Riina Hellström

“I think companies are making a huge mistake by creating a one size fits all policy, would say you have to be in the office X amount per week.” – Riina Hellström

TRANSCRIPT:

Miljan Bajic: 00:34

So, who is Riina Hellström? 

Riina Hellström: 00:40

You know what, asking that question over and over again by myself as well, who am I, and almost always getting to new answers, but let me just kind of give you a little overview of who I think I am. So, my name is Riina Hellström. I am a Finnish agile enterprise coach, and an organization developer. And I’ve been working with organizations or people systems, if you may, for 20 plus years. So, I’ve been working with so many different ways, and so many different things with org change, with organizational design, with management structures, with strategies, and strategy adoption, with everything you can imagine in HR apart from a couple of things, which I haven’t done, and then worked with agile quite a lot as well. So, the last 11 years, I have been focusing on what agile brings to the management side, the work development side, the org design side, and to HR. And then I work quite a lot with non-IT professionals. So, trying to help people understand what this means in their own domain. So that’s me. Privately, I live in Finland, I work globally, especially now with what happened with the COVID, our businesses all over the world starting in the morning with Australia ending with US in the evening. So, it’s a lot of work currently, which I love. And then privately I’ve got two kids and a summer home and, on an island, where we are aiming to be today or this summer as well for a while. So that’s what I do in the spare time. And I love traveling but right now one and a half years, I haven’t been able to do that privately. So, I’m hoping that the world will be opening up soon.

Miljan Bajic: 02:27

Where do you want to go once things open up?

Riina Hellström: 02:32

I would like to go to Japan, I haven’t, I love getting touched by new cultures and new ways of thinking, new world languages. And I haven’t experienced Japan yet. So that’s something that I would like to experience. And then I have a couple of things on my bucket list like Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and then again, South America. I just loved South America and the vibe there. It’s very different from our organized Pakistan to Finland to go to South America. Like, you know, money on maybe, maybe does, let’s take it easy and have a mango and a beer.

Miljan Bajic: 03:10

Yeah, I know, I was talking to my wife too and like we usually it’s like travel between the United States and Europe. And you know, it’s just some of those places, especially in Australia, we have a lot of relatives there and it’s interesting. So, I think it’s everybody I talked to these days, everybody’s eager to go back to travelling so. But to bring us back to HR and agile, there’s a lot of, we hear a lot about agile in HR, agile HR. What does it actually mean? And why is it becoming increasingly important? You’ve wrote a book on it, or you co-authored the book on agile HR. So, what is it then why is it important?

Riina Hellström: 03:53

So let me take you back to 11 years ago, when I was working in organizations within HR and Management Development, I was continuously challenging how we were treating people, how we were setting up people practices and trying to support them to do a good job. But they were basically just, I mean, the way how organizations are set up are very machine like, it’s like the taken from the engineering practices and processes, practices, standardization, this is how things work. And I was challenging that might be because of my background and team sports. I’ve been playing handball for 18 years in my life. And then might be in my background, also in organic chemistry and organic, you know, pharmaceuticals and how the body works, etc. So, there’s a lot of different kind of thinking from that organic side and I was looking at organizations said; You know what? This doesn’t make sense. We’ve got brilliant people here. They are…. so, they’ve got so much potential, but they’re just bringing a fraction of it to work because our system doesn’t allow them to work together very well, so I was always challenging this. And I was looking for something that would, I was kind of trying to make up a system in my head, like, how can we bring the biggest potential? How can teams start really working together? I was thinking that we don’t need that much managers, we might need coaches to bring the best out of people, etc. And then I came across the scrum Guide, which practically changed my life. Because when I read that I was like, yes, somebody has described a system of work, which I believe in, which sounds like organic, it sounds like people can bring their potential, it sounds like we’re continuously learning and adapting to the ongoing environmental changes, needing to adapt to requirement changes, etc. And I saw that you know what? This is not just happening in software or IT; this is happening everywhere. And that kind of picked my kind of, I just blew my mind that you know what? This is going to spread from software to every about everywhere else as well, then I started learning about this. And I started connecting with people like you, who are kind of long-term gurus in Agile from the software and IT side. And that people said to me; you know what? What are you doing here, we don’t want HR even close to what we’re doing, because you’re ruining everything for us. And I went like, you know what? You just wait, because when you start scaling this across your organization, when you start scaling agile teams, and then you just start working together, and you might have 100 people working this way, that’s when you start to start to knock on my door in HR because we’re caring for the people system, we’re caring for org design, we might be caring for how we develop managers long term or leadership, we are caring for performance management structures, for rewarding, for the policies of how to work, how to recruit, how to hire and fire people, what kind of learning, you know, processes and practices you’ve got in this organization. So, all of that people back end, that’s what HR is working with. And that’s why agile HR is important. So, some people say, this is just a fad and you’ve got just taking agile from software and using it in HR. You know what? Yeah, I am, because we’ve got a lot to learn from you people, we need to start adopting the ways of working here as well to be able to create people, practices that work for agile organizations, we have to be agile ourselves, and start co-creating with people, start understanding what works, only delivering out people practices that work with the teams. So, there’s a lot in Agile HR, we talk about two things, agile, HR, or agile in HR. So how can we in HR, or people operations start using the Agile practices to deliver value out to our employees, to the managers, to the businesses? And on the other hand, HR for agile, which means that what kind of people practices, people policies, people solutions, and products, do we need to build to enable modern organizations, perhaps network flexible, agile organizations. So, these are two sides of Agile HR, which I tend to bring up.

