Rob Crawford, CHRP
senior HR consultant,
Navigate Partners Consulting

Rob is a senior human resources professional with extensive experience as a practitioner and consultant.  Strategic planning, team building, leadership development, executive assessment and coaching are all areas of expertise, along with extensive HR leadership.  Considerable experience in project management,  learning and development, along with years of teaching experience in several colleges and universities.  Rob currently lives in the Kelowna area and with his family enjoys the variety of activities and lifestyle the beautiful Okanagan offers.

Credibility and influence.  Those are the key attributes that a strategic HR business partner needs to be able to impact innovation in the workplace. Credibility is critical because an HR professional with in depth understanding of the business, as well as relevant HR advice, helps improve the business operations.  Once you have credibility with your leadership team, you are able to recommend changes and innovations to help lead the organization into the future.

The second attribute, influence, refers to your ability to take your thoughts and innovations to the leadership, and have them be willing to try new approaches to sometimes very old problems. Innovations need to be seen as enhancing the business—new processes, products, or services.  It’s no different than pitching a sale—if you don’t have that credibility and influencing ability; you don’t earn the right to proceed.

Sandra Reder
president & founder
Vertical Bridge & Health Bridge HR

With over 20 years of experience, Sandra has worked in a wide range of industries including healthcare, private sector, not-for-profit and public sector. Actively involved with HRMA, she is past chapter president of the Association of Canadian Search, Employment and Staffing Services, and past chair for the Developmental Disabilities Foundation. Currently she sits on the local board of Room to Read Canada, the Foundation for Fighting Blindness Comic Vision event committee, and the Advisory Board of the XYBOOM Conference.

There is no one answer. The best way HR can impact innovation in the workplace is multi-faceted.  People are motivated by a number of different things when they’re looking at career opportunities.  Most often the top two or three are learning and growth opportunities, flexibility and a leadership team that listens.

So how does HR respond to this?  Number one is to provide leadership training and mentoring in order to identify and develop emerging leaders.  A company known for its amazing leaders will have far reaching benefits…we know people don’t quit companies they quit managers.  Inspired leaders will inspire innovation in others.  Flexibility doesn’t just translate to flexible work hours or tele-commutes, it can also mean how one works in order to get the job done.  Not everyone approaches a task the same way, allowing employees to be creative in how they accomplish things encourages innovation.

Morgan Kemick, CHRP
HR consultant,
learning and development

Morgan Kemick, CHRP has worked in a variety of industries, including engineering, entertainment, non-profit, and food and beverage. Rounding out her passion for learning and development with an Associate Certificate in Conflict Resolution, Morgan loves to help develop employees, at all levels of an organization.

The most powerful way HR can impact innovation in the workplace is by being part of overall strategic planning and continuously looking inward to identify innovation opportunities within HR.  A true HR department touches all areas of a business including, but not limited to, recruitment and selection, compensation and benefits, learning and development as well as company culture.

When innovation is an organizational goal, HR can help recruit suitable employees by tailoring job postings – increasing their appeal to innovative individuals. HR is also able to adjust interview questions, allowing the organization to gain additional insight into a candidate’s ability to innovate prior to them being hired.

Additionally, HR can add innovation values into the compensation and benefits strategy by setting KPIs aligned with an innovative culture, as well as holding employees accountable to those KPIs. Finally, when it comes to innovation, talk is cheap. In order to meet organizational needs, it is crucial that HR continue to seek out opportunities to innovate – keeping on top of industry trends and updating best practices accordingly.

Ken Todd
change practitioner,
Northwestel

Ken Todd is a member of the Yukon Advisory Council of HRMA based in Whitehorse, and during the day works as a change practitioner with Northwestel. He has lived in all three northern territories and Labrador over the past 25 years, working in various leadership positions in broadcasting and telecommunications. A central theme throughout Ken’s career in the North has been guiding people and organizations through technological, market, and cultural change.

Years ago in the North, a successful recruitment for candidates from southern Canada was determined by whether the new arrival actually ventured off the plane and onto the tarmac during the month of February, with a temperature of -50C including wind-chill.

Thankfully things have changed—though we still face similar temperatures! As a business partner, today’s HR professional plays a key role in assessing the competency and fit of recruits for remote locations, using both technological and process innovations. The recruitment toolkit now includes videoconferencing, Skype, social media, collaborative tools, and insights provided through the study of neuroscience, to help predict behaviour and a candidate’s likelihood to stay and succeed in a small community.

With the costs of relocation and churn, making the right call with an employee is critical, and the skilled HR practitioner who is open to new ways can make all the difference in recruitment.

Zoë MacLeod
director, Centre for Coaching and Workplace Innovation,
Royal Roads University

Zoë MacLeod is the director for the Centre for Coaching and Workplace Innovation at Royal Roads University. Zoë is a certified executive coach, change agent, and educational consultant working in the fields of leadership, executive coaching, project and change management, strategic human resources, effective organization design and development. She is passionate about helping people and organizations to cultivate creative intelligence, focus on strengths and awaken to the possibility of happier, healthier and more productive work environments.

The fascinating thing about innovation is that it is created, and implemented, by people yet organizations often lack the conditions required for people to innovate. As organizations begin to move away from mechanistic and hierarchical structures, HR departments across the globe need to focus on more flexible work environments, fostering open and collaborative cultures, and helping the organization to cultivate creative intelligence.

Innovation cannot occur without people and ideas and organizations are filled with people who have ideas. If innovation is important to your organization (and by the way, it IS) HR can begin to cultivate the conditions necessary for innovation to occur. In order for HR to impact innovation in the workplace, we must pay attention to it, value it, support it, cultivate it, lead it, live it. There are many resources to explore that can assist with cultivating innovation in the workplace. Innovation starts with asking questions. What questions do you have?

(PeopleTalk Spring 2015)