Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies

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CAHRS Working Group

Consumer–Driven HR Model
Hosted by Mastercard
New York, NY | September 15, 2016

Participating Organizations:
Key Takeaways:
Accenture
Boehringer Ingelheim  The idea of consumer-driven HR is to improve how organizations impact the employee
Boeing experience in positive ways to build engagement and to remove or reduce barriers that
Bridgestone negatively impact their ability to do their best at work.
Deloitte  Key activities include (1) myriad of data collection and analytic techniques to identify
General Electric employee needs, wants, and barriers that might enhance or detract from the employee
General Mills experience, (2) identifying a range of options and programs to address a range of employee
Hewlett Packard needs across different employee populations, and (3) helping employees to see, understand,
IBM and choose from these options to create the ideal experience that engages them with work
JPMorgan Chase and the company.
Mastercard
Merck  This model works with the existing HR model of HR Business Partners, Centers of
Protective Life Excellence, and Shared Services but also includes People Leaders (Line Managers) in the
Prudential identification, execution, and delivery of a better employee experience.
T. Rowe Price
 Consumer-driven HR may work best when it has the open support of senior leaders as it
Cornell University
requires a shift in mindset in both HR and Line leaders for it to be effective.

What is Behind the Idea of Consumer-Driven HR?

Over the course of our early discussion, it seemed that the idea behind consumer-driven
HR is making the workplace and the experience of work more in line with the expectations
that workers of all ages and backgrounds have come to expect as consumers. Ideally,
employees are looking for an enriching and rewarding set of experiences, and a seamless
interaction with HR in which obstacles and barriers to an enriched employee experience
and performance in their jobs have been removed or mitigated. Strategically, as much as
anything, a consumer-driven approach to HR seems to be a shift in mindset regarding
thinking about how HR processes systems and technology. When done effectively, this
approach to HR can enhance the employee experience, improve use and access to
information that employees need to make better decisions about their employment
experience, and develop a deeper understanding of the needs and issues of different groups
or employees rather than providing a one-size-fits-all set of processes that generally work
well for few employees. Key concepts or work streams within the consumer-driven HR
approach include:
 Input of employees in terms of what they want or in design of HR solutions and
programs. During our discussion, participants identified and discussed many of the
following ideas as part of our efforts to understand and involve employees: letting
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employees design and drive their own experiences; enabling easier access to the data/information that they need to get
their job done; understanding what they want and need to get their job done; how to navigate their way in complex
organizational structures; and enabling more information and help in how to navigate and grow their careers.
 Creating options. Participants in the working group spent a good deal of time in the morning talking about the
importance of both creating options that enable choice for employees in how they can shape the employee experience
and providing employees the information and help they might need to both understand what options exist and which
are the best fit. In other words, it is important to both create options across HR programs and activities so that
employees have the opportunity to uniquely shape the right experiences, but HR must also enable these employees to
navigate the range of options that are available. During our discussions, participants identified quite a wide range of
new initiatives and options that they are creating for employees across:
 Pay and benefits,
 Career paths and job roles,
 Learning and development,
 Location, work arrangement, technology,
 Workspace design, and
 Volunteerism and experiences.
 Use of technology or artificial intelligence to push options and assist employees in navigating the range of
options. Multiple participants provided examples of how their organizations are using machine learning,
algorithms, or artificial intelligence to help employees navigate options or to push potential opportunities to those
employees. For example, one partner noted using algorithms to identify potential successors for key roles based on
skills and experiences rather than leaving this up to manager nominations. This process increased the size and diversity
of the potential successor pool and increased the chance more employees might be considered for growth
opportunities. Another participant noted how her company was using push technology to recommend learning
opportunities (digital and face-to-face) to employees based on past courses, career interests, and ratings of similar
employees. All of the examples pointed to the need for HR to think more carefully about how we can be using
consumer-like technology and algorithms to provide more information to employees, help the employees navigate
choices, and to identify employees for opportunities that might not have been hand tapped by current leaders.
 Know who you are as a company before emulating what others are doing. Another key theme of the morning
session was to start with the culture and business demands of the organization and then shape employee experiences
and changes in how HR can support those experience rather than starting benchmarking what others are doing and
blindly copying those practices. Clearly not all “best practices” in shaping or creating employee experiences work in
every culture and with every business model.
 How does this become seamless? Much like their experiences as consumers of products and services, employees
are increasingly demanding more seamless service from HR which can be complicated as they move between
self-service portals, interactions with their HRBPs, with their people leaders, and interactions with the HR teams in
shared service centers. We need to look more closely at how to make these experiences seamless in terms of the pass-off
from one to the other, consistency in messages and data from one to the other, the service experience between the
different groups, etc.

