In a disrupted world, traditional HR practices can lack relevance and impact. In fact, just 29% of HR professionals feel that their work is valued in their organisation.We hosted a webinar featuring one of Europe's most influential HR leaders, Lucy Adams – who is the Founder of Disruptive HR and former HR Director at the BBC. She visited our London office to share her valuable insights into how HR professionals can drive positive change by making people practices more aligned with the wants and needs of employees. From our discussion, we’ve picked out the top five takeaways on how to change HR practices for good.You can watch the full webinar here. 1) The role of HR is to create conditions that enable people to perform at their best.“HR is the hardest gig in the world,” says Lucy, “but it's also the most fascinating.” People are the most complicated and unpredictable area of any organisation and have a variety of needs that need to be catered for. Therefore, a one-size-fits-all approach to HR isn’t going to be effective.So, how can HR teams equip themselves for that?“First up, we have to ask ourselves, what is my role?” says Lucy. Who believes that HR is currently going through its third evolution. Where HR 1.0 was about “being the nursemaid for employees” and HR 2.0 was about being “strategic business partners” and following the leadership agenda. HR 3.0, however, is what Lucy feels its true purpose should be: “enabling people to do their best work”.“That's our role” says Lucy “and if we can get our heads around that… then it takes us in a very different path.” Instead of HR being about endless process implementation or providing emotional support for employees, it's about creating the conditions to enable people to thrive in your workplace. That might mean spending less time on “transactional stuff” like employee engagement surveys and performance reviews and instead investing more energy into understanding employees, showing appreciation, asking what works for them and providing opportunities for growth. 2) Hybrid working is not a one-size-fits-all. A staggering 98% of workers have expressed the desire to work remotely, at least part of the time.However, in a post-pandemic world, where organisations continue to grapple with the transition to a hybrid workplace, many business leaders have expressed concerns that a remote environment might be detrimental to innovation and culture. While Lucy is a firm believer that “some work is better together”, she feels it’s “not purely about innovation,” but rather enabling teams to come together and connect in a way that's meaningful and valuable to them.It should be up to individual teams to identify the moments that matter when it comes to face-to-face interactions and to decide when being together in-person adds value. “For some teams that might mean that we want you in every day for the next three months… And for other teams, it might not matter at all.”That’s why, as a HR manager, Lucy suggests not imposing restrictive policies across the whole business, but rather allowing flexibility and empowering managers and teams to determine what's best for them.3) Traditional performance management doesn’t work.It’s costly and takes a huge amount of time and over 80% of employees don’t believe that it helps with performance or find it motivating. And yet so many businesses still do it. Every single year. The annual performance review.“[Managers] know this is not driving better performance or motivation” says Lucy. “They know it instinctively… It's not driving value. It's taking up too much time.” And as a result, many will exhibit frustrations such as: “How is this helping with my business? How is this helping my people form an employee perspective?” The idea that a target we set in January will be still relevant by December is risky at best. That’s why, rather than setting objectives and giving feedback in a huge lump sum once a year, Lucy suggests “getting rid of ratings and the performance review” and moving instead to more “light touch principles.” As a HR professional, this means trusting managers to manage by encouraging more employee-owned discussions, more frequent check-ins and absolutely no ratings!4) It’s time to take notes from marketing.If HR professionals really want to transform their practices, to make their work more relevant and impactful, then more time and energy must be invested into employee-centred HR design.This means treating employees like “consumers” and making HR products and services much more closely aligned to the tastes and wants of employees – rather than just what the organisation wants. In order to truly understand employees, Lucy suggests taking inspiration from colleagues in marketing – borrowing their techniques for getting close to the needs and wants of customers and adapting them to better understand your own workforce. “Marketing is trying to do with customers what HR is trying to do with people. They're trying to change perceptions, change behaviour, increase brand loyalty, so actually somebody with a marketing mindset can be really effective and an HR team.”5) An employee's competence can be changed, but their motivation cannot.A lack of trust is “a very dangerous and corrosive thing… for an organisation,” says Lucy, “because that stops innovation. It stops people questioning the status quo, challenging the status quo, it stops people being confident about trying new things.” However there are many instances in which HR can facilitate that trust to be built.According to Lucy, there are 3 different ways in which we need to trust people in the workplace. Firstly, “trust in someone’s competence” and their ability to do a good job – which can be built through proper training and ensuring that employees are in roles that are right for them. The second type of trust is “trust in someone’s judgement”, which “is tricker,” says Lucy, as it often requires a relaxation of HR processes and policies, which generally don’t give employees the wiggle room to exercise their judgement effectively. The third, deal breaker type of trust, Lucy says, is when we don't trust in someone's motive. “If you are honestly saying that you don't trust someone's motive, their character, but you're still paying them… You're still letting them loose on colleagues or clients… What are you doing?”“I've worked in organisations where we had huge numbers of people who should have gone years ago, they should have gone and done something different. But for whatever reason, they stayed, and they're the real risk to you.” As a HR professional, it’s down to you to know when someone needs more training, requires a bit of encouragement to take ownership, or when they simply aren't a good fit for the organisation. If you sense that an employee is indifferent and you don’t trust that they believe in the organisation's mission, purpose and values, then it's probably time to let them go. YuLife Presents is YuLife’s event series for the HR community. We bring together leading experts on today’s most important topics to provide our community with practical advice, and inspiration for their own workplaces.To watch Lucy Adam’s full YuLife webinar, click here. And if you want to be the first to find out about our next event, sign-up to our YuLife Presents mailing list today!