The day HR told me to get out of their lane

The turning point in my career was when the Head of People at my company came over to my desk and said, "I hear you've been putting together some training on feedback".

There was a kind of "Hey, you're in our lane" energy in the tone.

See, even though the HR team had designed a quarterly 360-degree feedback process, time and time again our engagement survey kept showing that people didn't feel they were receiving regular feedback on their work. (In other words, they hadn't achieved product-market fit)

About a month after I joined, I was standing with my managing director at our company's away day, who was discussing the problem with one of the other directors: "Our teams don't know how to give each other feedback, so they avoid it, and it's slowing us down".

I chimed in and said, "Oh, I remember when I was going through onboarding at the Apple Store - we had to role-play giving and receiving feedback until we felt comfortable with it."

I immediately regretted sharing that story, because the next thing you know, I'm under pressure to organise feedback training, and HR is telling me to get out of their lane.

Since then, I've realised that this happens in organisations all the time. Someone notices a problem with the culture and decides to take it upon themselves to fix it.

In my view, it's actually a sign of a healthy culture; it means people care enough and feel safe enough to take action.

But it also means the HR team gets sidelined because they’re seen as too slow or as lacking the time or capacity to deliver initiatives.

Often, HR struggles to keep up because they're stuck in reactive mode, having to clean up issues arising from solutions designed with good intentions but without the guardrails to ensure fairness and consistency or to address legal risk.

It's a bit of a vicious cycle, but one that I think is possible to break out of with the right approach.

HR becomes strategic by collaborating with the business

Let's return to my chat with the Head of People, who came to ask about why I was designing feedback training.

I explained the situation and the approach I was planning to take, and instead of saying “Thanks, I’ll take that off your hands now”, my Head of People saw an opportunity.

She arranged for me to work one day a week with my managing director on the People Team. Not as an HR person, but as a UX designer.

Instead of diving directly into designing and delivering feedback training, we conducted some focus groups to answer the question, “Why don’t people feel they’re receiving useful feedback?”

We asked people to share examples of their previous experiences giving and receiving feedback, what happened, how it felt and what tools they used.

What we found wasn't a process problem. People were using the 360-degree feedback tool, but the quality of the feedback wasn’t seen as useful.

Feedback was often based on personal preferences that the receiver didn't know how to act on, leaving them feeling as though they'd received a character assessment rather than useful input on their work. That kind of feedback needed a conversation, not a form.

At some point, people got tired of hearing how their differences irked others, so they stopped asking for feedback.

And despite working flat out to address low engagement scores for feedback, the HR team wasn’t solving the problem because they were too far removed from the day-to-day experience of giving and receiving feedback in the flow of work.

What HR can learn from UX & product design

In UX, we talk about how for a product to be successful, it needs to be:

• ❤️ Desirable: Does it meet a real need?
• 💰 Viable: Will it generate revenue?
• 🚧 Feasible: Can we build it?

If we've learned anything from the rapid growth of AI, it's that anything can be built.

In my view, feasibility is rarely just about whether the team has the technical capability. More often, it's about whether the environment they're working in encourages them to experiment, investigate, and learn their way to a solution.

People Teams have the same challenge.

In People Experience, the same questions need to be asked, just in a slightly different way:

• 🫱🏽‍🫲🏾 Desirable: Do we know the real employee problem to solve or need to address?
• 📈 Viable: Do we understand how solving it will impact the business’s success?
• ⚙️ Feasible: Do we have systems that enable us to build a solution tailored to our unique context?

If you would struggle to answer any of these questions, you’re not alone. These questions aren’t ones most People Teams are encouraged to ask, but asking them is what makes the difference between implementing a process and solving a problem strategically.

The impact of a new method

In my story above, the shift wasn't about hiring a UX designer. It was about how the team approached problems: instead of going straight from survey results to a solution, they learned to function more like a product team.

That meant:

• Getting closer to the people experiencing the problem, not relying solely on survey data to tell them what was going on.
• Investigating the cost of the problem in terms of trust, collaboration, and performance before researching solutions.
• Sharing what they found with leadership and the wider business before designing anything, so the work was visible and co-owned rather than happening in a black box.
• Testing smaller solutions with a subset of colleagues, before rolling out at scale

One of those solutions was to design feedback training, which focused not only on how to frame feedback, but also on how too make it a two-way conversation.

But we also iterated on the 360-degree feedback form. We changed the questions:

• From one that elicited opinions on behaviours: "What's one thing that your team member could start, stop, or do differently that would help them and those around them improve?"
• to questions focused on skills that the individual chose they wanted feedback on, "What advice would you give to this team member to improve their stakeholder management skills?"

To get started, you don’t need a UXer in your team.

If you're in a People Team that feels stuck in this cycle (working hard but not being seen as strategic), the first thing to recognise is that the problem isn't effort. It's the method.

Pick one initiative where you change the order of operations: understand the problem first, then design the response

Pair up with someone in your product or design team for a single project and ask them to coach you through their process.

Or, if you don’t have that capability in-house, just start by having five conversations with the people affected by the problem you’re looking to solve before jumping to a solution.

And when you do get to the point of building a solution, the platform you use matters. Try to avoid HR tech that assumes a set methodology and that limits what you can design.

Instead, choose a system that lets you build for your context (a system like Crewmojo 😉)

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