Miljan Bajic: 08:17

Yeah, so maybe let’s explore one of those. So, like when it comes to helping in, you know, HR driving and helping with org transformation and design, in what ways could HR help with org design and transformations and these initiatives that are companywide, encompass the entire organization and impact every piece of the organization?

Riina Hellström: 08:44

So, it depends a bit in my opinion on the context, when we talk about [inaudible 08:47]

Miljan Bajic: 08:48

It always does right? Context is the most…

Riina Hellström: 08:52

Exactly. When we talk about transformations, first of all, what kind of a company is transforming? If it’s the traditional classic management structure, where we got the line organization, where you got the annual budget, you’ve got the project management, you’ve got that kind of structure, and you start gradually bringing people on board to an agile structure is setting up agile teams, maybe finding an end-to-end value stream where you start a scaled model. When you start a little bit of Kanban here, start using Scrum in certain teams, in those kinds of situations, HR can work with so many different things, first of all, capability to build. So, who is sitting on their learning and development is usually HR and then you just start building the capabilities at least half a year, if not a year ahead so that you’ve got product owners coming in and scrum masters coming in. Then you’ve got people understand agile on the business side. So that’s one part. Another part is the org design because quite, I would say how would I say this without being too cynical? Well big consultancies coming in and selling big transformations, usually come in with a model. Here is a perfect model for you. And here is, this is how you should implement agile. And I don’t believe that because I’ve been working with so many organizational changes that you just can’t implement or change, especially with agile, you have to invite people in, you have to do create with them, and bring them along to a journey, which is an evolution, not an implementation. So, when you start working with this, we in HR have seen quite many changes. And we might be able to help with that. Staging, and creating a roadmap of what to do next, and what to remember to do rewarding people practices, enablers, such as rewarding and performance, structures, leadership, so where I see quite a lot of transformations go wrong or have trouble is when we have this, we keep the same line management structure in the Agile structure, right? And we don’t need the same kind of line managers there. What we need is different kinds of enablers and people who will lie in the teams who work with impediments, work with improvement of the system. We don’t need that, how would I say, maybe, delegating, micromanaging, reporting, accountable line manager there. And to start changing the structure of management, that’s also something that HR works with? Where do we find…?

Miljan Bajic: 11:31

So that’s a lot about like decentralizing. What you’re describing is like how the context matters but assuming that we’re working, where you know, that type of like, you know, command and control, or maybe not necessarily command and control, but more of, you know, one person accountable for everything versus sharing their responsibility. Is that what you’re talking about?

Riina Hellström: 11:56

Correct. I mean, it is a lot about decentralizing what makes sense. But then understanding where it makes sense to have central services available. For example, if we’re talking about people services, I don’t think that each team should be professionals in talent acquisition and recruiting. I think that there should be a service where we’ve got, you know, shortlisted people, two teams and saying, Hey, we know that you’re looking for an arm, you know, software developer, back end software developer, here are the talents that we’ve scanned from our you know, databases from our network, they who have applied, look at these candidates and come back to us to see what you want to do with them, rather than have them do the kind of dirty work of recruitment, or the kind of operational work. So, there’s a lot of thinking here and there is not one way of doing this, there is not one model, but we have to continue to think about what’s best for the organization, how much work we can put on the teams as well and how much decision making they’re ready take on. I’ll give an example just to be clear, because it’s much easier to actually talk by examples. I was working with a transformation, business transformation, where we transformed a unit with 550 people towards kind of a team of teams’ model. So wasn’t any of these agile scalable that we are used to but the team of teams’ model, self-organized teams, who were there to sync together on how to work. Consultancy, and IT consultancy, they’re competing with the best agile, very innovative companies. And we started onboarding people onto this model. And then we onboard about 200 people onto self-organized model. And the team started realizing that they’ve got different maturity levels of making these decisions themselves. Some teams, were not quite there yet to make pricing decisions, or to make decisions about which leads were kind of okay to start working with, because if you started working with lead, it was a lot of work that went into getting all the way to a suggestion or, you know. So we instead of having a manager there to make these decisions. What we came up with, and what the managers themselves came up with is that they created a team of leaders who offered services to these teams. So, leadership as a service, and they say, here we can help with pricing, we can help you with, you know, agreeing on if a lead is qualified or not, we can help you with problems in the team, we can help you with, you know, retrospectives, we can help you with impediments around the organization. So, these are services for you as teams to be able to do a good job. Now I think, it was just brilliant, again, rethinking on how we can support the system and help that evolved, rather than creating some kind of an additional process or additional role to take in each role in each.

