It’s a common headache for human resources (HR): the team invests time and money in the latest innovation in the world of work, but as soon as they’re ready to roll out their strategy, the market has moved on or the issue has evaporated.
During his decade as chief human resources officer (CHRO) at TomTom, the Dutch location-technology firm, Arne-Christian Van Der Tang has seen the pattern play out time and again. From workplace inclusion and upskilling to wellbeing and remote working, the demands on HR to ensure talent is “future-fit” are never-ending.
Concentrating too much on the challenges of tomorrow can cause HR teams to miss what drives value today, warns Van Der Tang. Even if HR had a crystal ball, conventional approaches make it almost impossible to prepare for the flood of changes coming around the corner, he says.
“Operating in this complex HR environment with lots of processes and procedures and works councils and siloed organisations, we cannot do that,” he says. “The pace of change is simply too rapid.”
The now of work
TomTom’s solution is to adopt a near-term focus to its operations, prioritising management practices such as agility, flexibility and responsiveness.
Van Der Tang refers to the approach as the “now of work”. The emphasis, as the name suggests, is on delivering tangible HR products and services that improve the performance of TomTom’s staff in the here and now.
A major part of the strategy, which was launched in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, rests on getting employees excited about their job. Nothing does that more than the feeling of “personal impact”, Van Der Tang argues.
To motivate such sentiment, the Amsterdam-headquartered firm allows its 3,700 employees almost unrivalled workplace flexibility: from home, from the office, on the commute, or (for up to three months each year) overseas, it doesn’t matter. What counts is finding the environment that enables them to deliver the greatest impact possible.
HR managers must fall in love with the problem, not the solution
The design of its offices reflects a similar ethos, prioritising maximum flexibility and minimal fuss. With echoes of the firm’s iconic mapping product, individual teams work not in gated cul-de-sacs but in open “neighbourhoods”, replete with separate spaces for everything from group brainstorms (with managed acoustics) to the privacy required to meet tight deadlines.
The same logic is seen in its approach to leadership. Layered decision-making systems and complex sign-off processes are the death knell for the autonomy on which personal impact depends. Instead, TomTom defines leadership “through the lens of action”, according to the company. In other words, everyone and anyone is encouraged to seize opportunities that come their way – and take responsibility for the result.
No wonder that ownership and accountability are two of TomTom’s four guiding behaviours. In a similar action-oriented vein, its company principles include the injunctions “start with yes” and “disagree and commit”.
The now of HR
For TomTom’s now-of-work theory to become truly entrenched across the whole organisation, one group above all had to live it out: the HR team.
This fact was not lost on Van Der Tang, who immediately set about working with his 90 or so HR colleagues to update their mission, vision and purpose. The latter captures the essence of the new “real-term work” mentality. “We help people find their impact,” he states.
To live up to that mission in talent management has required a huge shift in his team’s internal mindset. Van Der Tang explains that HR managers have had to learn to “fall in love with the problem, not the solution”.
The phrase jars with the idea popular in management circles that leaders are meant to provide solutions, but it makes sense in an environment that seeks to deliver immediate impact. Delivering solutions, traditionally understood, is what happens a long way down the track. Tackling problems, in contrast, is what gets done this minute.
It sounds like a small shift, but the implications are profound, Van Der Tang insists. He gives the example of dealing with an inexperienced leadership team. A seasoned HR professional would typically double down on leadership development, he says. “We would go away and build a leadership-development programme, but when we bring it to market six months later, the problem might have gone away or changed entirely.”
Van Der Tang is clear that the alternative is not to ditch all attempts at future-planning. Nor should the HR team spend its time madly trying to put out fires. Both are recipes for disaster, he says, as much for the talent that HR is there to serve as for HR professionals themselves.
Prioritising problems
The answer is to be much better at prioritising. By slimming down the function’s to-do list, HR can focus its invariably limited resources on immediate business problems that are in its purview to fix.
When Van Der Tang sat down to count his division’s entire portfolio of tasks, he ended up with a list of 240 different products and services. “Obviously that was crazy,” he reflects. “But mostly it was just unmanageable and impossible to prioritise.”
He quickly cut the list in half and continues to whittle it down through regular monthly prioritisation meetings with his team. Again, they focus on the most pressing challenges, coupled with the best opportunities for immediate impact.
The team draws heavily on real-time data when deciding what to prioritise, but even data-driven decision-making can be vulnerable to traditional thinking. “We struggled in the beginning to have data be the driver for problems rather than the other way around,” he admits. “When we would fall in love with a solution, we would find the data to support the solution.”
To help break with such deeply entrenched habits, Van Der Tang ripped up the old functional divisions in his HR team and created multifunctional units dedicated to common business concerns, like talent services, people products and internal communications.
His reasoning was simple: from compensation and benefits to recruitment and training, HR teams can easily comprise 20 or more separate functional domains, each of which works to its own roadmaps at arm’s length from one another.
Such a system hardly invites a now-of-work agility, Van Der Tang says. “Functional experts think ‘my job is done when I’ve delivered a new long-term incentive programme’ or whatever it might be, without specifically thinking: ‘Am I solving a business problem?’”
Present-day results
Shifting TomTom’s approach to talent management to a more here-and-now footing is a work in progress, but Van Der Tang insists that the changes in his HR division are bearing fruit.
He points to a variety of tailored HR products, including a new five-month programme for upcoming leaders, devised in partnership with Cambridge University’s Judge Business School. At the crux of the programme is an invitation to participants to apply their new-found skills to solve a present-day problem at the company or deliver a real-time business opportunity.
Additional products recently delivered by his rejigged HR team include a new career framework based on skills and competencies (as opposed to vertical career ladders), a revised learning management system focused on turbocharging technical skills and innovative smart data tools designed to deliver real-time insights into TomTom’s “organisational health”, among others.
The changes are gaining positive feedback internally. Since introducing its new approach a few years ago, TomTom has registered upticks in talent engagement and retention, as well as in referral hires and use rates of HR services.
But Van Der Tang is frank about the difficulty of learning to love the problem, rather than the solution. “It’s an ongoing change in mindset and something we just need to really keep each other honest about.”
