This company had identified the HR department as an underperforming. They have almost removed the department from the business equation. To issue an appointment letter, would take over 80 days. When the document reached the branch, employees had already left the company. Thus, HR did not know the head count. My duty was to turn around the HR department.

I used an approach most appropriately identify as “facilitated complex adaptive system”. First, got the employees to study the processes, measure the processes and create insights on the work of the HR department. Once they have spent enough time on getting to know what they do, took them out on a week end. We started traveling on Friday, night at the holiday bungalow was a socialization event.

Next day we started to work from the breakfast table. I gave them to guidelines and freedom to work on two things.

1. What do other departments tell about what we do
2. How do we come out of this

by lunch they had tons of ideas how we could turnaround the situation. The entire afternoon was spent on applying a creativity process onto the ideas that they had contributed, with their participation. Finally, we reduced them to five things that we should practice.

1. Team work
2. Response
3. Independence
4. Priority
5. Service

Four of those were accepted by them while I had to ensure they get “Independence” from patricianly from the IT department. Defined new rule for how to assess the Priority for any job in their hand, based on Importance and Urgency.

Importance, asses from how higher up will their boss (me) would get scolded, if this task is not carried out.

Urgency,  how sooner is their boss (me) going to be shouted at.

It was all left for them to assess the priority, next day we walked around and enjoyed. Everyone came home happily.

Then the difficult part started. I had to develop a framework explaining all the elements of TRIPS framework, and expanded it to 10 monitorable features. Further each feature was expanded to fiver rating levels and clear rating descriptions were developed and declared the it as the performance management framework.

We often discussed, evaluated their performance, kept my part by giving them Independence” from IT department. And like magic, performance improved. Within two months we declared a Service Level Agreement of two days for any request we receive at HR department.

It was the same people, we changed the layout and adhered to TRIPS. They performed.