Miljan Bajic: 14:57

Yeah, and that’s what it sounds like. It’s almost as the and I’ve seen this and I agree in the sense of like trying to go prescriptive with like this is more organic, you create some guardrails, and you say self-organize around this. In this instance of policy, right? Would you call that a policy?

Riina Hellström: 15:14

I would call it an ongoing service that needs to kind of be it’s kind of an in-house consultancy, basically. But then if I talk about process or policy, I had, this is not our example, when we are in HR, we have two things that we need to take care of, at least. First of all, supporting the organization to do its best possible job and be healthy you know, that’s one thing. Second of all, every country has legal compliance, regarding employment laws, regarding corporate laws, what we need to take care of with employees’ health, well-being, all of these things. And you’re not a professional in corporate employment legislation, even if you’re a master of Agile enterprise, whatever, you don’t know what the law is in France, or Russia or US or whatever. But we’ve got the network to understand what we can do there and we can’t do there and how we need to support the organization within those constraints. So that’s something that we’ll need to, you know, we still need to have policies there. And I had a transformation where this executive agile, I was CHRO there, one of the Agile coaches came to say, hey, we’ve got a great idea. We are now so self-organized so we’re not going to report or record any work time anymore. Because everybody can take care of themselves. I was like, that’s a great idea. But let’s just kind of take a step back, a couple steps back here, because that is a massive risk. And that risk is at risk that the company can’t take because there’s legislation in place, if we can’t show the authorities how much you work, we are going to be in court and shut down very quickly so that you don’t work overtime, without pay or overtime so we’re killing you at work, you know, so, or that you were overburdening yourself with too much work. So, we can’t do that. And sometimes we have to be the bad police, bad cop, still and say, Hey, fantastic idea, but let’s look at the constraints. In a similar way, as you in software are looking at, for example, privacy, or security discussions, you’ve got certain guardrails, which you just need to keep and that’s the same thing with the people practices, every country additionally has different kind of legislation. So, it’s not that easy to create fair systems that work in each country. And that’s the back end that we know quite a lot about. Does that make sense?

Miljan Bajic: 17:49

It does. No, I’m just thinking, you know, in the sense of like, you know, changing those, you know, policies that are related to design, and one of them that comes up a lot is obviously the whole compensation and that’s related to that is performance reviews, right? So, from your perspective, and understanding of the traditional way of performance reviews, what does it look like in an agile context or in a complex context? How do we reward people? How do we do you know, some type of assessments or you know, what replaces annual reviews?

Riina Hellström: 18:34

What do you do even for that once-a-year discussion with your manager about how you did the whole, you know, it’s as absurd as I would be your spouse, and I would have one conversation with you a year telling you that, you know, Miljan, last year, you did your three from last year, your three out of five from the whole year for all situations, you know, it’s as ridiculous. So, let’s start looking into this.

Miljan Bajic: 18:59

To make this comparison even a little bit more crazy or funnier, if you had five husbands, if they all performed great, you couldn’t also rate them as fives, right? There’s something fundamentally wrong with that, with that approach. So, what are we doing in Agile, like…? 

