or levers. HR has an advantage similar to that of Finance and other centralized business functions – access to, and support of every other function in the business. With HR’s broad reach across an organization, its access to all operations and people data can be converted into useful insights to enhance business-aligned HR contributions.
Finally, at Wowledge, our principals and experts have a very strong bias towards collecting and leveraging data at every opportunity to inform problem identification, solution design, and decision-making. It comes out in recommendations for the use of employee listening and design thinking concepts; in creating HR solutions and leveraging both lagging and leading indicators of practice, process, or program impact metrics for tracking and reporting purposes.
It is a running commentary on the state of leading today’s Human Resources and People Operations along with the opportunities for enhancing the function. You can plan on it being insightful, actionable, thought-provoking, progressive, and a little irreverent at times. It provides our experts’ views on hot topics of the day, trends in HR and talent management, commentary on best practices, and trends and innovations that impact the HR space.
We also regularly provide readers with tips on topics such as building support for and “selling” top leadership on new HR processes or programs, skillfully managing the introduction of those new practices, and generally using change management as a core capability. Oftentimes, we hear from fellow HR professionals, especially in lean teams, about the challenges and barriers that they face in putting in place new or upgraded practices – we see our role as getting those teams “unstuck” with fresh thinking based on both new ideas and proven concepts.
First, Wowledge’s co-founders and expert partners come from some combination of top management consulting, academic, and corporate HR leadership roles. We have a sizable number of years of experience identifying the root causes of people challenges, having consulted with the biggest and most successful companies in the world, led HR in start-up and emerging companies, and extensively researched best practices and their outcomes.
Our authors have broken barriers with cutting-edge practices while always grounding those with proven, fundamental concepts – bringing an intimate knowledge of the steps central to building lasting solutions that really work across companies of all sizes. And we’ve learned how to create HR practices that improve people and business outcomes with minimal disruption.
Second, while the blog covers topics of interest to all HR professionals, we have a special interest in tackling the issues that face lean teams at small-to-medium-sized organizations. Those teams can often use an extra portion of expertise that may not be present in their current lineup. The blog also offers insights into identifying and overcoming common implementation challenges – not just designing solutions. Design alone can be read about in a book or article – it’s the “how-to” we add into the equation.
So, keep your eyes peeled for this site – Wowledge’s “The HR Pioneers Blog”. It is a free resource for our followers and will always be available to our subscribing members along with added links to relevant insights, as well as the enabling practices and tools that support them.
About Wowledge
Wowledge is the expert-driven platform for lean teams building strategic HR programs. Members enjoy access to up-to-date best practices, step-by-step guides, tools, templates, and insights to accelerate the design and implementation of all key HR programs and processes.
It represents a modern, all-in-one source for HR professionals to learn from seasoned experts and access actionable best practices for every stage of their organizations. Purpose-built for small, midsize, and growing HR teams, Wowledge delivers the expertise needed to evaluate, build, and advance effective HR programs. Level-based topic packages progress from core to advanced to emerging practices. These guides provide the necessary know-how to implement programs that can transform all HR processes.
Wowledge combines the expertise of a big HR consultancy with the agility of an on-demand service to offer a new way for HR professionals to obtain the necessary know-how and implement effective people programs needed to produce exceptional employee experiences. Wowledge’s curated content comes from its network of seasoned HR experts with backgrounds in management consulting and corporate HR leadership. Expert progression-based topic guides and best practices are continuously updated through its collaborative platform, equipping HR professionals with the know-how to advance their people programs. Anytime. Anywhere.
We are on a joint mission with you, the HR Pioneer, to make a difference in nurturing an engaged diverse workforce.
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