Building a shadow HR function to deal with their incompetence
Coping with HR's lack of support by building your own function
The term “shadow IT” is used to describe those systems managed by areas other than IT which are often hidden from their sight. For example, very often fraud teams in banks run large amounts calculations and analyses in computers unknown to the IT folks, or designers working in old school corporations that don’t allow Apple products often buy their own computers to be able to work. This trick can go as far as building complete shadow organisations, it’s risky… but effective.
Owning you team’s problems
When Susana got appointed to lead the Operations team in a large energy company, area which drove a lot of client facing processes like their onboarding, she realised the huge gap compared to rest of the company, including low excitement and sense of pride about working there, obsolete equipment, dark physical spaces, low salaries and more.
Susana therefore decided to hire a friend of hers, an ex-HR manager from a consulting firm, to help her on some of these issues, beginning with low hanging fruits like redesigning the awful cafeteria and changing the food subcontractor to make it look like you actually wanted to eat there, cleaning (deeply) the bathrooms, negotiating with a nearby shopping mall to get a good deal on parking spaces, making coffee and sodas free and many other small but cool perks which made employees realise that Susana was really trying. Side note, a Union started to complain because offering free things to a few employees violated some agreement and therefore the same perks had to be given to everyone, the Head of HR wasn’t thrilled…
Good managers fill the gaps left by the company
After this first “easy” changes they decided to start addressing more structural problems. For example, the yearly employee evaluation process of the company was at best simplistic, requiring only a form to be filled by the person’s manager and that’s it. Both coming from consulting they envisioned something far more useful, with a proper conversation between the person and manager, a true focus on developmental feedback, involvement of peers and internal clients, doing it every 6 months and many other improvements. But could they implement that only in their area? do they even have to tell HR? In true hacker style Susana decided to move ahead without them.
Sometimes is better to say sorry than please
Filling the interstices left by the system
So, their idea was simple, lets implement our own processes but try to couple it with the company’s one. For example, if the company want us to fill some forms every year, lets then align our second yearly review so the result can also be used for that. In other words, we build our own thing but with the right interface to “connect” with the company.
The process was a success and Susana grew her own “shadow HR” team to now 3 full time employees managing not only reviews now other activities like coaching, staffing, metrics, compensation and even started redesigning the roles and careers to better reflect what her team did. It’s very common for large companies to assign generic roles to people like “manager” that doesn’t mean anything, this is specially true in IT where instead of being called “software engineer” you get this generic roles just to keep things homogenous with the rest of the company (or laziness). At the same time many companies have roles that are messy and the result of many iterations like manager A, B, X, 2, 5, III and so on. Lacking this common “framework” complicated their performance review since it was hard to compare apples to apples.
But then, things became complicated, the Head of HR took notice. Of course, the first thing is that he did was to raise the issue to the CEO arguing that Susana was “bypassing HR”, they even brought all the Union complains but fortunately the CEO decided to support her seeing the amazing transformation she had done and the feedback from some of her employees. A happy ending, or not?
HR was still mad since it also exposed their own flaws so they decided to hack Susana back… instead of fighting they were gonna support her, even better, Susana’s ideas were so amazing that…
“we want to take them to the whole company, therefore, instead of launching your own, wait until we can adapt and deploy them at company level”
Long story short, a year later nothing happened with some initiatives stuck while others mutated so much that HR took credit for them. Still, it was worth it. People took notice and valued her efforts to improve things. This not only increased the engagement toward the project but followership, people are not stupid, they know who does each thing. A new culture began to grow in her team addressing also the sense of “second class citizen” she had found months before an a new “not many problem but its my fault” mindset began to appear.
So, in conclusion, building a shadow anything is not ideal but sometimes is the only option to cope with the missing components of an organisation. Also, filling the gap is not a problem as long as you can connect back with the processes and requirements other organisations like HR put on you, they shouldn’t be mad if you try to improve on top of their initial idea, but at the same time there are other hacks to bring them on board that we will discuss in other articles.