We’ve spent decades learning what makes work better for people. Perhaps it’s time we started redesigning how we work around what we’ve learned!!
Over the past few decades, we’ve built up an extraordinary body of knowledge about people at work. We know a huge amount about motivation, performance, engagement, learning, behaviour, job design and what helps people thrive.
And yet, when you look at some of the everyday practices organisations rely on, there’s a curious disconnect between what we know and what we actually do.
Take performance management.
We know that performance isn’t something you create through an annual appraisal. It depends on a whole range of things: clear expectations, meaningful goals, useful feedback, support, capability, motivation and the environment in which people work.
Yet how much time and energy is still spent administering annual performance cycles, completing forms, agreeing ratings and calibrating outcomes?
Or employee engagement.
We have decades of research into the conditions that influence engagement. We know that things like autonomy, meaningful work, relationships, leadership and opportunities to develop all matter.
Yet in many organisations, engagement is still largely treated as something to measure. We run the survey, analyse the results, produce the action plans and repeat the exercise.
Of course, measurement has its place. But measuring engagement isn’t the same as creating the conditions in which people can become engaged.
Then there’s learning.
We know that attending a training course doesn’t automatically lead to behaviour change. Whether people actually apply what they’ve learned depends enormously on what happens back in the workplace: opportunities to practise, support from managers, reinforcement, feedback and the wider environment.
Yet the course itself is still often the centrepiece of our approach.
And job crafting.
There’s a substantial evidence base around the benefits of giving people opportunities to shape aspects of their own work.
But how many organisations actively build those opportunities into the way jobs are designed and managed?
If we know all this, why aren’t we doing more with it?
Why do established practices persist?
I don’t think the answer is that HR practitioners simply don’t understand the evidence. And I’m certainly not suggesting that everything organisations have been doing is wrong.
Many of our established People practices exist for perfectly understandable reasons. They’ve become embedded in organisational systems, technology, governance, budgets and leadership expectations. They provide consistency. They help organisations manage risk. They create processes that can be monitored and outcomes that can be measured.
And they’re familiar.
It’s also often easier to manage a process than to change the conditions in which people work. It’s easier to run an engagement survey than to continually understand and improve people’s everyday experience. It’s easier to mandate a performance-management process than to create the conditions in which thousands of meaningful performance conversations happen. It’s easier to design a solution centrally and roll it out than to involve people in understanding the problem, experimenting with alternatives and adapting as you learn.
None of this means those established approaches have no value, but it does raise an interesting question.
Have some of our people practices become so institutionalised that we’ve stopped asking whether they’re still the best way to achieve what we’re trying to achieve?
What if we were starting again?
This is the bit I find really interesting. Rather than asking how we can improve our existing people processes, what if we started with a different question?
If we were designing these practices today, knowing what we now know about people, would we design them like this?
If we wanted to help people perform at their best, would we start by designing a performance-management process? Or would we start by understanding what enables performance and development, and designing the conditions, conversations and support that make those things possible?
If we wanted to improve engagement, would we start with a survey? Or would we start by understanding people’s everyday experiences and involving them in shaping the things that influence those experiences?
If we wanted people to change how they work, would we start with a communication campaign or a training programme? Or would we start by understanding the behaviours we’re trying to influence, what makes those behaviours easier or harder, and what needs to change in the environment?
These aren’t necessarily either/or choices.
We might still need surveys, performance processes, communication plans and training…But perhaps we’d design them very differently.
And perhaps we’d start somewhere different altogether.
There’s something else worth noticing
When you look across some of the approaches that have emerged from our growing understanding of people and work, an interesting pattern starts to appear.
Job crafting.
Good job design.
Meaningful employee voice.
Coaching and development.
Participation in decision-making.
Co-creation.
Experimentation and learning.
They’re different ideas, supported by different bodies of evidence.
But many have something important in common.
They move us away from treating people primarily as recipients of organisational processes and towards involving them more actively in shaping how work happens.
Less designing things for people and more understanding and designing things with them. That doesn’t mean everyone gets to decide everything. Organisations still need structure, leadership, accountability and consistency.
But it does mean recognising that people have knowledge, experience and insight that we can’t fully access from a dashboard, survey or leadership meeting. And that better solutions often emerge when the people who will experience them have a meaningful role in shaping them.
For me, this is where the idea of putting people first starts to become much more practical. It’s not simply about what we believe, it’s about how we work.
And now AI changes the equation
Of course, there’s another reason why this feels particularly relevant right now. AI is changing our access to knowledge and expertise at extraordinary speed. We can research, analyse, benchmark, generate ideas and develop potential solutions faster than ever before.
But here’s the interesting thing.
Lack of knowledge hasn’t always been our problem.
In many areas of people practice, we’ve had access to good evidence for years. The challenge has been translating that knowledge into what actually happens inside organisations.
AI might make it easier to access the evidence, but it doesn’t automatically mean we’ll ask better questions, understand the real problem, involve the right people or design something that works in our particular context. In fact, there’s a risk that we simply use AI to produce more of the same things, only faster.
More policies.
More processes.
More communications.
More training content.
More action plans.
All produced with impressive efficiency.
But are they helping us work differently? I think that’s the opportunity worth exploring.
Not simply using AI to do our existing people work faster, but combining its capabilities with human understanding, judgement and design to rethink how we approach that work in the first place.
So what comes next?
I don’t think the future of people practice is about throwing away everything we’ve done before. Nor do I think there’s a single new model waiting to replace all the old ones. But I do think there’s an opportunity to ask some much better questions.
What do we already know about the problem we’re trying to solve?
What’s actually happening here?
What are people experiencing?
What might we do differently if we started with the outcome rather than the existing process?
How might we involve people in designing what happens next?
And how can we experiment, learn and adapt rather than assuming we have the right answer from the outset?
These are questions we’ve been exploring through our work at People Lab for some time. And they’re increasingly shaping how we think about what it means to be genuinely People First by design.
Over the coming weeks, I’m going to explore some of these ideas in more detail. We’ll explore what the evidence tells us, why established practices persist, and what different approaches might look like in practice.
Not to criticise the past or to suggest that applying evidence is as simple as finding a research paper and following its recommendations. But to explore what comes next.
Because perhaps the biggest opportunity for people teams isn’t simply to know more.
It’s to get much better at turning what we already know into how work actually works.
And that feels like a conversation worth having.
