Naiman Labs Newsletter #8. Do you know what HR does?

Hello friends! Welcome to another issue of Naiman Labs newsletter!

Have you ever felt misunderstood or overseen at work? Several days ago I saw a post in LinkedIn with a picture of Iceberg. This was a description of “what do you see when you see an HR across the table”.

Of course there were many various comments under this post. I could identify 3 main areas:

1. Many people are aware only about 3 responsibilities of any HR people: Hiring, Firing, Paperwork.

2. HR professionals are feeling undervalued and overseen

3. Working professionals (both from HR and not) are aware that HR needs some improvement in terms of skills and quality as well as its reputation.

As someone who works in HR, I can relate to this situation. Everybody knows about recruitment as an HR function. But people rarely knows that there are many various HR areas like compensation management, talent management, organisational analysis, people analytics etc.

I still remember a random-coffee session I had 2 years ago with one of the software developers. He was trying hard to connect the dots that I was working in HR department and I was not involved in hiring people. You cannot imagine how surprised that guy was when he realised that I was working in compensation & benefits team, analysing market compensation data and designing compensation structures. His reply literally was:"Oh, somebody actually does it in our company. I thought our managers just google salary numbers".

I believe it’s crucial for HR professionals to communicate their work carefully and thoughtfully, and to showcase the value they bring to their organization.

But this is not just about HR. It’s about every profession.

If you want to be good at what you do and have others recognize your skills, you need to invest time in developing yourself, keeping up with trends, and experimenting with new approaches. You should set your own agenda and explain to others what you do and why it matters. Don’t be humble, be confident in your expertise and your contributions to your company’s success.

📃 People management article of the week

Last week I shared a great article about a research on what makes people leave their jobs.

Today I’d like continue this flow and to share another MIT Sloan Management review article about predictors of a strong corporate culture.

There's one important thing I’d like to highlight before recommending this article. I don’t like the use of “Corporate culture” in this context. We’ll talk about this later, but in my opinion culture is more of a set of values, principles, beliefs and behavior shared in your company.

When the researchers in this article analyse predictors, I read it more in a context of what makes people happy, what makes them engaged, what makes them feeling belong to their company.

In their findings they mention different predictors, including some that are more related to the systems, processes, reward programs, management skills which goes a bit beyond than the term corporate culture.

💼 Your career tip of the week (and productivity)

There’s a quite widespread team retrospective approach where the team share their opinions in Mad-Sad-Glad structure. I attended several retro sessions of our product team and it was very insightful to see how they share their in responses to 3 questions:

• What are you mad about?

• What are you sad about?

• What are you glad about?

Why not to try this approach in your own schedule? It doesn’t have to be a team retro to ask these questions to yourself.

1. Set a time at the end of your work week, (or even you can start with bi-weekly reviews)

2. Ask yourself these 3 questions

3. Write down your answers in some note-taking app

4. After you practice this a while, upload your notes to ChatGPT and ask it to summarise and analyse it.

I am sure you’ll get many insights in the process and after the analysis 😉

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Have an easy and joyful week!

Vlad from Naiman Labs