Riina Hellström: 19:18

So, first of all, let’s understand. I think that we need to go back to some principles. Why do we have performance management structure in place all together? What value are they there to drive, okay? And if we look at the value, it’s not actually, the value shouldn’t be about looking in the review mirror and evaluating what you did. The value should be helping you succeed as you move forward, because that’s the thing that we can still impact, right. So, I would like us to start thinking about performance management as in growth conversations, as in looking forward as an improving and again, as in target setting and knowing where we’re going even if the target would, even if we would need to pivot a little bit, the target’s there, we are aligned on where we’re going so that we can self-organize around that. Now, easier said than done. The large corporations have performance management structures that are agreed all the way up in the board. So, changing them takes at least one year, if not two years, just really start redesigning a performance management structure takes a long time, not done in, you know, a blink of an eye. Second of all, if we can’t change that big thing, immediately, what I usually have recommended is okay, let’s tweak it a little bit, let’s at least get rid of individual target setting. Because if you’ve got an individual target for a person working in a scrum team or agile team, and they are set for a year, and even if that agile team needs to pivot or even leave the value delivery, because it doesn’t make sense, these persons might be conflicted with their target versus what’s the best thing to do. So, let’s give people at least a team target if not the value delivery targets towards the customer, where we’ve got several teams connected to the same value delivery. Let’s try, remembering where we build performance management structures. We have a saying in Finland, if you bow to one side, you show your back end to another side. I’m not sure if you have that saying you know. So rewarding practices are the same, you always sub -optimize something. If you got a team level practice, you might sub optimize the unit profitability. If you’ve got a high-level target setting, say that everybody’s rewarding is connected to a high-level target, you feel that okay, but I don’t have that much to say, I can’t influence that much, it is not motivating me. So now we come to the motivating point. Do we need these targets and rewarding connected? Quite a lot of companies are decoupling the target setting from the rewarding. So rewarding is maybe connected to profitability or growth or new customer, you know, recognition. So, the KPIs or the value deliveries there for. And the targets are set, maybe quarterly, where we quarterly are looking into how can we get towards this big ambitious goal? What do we do there? And the targets are then discussed how did we get towards them? How did we do? How do we you know; how can we improve? And I hearing me use the word we continuously, it is about we, it’s about how do we go there. And now I think we could have different kind of levels of performance management as well, almost kind of influence. 

The third thing I want to say about this is that which many people haven’t really maybe kind of broken down into bits and pieces but the Agile system is a performance management system. I’m going to say that, again, this is so important. The agile structure includes everything that a performance management, the traditional performance management structure included. It includes setting a big vision, it includes a goal, the KPIs of what we’re building, what the value deliveries, it includes breaking that goal down into attainable epics, or features or bits and pieces that we’re building. It includes continuous evaluation of those pieces and setting targets on a micro level, right? We’re setting targets for each quarter, or sprint or whatever you’re using. We’ve got the what we know what we’re aiming for in teams. It includes evaluation of those targets together as a team. How are we doing? Are we delivering what we should? So, it’s the evolution there as well and it includes improvement. So how can we improve as a team or as a unit or as a whatever the bigger size is? So includes all of those elements. What it doesn’t include, specifically is what we tend to have in the performance management structure as well, is the learning and development. So how do we add to growing our capabilities and skills? But that can be added as well. So why do we need an extra layer of performance management on top of agile which includes or this is a good question as well. Can we just pay people enough to bring their best to work, to do their best with the potential they have in you know, in comparison to maybe the field overall and then skip that circus of performance management? That’s one question I have.

Miljan Bajic: 24:31

Yeah, it’s I think that’s what we know we’re going see, you know, over the last 5 years, 10 years agile HR has slowly been brewing, but I think over the next 5 to 10 years, we’re going to see more organizations trying to figure this out. And like you said, I don’t think there is a specific way of doing it. You have to figure it out based on your context. What are some of the companies out there that you admire? Maybe that you worked with, or you’ve you heard of. Like, what are they doing that are kind of the forefront of this kind of change? 

Riina Hellström: 25:07

Of Agile HR? I have to say I do like Spotify’s HR and analysts but if I sharing on their agile practices and how they are working with hacking their selves forward and growing the understanding and co-creating with the organization, I do like that very much. I also appreciate, we’ve got some fantastic case studies in the agile HR community that are also shared in our network where people will learn this are starting to, for example, use design thinking in delivering people products in-house. So, if we take an example, they want to develop an awesome remote onboarding practice, instead of us going with HR people into a bunker, designing the onboarding practice, and then, you know, releasing that to you and say Okay, here is we implement this. We would take you in and say, hey, you know, a couple of people who’s been recently onboarding, a couple of managers, maybe some candidates and say, let’s now innovate on how to create awesome remote onboarding practices. They would use design thinking in validating, testing small scale, what works and what doesn’t. And then when they find something that works in their contexts, in their company with the candidates and with the people who their onboarding, they would maybe then adopt a couple of different ones, couple of different remote onboarding practices. So, this is what we’re seeing across the scale with people in HR who learn this way of thinking. They don’t think there’s a one size fits all, they don’t think that they can come up with the solution themselves. They start developing with the organization. There’s some amazing stuff coming up such as I know that I can’t mention them some of the customers names because we’ve got a very strict NDA. So let me say this. A very prominent tech company, delivering technology and entertainment to many of the people in the world are right now building an inclusion in everything they do. And that’s also done through testing, evaluating, discussion with the company all over so that it’s part of what we do. It’s not something additional added on to, you know, everything we do. But there’s great things going on and it’s not about who does what? It’s about how we think of delivering these things, to the employees, to the managers, to the leaders. We don’t, we stop with this, you know, going into product development stage for a year and then coming up with something which is old, not liked, not validated. We’re talking about having a pilot test group, but all the assumptions have been built into the product anyway, you know, and that’s.