Creating Balance in Driving the Consumer-Driven HR Approach

Companies need to make sure that they develop and follow a balanced approach to how they understand the “voice of the
customer” – given the diversity in companies across lots of dimensions (e.g., generations, gender, nationality, job type or
level). Companies need to make sure that they are getting a well-balanced sense of the needs and barriers for all of the
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different populations of employees in the company and aren’t oversampling the loudest voices. At the same time, we need to
be careful to not burn out employees on exercises of providing insights, co-designing solutions, etc., as we need to be mind-
ful that they are also working fulltime jobs.
 To ensure that HR is getting broad and representative data on needs, issues, and ideas, participants identified a
wide range of data-collection activities that they are pursuing, such as:
 Pulse surveys. Consistency of data acquired to be able to collect over time, potentially add in special questions
that track against new initiatives or pain points;
 Free flowing questions to employees while interacting with an HR activity or service – for example, asking
open-ended questions about the employee’s overall work experiences or experiences with a particular activity or
supporting technology while the employee is on the self-service portal or interacting with a live HR person;
 Using internal social media technologies to communicate ideas and get employee responses and conversations,
and potentially crowdsource innovations or changes. Most suggested keeping these conversations visible to all.
Our discussion raised a number of questions on how to process the data, how to ensure distribution of
participation, and ways to curate the information to make it easier for later conversation with participants to
follow the stream of the conversation, etc.;
 Companies have also used in-person and virtual focus groups and crowdsourcing methodologies
(e.g., hackathons) to identify issues, solutions, and new delivery mechanisms;
 Some participants noted that they also use anonymous drop-box style techniques for employees to share
concerns, identify employee experience challenges, etc., and then have senior managers speak to these
comments, questions, suggestions in some public forum (potentially through newsletter, video, etc.); and
 Leader listening lunches are a potential way to bring together senior leaders and employees from all levels and
parts of the company to create opportunity for employee voice and for senior leaders to hear issues, concerns,
and needs directly from employees.
 Success of consumer-driven approaches (e.g., using design thinking) in HR depends on a willingness to be open.
Openness of sharing the data with employees is critical for employees to know what is already being done, what issues
have already been identified, what opportunities exist, who is working on which problems, such as:
 Share with all employees,
 Share with line leaders,
 See the results for their part of the organization, comparison to other units/divisions/teams, and
 Increase employees’ perceptions that participation in activities related to data collection or idea generation are
mutually beneficial for themselves, other employees in the organization, and the organization itself.
 Other Issues that were raised. During the course of the day, participants raised a number of other issues that we
didn’t have time to address but should talk about in future sessions, including:
 Many of the participants noted that their companies have started down the path of consumer-driven HR
approaches for full time and regular employees but have yet to do this with other key groups that help to drive
company outcomes including contract employees, project or temporary employees, etc.;
 How to continuously evolve yet keep consistency in processes that don’t leave people confused or skeptical; and
 How can companies create a balance of what is expected from Managers and employees versus delivery from
HR?
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Changing Competencies of HR and Line (People) Leaders to Deliver

This Consumer-Driven HR
As companies move more to this approach, participants noted that there will be a resulting impact on competency
and skill needs for a number of key roles:
 HRBP
 Acts as the voice of the customer to understand needs or challenges that get in the way of work;
 Agents of the change - supporters and drivers of change rather than detractors/resistors;
 Deeply understand the drivers of the business understanding what business might need to manage/interact/
support employees differently to drive business results that they are trying to accomplish; and
 Empathy – understanding pain points of process and what is getting in the way, translating that into actions
or requests to drive change.
 Competencies of line leaders
 Empathy and trust – required to understand and drive to their needs,
 Stewardship and accountability,
 Willingness to empower employees, and
 Ability to coach and have conversations.

Change Management is Required to Drive This New Model

As with any big change, success in moving to a consumer-driven approach to HR will need good change
management support. A few critical issues to consider include:
 Readiness of the organization and leaders;
 Ability to create strong cross-functional partnership with other functions in the company that will impact success
including information technology (IT), Legal, Line-managers, Communications;
 Communication of the purpose and benefits of the approach to members of the HR community, employees, and
people leaders;
 Ownership by senior leaders;
 Mindset of the function;
 Willingness to experiment with potential for failure,
 Willingness to launch the beta version without knowing it is 100% right
 How much of this is about a change in culture versus a change in delivery;
 Removing barriers or processes that don’t add value,
 Digital, physical, cultural, leader, development, purpose (corporate/divisional purpose, how to give back to
community and feel connected), and
 Process, experience, culture.
 Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies
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This Summary Report was prepared by Chris Collins for use by

participants of the Consumer-Driven HR Model Working
Group.

The Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies (CAHRS) is an

international center serving corporate human resources leaders and
their companies by providing critical tools for building and leading
high performing HR organizations. CAHRS’ mission is to bring
together Partners and the ILR School’s world-renowned HR
Studies faculty to investigate, translate and apply the latest HR
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