Launching a new HR initiative can be nerve-racking. We often get stuck on the last 20% of it, trying to get it right before we unleash it to the masses.  What will people think of us if it's a flop? Better get it perfect rather than risk our reputation, right?

Not necessarily says James Law, Director of HR at tech start-up Envato. He says that if you wait until your product is completely finished before rolling it out, you'll end up doing nothing. He has borrowed some tried and tested methods from their savvy tech team when implementing their HR initiatives.

In this excerpt of his presentation at HR Tech Fest 2016, James explains how to take a “minimal viable productâ€' approach and label your HR initiatives as a trial in order to get things done.

Transcript

One thing we found out – that's the HR thing by the way – is that we were doing nothing if we waited until we had something completely finished before rolling it out. That is where I've gone wrong in the past, because it's a bit nerve wracking in any form of life, but in HR particularly, because we don't always have the best reputations as do-ers (God knows why) and we've come from a personnel background historically, a long, long time ago and we were more administrative. So when you go to do something that's a little bit more exciting and liberating, you do get nervous, I get nervous all the time, and you also get nervous that it's going to fail, and you spend a lot of time worrying about the last 20% of whatever initiative it is that you're trying to launch.

I would say that what I've learnt being in Envato through our products people, who are brilliant, is that you should be creating,. You should be creating minimal viable products for your business, phasing them in bit by bit and telling people they might fail. The reason you should be doing that is because some of them will and you won't feel bad about it, and I guarantee you will learn something from the failures, just as much as you will from the ones that are successful. We look at the data that we gather, we do some digging and do some asking around and we try and understand what that data is telling us, and then we do a couple of things as a business, usually led by HR, to try and change the dial on those areas where we think we need to improve and we think we will take the business forward, and the initiatives that we decide upon are we create minimal viable products and then we iterate on them.

An example would be that we started a work from home initiative – it was already there informally, but we got bigger and we had to formalise it – and the first thing we did is we did a day a week and we said we would roll it back at any time we saw that it wasn't working. Because we didn't know if it was going to work or not; we did some assessments, we asked some questions and got the data, but we had no idea. So, we did it and it worked, but it didn't work as well as we would have expected, and there was still this hesitance to use it if you thought you were going to miss out on an important meeting, or your boss wasn't a big advocate for it, or you felt like your team was watching that you weren't there, or the person who sat beside you said, “Enjoy your day off,â€' as you left the day before you were going to work from home. All those little things had a massive impact on people viewed that initiative.

So, we said, “Okay, we're going to iterate on that and we're going to improve it again. It's going to be minimal and we're going to see if it's viable, and it's phase two and it's a trial – that's the other word, good one, trial, so trial is the other word – and it's a trial so we can roll it back whenever we want to.â€' It's hard to roll things back, I know, but it's easier to do it if you said it's a trial than if you've laid it in stone. And we went to unlimited work from anywhere at anytime so people don't have to come to the office at all, and that has had a huge paradigm shift culturally to how people view working from home or anywhere, positively.

People are now not worried about whether or not that person is looking at them funny when they leave the office, because they might be in tomorrow or they might not, and it doesn't matter. You go to a meeting and you sit down and you turn on Google Hangouts, which is like video conferencing but on the cheap, and there might be someone in there or there might not be; everyone for that meeting might come live into the office, or you might be the only person in the meeting room. That takes all the pressure and the anxiety and the nervousness out of it and puts the power back in the hands of the individual to find a space, and this is the business reason we did it, to give people the opportunity to find a space where they can work that suits them the best.

About the Speaker

James Law has worked at some of Australia's leading online businesses such as seek.com.au, realestate.com.au and betfair.com.au. He is now plying his trade at Envato where he supports the brilliant creative minds that pull together one of the leading digital marketplaces in the world! His people philosophy is based on finding fantastic people, helping teams work together better and then getting out of the way!