Miljan Bajic: 27:47

So, you’re anchoring? Yeah. So that’s very interesting, because its kind of like that’s what we’re dealing with the you know, agile, and I know, in your book, you talk about mindset, but could you maybe just elaborate, like, it’s a mindset shift.

Riina Hellström: 28:04

Massive.

Miljan Bajic: 28:06

And that’s easier said than done. 

Riina Hellström: 28:10

May I kind of ask you another question back? What’s your typical viewpoint of HR people? What is how would you describe; this is a HR person?

Miljan Bajic: 28:24

It’s somebody that’s responsible for the, you know, HR stuff. Performance, jobs, hiring, you know, somebody that works with senior leaders on defining maybe culture, you know, in a sense, they’re responsible, like you said earlier, like, maybe health of the organization, in general. But, you know, one thing that probably stands, they’re like far away, right, they’re not engaged, and they tell us what to do. And I think that’s what a lot of people feel like, because I’ve worked in as a consultant but I also worked inside organizations as an employee, and that’s how it feels like, and for the ones that are moving more to this inclusion that you’re talking about, and co-creation, it feels more engaging you know, as an employee, you feel more engaged. 

Riina Hellström: 29:16

Great to hear that you’ve got, still you have quite a modern view of who HR is and what we do, because quite many people say HR, they’re doing something with admin and just sending us a lot of forms, and taking care of payroll and some legal stuff, right. So, they don’t know that we’re working with all that what you just said, but quite many people think that HR are… and yes, there are different ranges of HR people. There’re the more operational, more kind of legal background people who take care of what we need to take care of, but they’re kind of I would say, if I dare to, what’s the word in English when you kind of give a character, characterize. Characterize them quite high probability is that they are risk averse, because they need to take care of a lot of stuff regarding law, they are prone to want the right solutions, the right answers, prepare everything to perfection and have all the answers prepared for managers and leaders because they are putting quite difficult situations quite often so they want to be prepared and have everything done and polished, and, you know, show a perfect solution or product. So to start to teach these people who think this way and who have been, you know, they’ve been trained this way, that’s their dominant way of thinking. Hey, you know what? What if we would show something which is a draft? Or what if we would show something, three mock ups and prototypes to managers and ask for feedback? Oh, my God, that’s such a big mindset shift even that. How can we show something which isn’t ready? How can we even say that we don’t know where we’re going to end up? Well, how can you know something? If you’re working with, say, culture change, how on earth could you write an end state of culture change? You can’t my friends. We have to just start going in this direction, you know, as an evolution stepwise. But when we then help them understand how to do that, that’s what I think is the beauty with agile is that, the certainty doesn’t come from what you do. The certainty doesn’t come from a plan as it did previously. The certainty comes from the process. The certainty comes from I know that we will have planning time coming up every month, the certainty comes from I know that we will review together what we’ve done. And if it’s not perfect, it’s okay, because somebody, there’s a high probability that somebody who will pick up on the on the foot flaws, you know, we can fix it as we go forward. That’s where the certainty comes from, from the process. And when people start learning this, they are much more comfortable with starting to work in new ways, starting to show kind of half-done prototypes to employees, starting to bringing employees to hacking. You know, let’s have the recruitment practice together. Starting to be opening up to ideas, and even letting people very keen to get feedback. I mean, get people to shoot down the ideas, if they’re not good. Why build something in a scale matter for the whole organization if five people can tell you in the beginning that this won’t fly? You know, so.

Miljan Bajic: 32:32

And that’s more like, you know, so who’s responsible for engagement? Because most people in less than countries, at least based on the research are disengaged at work. So, is it HR that responsible? Because, well, who is it? Maybe we’re all responsible for it, but…

Riina Hellström: 32:46

Just what I’m laughing about. I mean, that’s like, who’s responsible for you breathing? Who’s responsible for having good communication? Everyone are! You know, we might have tools, practices, and supporting mechanisms or services to help you in team start engaging more, or start evaluating your engagement or bringing some kind of budgets to do something with your growth or health or whatever. Well, I think there’s two sides, by the way, engagement, but enablement as well. You can be as engaged as you want. But if you don’t have the tools and the means to deliver value, that engagement won’t take you far.

Miljan Bajic: 33:31

Well, what about this? I recently worked with a client, and one of the managers says Miljan, the only way that you get promoted here, and you climb up the ladder is by staying, you know, unnoticed, and, you know, just not raising any red flags, keeping it down and not essentially messing things up. Because eventually whoever messes up there, they’ll filter those out. So that’s not policy. That’s not, you know, that’s I would assume it has been culture, right?

Riina Hellström: 34:09

Yeah, that’s more culture. And I mean, I think that my answer is, choose your battles. There are amazing companies that you can work for, if you are innovative, if you’re ready to, you know, bring in ideas, work with others, be engaged and there are companies where there isn’t time or space or room for that. And I think choose your battles is as well as sometimes you can actually make quite a big difference as being the innovator, as being the one who is engaging others, as being the one who is always in these new initiatives. But carrying the full load old time will become quite burdening. So, yeah, it’s more of a cultural thing. And quite a lot of companies are now talking about going agile and let’s be innovative. You know, everybody has a voice, and will have a lot. But even the most innovative companies still have some structures, especially if they’ve been around for longer than 20 years, 15-20 years, they still have some structures there, which are top down. And we won’t get rid of those structures. Some top-down structures are actually quite good as well. So, I’m not fully in for or… there are organizations where full self-organizing principles can work but when we start work, working with larger structures, top-down structures and organizing principles might be as well welcomed for people to bring some clarity and alignment, etc. That said, I think that we can go so much faster in organizations that are larger when we unleash the engagement and potential. And I think that I’m not sure if you agree, but when you tell people is that, you can go and work with these people towards that goal, that’s the goal we’re aiming for. We can’t tell you exactly how to go there. But you need to figure that out together. Here is, you know, means for you to do this enablement, budgets, you know, decisions, this is how we can work with problems as we go along. And here are some clear, red lines that you can’t step over. These are the constraints, you can’t do this, or this or this or this, that’s a no go. And I think to bring this clarity to people, what can I do? What can’t I do? And then just say, tell them, run, go find out, and let me know how I can support you. That’s what we’re trying to build. And those kinds of organizations, I think will thrive in the in the going forward.

Miljan Bajic: 36:48

Yeah, I mean, I think so too. And so, what is it about like our desire to have specific framework because like everybody that I talked to, everybody is saying, you know, this kind of templatized, the way of like, the way the frameworks have been sold, the big consulting companies are doing and, you know, for, if you’ve been in the trenches, and you’ve been doing this, you know, that there’s no framework that you have to contextualize, and adjust things. So why do you think organizations buy into the scaling? And how do you work if you work with organizations, for instance, that have adopted save for one of the other frameworks? And what kind of challenges do you run into when companies’ kind of going all in on a specific framework that might not align with,

Riina Hellström: 37:37

I would say, I’m not for against any kind of frameworks. I understand most of them understand what’s good about them, and I understand their pitfalls. And I also am not naïve. If you want to start changing an organization with 50,000 people, you can’t just do that organically, you know, let agile bloom and you know, start doing something in teams and start with standing how this works. It will take too long, that’s a business risk. So, I’ve seen some companies do an implementation of one of the models which are scaling agile. So scrum at scale, Spotify model, safe, less, these types of models are used. And it’s kind of a next iteration. It’s kind of getting everybody to just work in a new way and a quite a quick way. But there might be missing on what I think is the most important thing. And I think it’s the most important thing is to reach every individual who start working in a new way in three different ways. First of all, heart to understand what the values and the principles are behind this. Why is this a new way of working? What does it mean for me as a behavioral change when I start working in my domain, or with my new team, or with the people that are around me? What does that change in how I do my everyday life, but also how I make decisions, how I react on things? And being able to recognize that, for example, just a couple of examples. How do we deal with mistakes? How do we deal with conflicts? How do we deal with impediments in this organization? Just very important questions that reveal what value level you’re on. The second part, the second was hands. How to quickly move from concept, you know, concepts and conceptualizing the models to let’s just start trying here. This is how we do it. You know, let’s meet let’s plan our stuff. Let’s visualize it up on the wall. Let’s start working on that. It will not be easy the first couple of Sprint’s or couple of rounds, and that’s integrate and improve. And that’s whole idea.

Miljan Bajic: 39:55

So that’s the whole kind of idea of empiricism and just respect and adapt, keep it transparent.

Riina Hellström: 40:02

Exactly. And if there’s something with the model that doesn’t, if we talk about kind of transforming with through models, if there’s something with the model that doesn’t work, raise that. We need to have a, some kind of a team or a unit that takes up these red flags and checks, okay, this skills model is breaking down here, doesn’t work there, let’s fix this somehow, let’s give them the freedom to do it in a different way, or let’s coordinate or let’s get these teams to work together. Because right now, I see quite a lot of this thing that organizations are adopting agile, some kind of, you know, say for or another model, and they kind of haven’t on additionally to their line or organization, they just add a scale model on top of that, and say, you know, you’re not working in your usual job, 100%. But additionally, you’re in this one trade, safe trade, and you’re there 20%. And then you’re another safe trade for 10%. And that’s not even safe, my friends. I mean, that isn’t the scaled agile model. That’s just combining two models and just making a mess.

Miljan Bajic 41:06

Exactly like that. I use the analogy of cooks and chefs, it’s like bunch of cooks, throwing stuff in without knowing what they’re doing. And this comes back to the idea of learning and development. And what I run into a lot organizations, I don’t know if you’re familiar with Peter Principle, where like, people are promoted to a position where they’re not really competent for. But like, how is learning and development changing and like, what types of things HR can support? I don’t know if you’re familiar with fidelity, but they for instance, give one day a week to the developers. Tuesdays to focus on learning and developing themselves. And they don’t ask them to report anything. Just said one day a week is dedicated for you to growing yourself. That’s a pretty big commitment from a company to say one day a week, every week.

Riina Hellström: 42:06

I would say there is no way we can centrally coordinate learning anymore. There is no way it makes sense because it would be much too slow. It depends on how quickly people need to upskill themselves in different organizational positions or different teams. And if we talk about software developers, how quickly do you think their skills in a coding language or something becomes obsolete? It’s 1,2,3,4 years. So, they will need to continuously upskill themselves. And if we’d have some kind of a structure there were, think about this, imagine that just 10 years ago would work this way. You had a development discussion with your leader, then you agreed with the leader what you should learn during the next year, then that was, you know, coordinated and gathered centrally to an HR function who started looking at, okay, what do we need in this company? Then that was approximately, you know, they stopped me had a conversation with your manager in January or February, by May, they got this coordinated effort. By August, they had made plan on what people should learn the next year in the company. And they start discussing its vendors, you know, in October, then they have an offering next January, February. A year after you had the need of learning. And then you have the offering available. That just doesn’t fly anymore. Okay? Let’s get rid of these kinds of things. What we can see in L&D happening is decentralizing of learning. Having these kinds of practices such as use x amount of time of learning, have communities of practice or meetups in-house, bringing in speakers to learn, you know, go to meet other in other companies to learn about this, here is a budget for each team. You can use this budget as you wish to be able to make sure that you’re going in the strategic direction with your learning. And here, you might even have kind of gurus from different areas and domain areas to describe what the strategic learning domains are, you know. Maybe artificial intelligence gurus would write this is what’s happening this field, maybe we’ve got designers writing what’s going on in that field right now where we need to focus on. So maybe you have that kind of a map guiding your view towards something. So, we start seeing much more decentralization and also coaching so people and teams are being helped with the invisible, you know. You might know coding, but actually describe that to a junior level developer and help them upskill themselves through working with you that might need some extra help. I’m working quite a lot with engineers and I’m an engineer myself, so I get to say this. Engineers are not always very good with empathizing and expressing themselves and listening to what you really mean and understanding each other and making sure that we understand each other. So, clarifying that we really know what you’re talking about. They are very, very focused on facts, you know, and getting that written maybe and that’s it. So here coaching can make a massive difference. I mean, I’ve been coaching teams where I just go in, I have no idea what they’re talking about and that’s not my thing. But I make sure that people understand that each other, that we’ve discussed open issues or problems or conflicts in a very, very collaborative way, in a safe structure, which you and I are able to kind of create, and people feel much more comfortable than, you know, the big invisible stuff is taken care of, then they can focus on just getting that technical stuff done. So there’s a lot that’s happening in that space as well. And you know what, you know, who is who are very, very good coaches, and very, very good Scrum masters? HR people. Because we’ve been doing this forever. We’ve been working with people, we’ve been training, we’ve been facilitating, we’ve been listening, we are very, very good with that. So, I haven’t seen right now HR people stepping in as Scrum masters, stepping in as agile coaches, and even leading business transformations. Because they’ve been leading business transformations or changes before. Now, there’s this agile tab, tab unto that,

Miljan Bajic 46:34

Wish we had the Agile tab to everything, like just throw agile on it. But that’s very interesting because I agree, like, in the sense like, and also teaching others how to do that same thing and like, how do you scale coaching? Well, you know, you teach others to understand to be better listeners to, you know, try to look for better questions to understand people better, you know. I would hope that, you know, HR people understand the human side of things and you would think, you know, that’s what, you know, HR stands for, I hope. So maybe as a last question here, how do you think how has COVID kind of impacted HR both short term and long term? What are we going to see when it comes to this whole impact of distributive work force, space, like, you know, how we work? 

Riina Hellström: 47:33

Do you have another hour?

 Miljan Bajic 46:34

I know. Maybe whatever we can condense in the next eight minutes. 

Riina Hellström: 47:39

I will fix the world’s COVID and the HR problems in three minutes or less. Okay, that’s a challenge. So I think that what we’ve seen is amazing flexibility from many companies. Not just companies, but people. People both who are working, employees who are working in the companies have been shown that they are worth the trust that should have been given them in the first place. I mean, so many companies that I’m working with have been making amazing results, getting things done with amazing speed. And people are quite burned out, to be honest, because they’ve been working so hard. So, this is one thing that we need to start dealing with. I mean, HR people are also very burnt out. It’s not, you know, 10 people or 20, that I know, that are so tired, because they’ve been caring for the whole organization, the policies, the health, you know, health care, all of that, at the same time, while they are also running you know, with their families, and you know, working from home. So, health and well-being of people is one thing that I think is very important. The second what’s interesting is that now, there is absolutely no reason to say we can’t do this virtually, we can’t do this digitally. That’s an excuse that can’t be used anymore. So, it has to be very deliberate. You know, where are working? What are we doing face to face? What are we doing as a hybrid model? You know, the worst thing at least for me with training and facilitation is that some people are online, and some people are in the room, that is a really difficult discussion. So has to be very deliberate. We need to be much more strategic in what should we do, and that there’s again, can we let the teams make this decision rather than the company policy? 

The third thing is, we see two things; Preference of returning to work is very scattered. So, we can’t go with averages. There’s a company called Gleethman who is doing some research where they got some 200,000 data points of if people want to return to work or not. And this is about wanting to. And that’s scattered. So some people say I don’t want to go back to work at all. Around 20, 25% if I remember correctly. Want to just work remotely. And about the same amount want to go fully into the office. But then we’ve got people scattered between one to two days in the office three to four days, you know, so there’s not going to be an average approach that works for everybody. What we need to understand is that, oh, wow, our talent base just got scattered. These people who are working remotely, if we don’t have a solution for them, they’re going to be poached very easily by companies who offer a better life work experience for them, right. And then this kind of, I think companies are making a huge mistake by creating a one size fits all policy would say you have to be in the office X amount per week. What don’t you say we will create a policy where you say, every team needs to look at your context, your customers, your value delivery and agree on what you do virtually and what you do in the office. And it has to be an explicit team commitment on how you work, right? So why don’t we do that because teams can make the best decisions for sure.

Miljan Bajic 51:06

So that’s like going from very rigid policies to more adaptive policies that are context specific. And in that instance, you decentralizing that decision of how we work to the units and teams based on you know, where they are maturity wise, where they are in their work. I mean, the whole context. Yeah.

Riina Hellström: 51:26

 But what you can create as a policy is that you have to make this explicit discussion and explicit choices. And then we come to the culture. And then we come to do you have managers who are micromanagement professionals who don’t trust people? That’s another conversation again. But you know, yeah. The other thing is that digitalization and if we think about the COVID, is there’s nothing that prepared organizations better for agile than COVID. Because we didn’t know what kind of decisions to make, we needed to react every day, last spring, every week after the summer, and now maybe every month, we need to make new contingency plans, you know, so…

Miljan Bajic 52:10

A lot of people I talked to, they’re like, this was a good test in the sense of just to open our eyes to you know, as much as negative, it’s also created a lot of positive opportunities, just to our whole perception of what is feasible and what’s not feasible.

Riina Hellström: 52:30

And you know what? The change, or the kind of different situation was so long lasting, that it has changed the you know, changed behavior in a lasting way. So, people have changed behavior, people have changed opinion, I thought that I can’t do what I do virtually. But actually, now I find that what we do, train agile is working much better in a virtual setting because we break that down into five weeks instead of two days. And people learn much better and they apply it etc. So quite a lot of businesses have been also able to redefine themselves in how this works. So, I think there is a great opportunity here, but we need to be very strategic about that and the companies who understand this change in behavior, and change in I say, life work balance on purpose, because it’s about life balance really. It’s about how you bring in work into a life. And I think that’s super important to remember one side’s average approach won’t take you far.