Introduction to High-Performance HR
At Turkey’s Davos, during the 11th Human Resources Summit organized with the distinction of Eduplus, we are once again joined by a valuable presentation and a distinguished guest. One of our solution partners will also share insights on achieving high performance in human resources. Welcome, Mr. Dinçer. Thank you, Mr. Cüneyt. Please, go ahead. Alright, let’s begin.
Today, I will share with you two simple tips for achieving high performance in human resources. First, let me introduce myself. My name is Dinçer Özturan, I am the CEO and also the founder of Projera Training and Consultancy.
From Engineering to Organizational Performance: A Personal Journey
I am actually a computer engineer. After working as a software engineer for a while and transitioning into a software management position, I became particularly interested in topics such as organizational structure, organizational behavior, performance management, and performance tracking. I started conducting numerous laboratory experiments on these topics in the organizations I managed.
However, over time, I realized that organizations really needed help in these areas, that everyone needed it. So, in 2008, I founded Projera. Our motto is “bright people, bright future.” Initially, my focus wasn’t on people. I was more interested in processes and the technical aspects of work, but as I went through transformations, entered these areas, and tried to achieve high performance, I realized that everything happens through people. Therefore, as we restructured our company, we adopted this motto.
Projera’s Impact: Measurable Results in Organizational Transformations
Our goal is to build high-performance organizations and assist organizations in this endeavor. In the work we’ve done so far, whether at the company or department level, we’ve achieved a 32% increase in customer satisfaction, a 56% increase in employee engagement and satisfaction, a 576% increase in speed, a 36% increase in productivity, and a 310% increase in quality.
Of course, these are the maximum figures, and we can’t always reach these numbers with every conversion, as you can imagine. There are many parameters involved, but we want to help as much as we can. These numbers, at least, show that some things that might seem absurd to people are actually possible, and we are doing our best. To briefly talk about our company, since 2008, we have provided consultancy to many organizations. These include Turkey’s leading telecom companies, educational companies, banks, insurance companies, and software companies. We have been working with Turkey’s largest software companies and continue to do so. We continue to work with banks and collaborate with the defense industry. In many sectors, we focus on how to achieve high performance and how to assist organizations in this process. During these transformation processes, we also collaborate with many companies. Sometimes we assist within the scope of social responsibility, and sometimes we engage in joint projects with them.
Transforming Human Resources for High Performance
Our main service areas include corporate transformation. When we ask, “What are we experts in?”, we can say we are transformation experts. We describe our own titles that way. The difficult thing, the thing that we believe we are good at, is “transformation” which is genuinely a challenging task. However, a transformation’s success is not only attributed to the consultancy firm or coaches but also to the success of the organization’s leaders. Over the years, competence development has become one of our critical focus areas. We offer coaching and mentoring services, organizational process improvement, leadership development… Don’t worry, I won’t be doing promotions during this presentation, I’ll finish these quickly. Besides, since 2012, we’ve been involved in transformational changes related to lean and agility. We were present in ING Bank’s agile transformation, Turkcell’s agile transformation, and Ericsson’s adoption of the agile working model 10 to 15 years ago. We are still involved in these transformations and providing support on various topics.
Overcoming Challenges in Agile Transformations
However, some companies undergo lean or agile transformations but fail to achieve the desired performance. That’s when they come to us. “We’ve done the transformations, but we haven’t achieved the results we expected,” they say.
Sometimes, a little “touch” is needed. These touches vary in nature. Sometimes, it’s necessary to address employees. Other times, it’s about product development or restructuring software organizations, targeting, or managing talents. If agility has been pursued in the wrong way, you may find that shifting the organization towards lean principles leads to performance improvement. We also offer such specialized services. Now, as I reach the end of the introduction, let me briefly share that our team consists of 26 consultants. We have team members from backgrounds in product management, portfolio project management, investment management, project management, business analysis, and software development. Personally, I have been involved in all of these areas throughout my career. I also ran my own software company for about 10 years and participated in all these activities as a manager. Afterward, I focused all my attention on Projera. Projera Institute is our training brand, where we offer all our training and certification programs.
The Future of High-Performance HR: Lessons from Global Leaders
Now, let’s get to the topic. The high-performance transformation in human resources is a case we’ve frequently encountered in the last five years. While transforming IT departments, operations teams, and marketing teams, human resources has also sought high-performance transformations. There are numerous practices and different experiments in place for this. However, issues of effectiveness and productivity arise. “Is the stone we throw worth the bird we’ve startled? Are we receiving employee satisfaction in return for the money we’ve spent? Are we truly achieving our goals in terms of employee satisfaction and performance?” These are the questions. Despite a lot of effort, we sometimes fail to achieve the desired results.
For high performance, our benchmark must be the world giants. Otherwise, all organizations will continue at a certain performance level—earning money, generating revenue, and expanding their markets. These are good things, but when we talk about high performance, our standards must be high.
The New Dynamics of High Performance
In today’s world, it’s no longer the same as it was before the 2000s or 2010s. With the pandemic and the changing world, the names of the world giants have changed. Many of the companies we know today, like Koç Holding in Turkey, are actually much smaller than these new giants, whose organizations are five or ten times the size of Koç Holding. So, when we think of global giants, we may start to look elsewhere. The world is changing, and so are the dynamics. The formula for achieving high performance has also changed.
Customer Obsession: A Key to Success
So, what should we learn from these organizations? From the companies and organizations that are performing well in this new world, we can summarize in one simple sentence: “Customer obsession.” Customer obsession is the key to how these companies have reached their current positions. There is no exception to this. The concept of customer obsession is at the forefront in all of these companies. As you know, Amazon coined the term “customer obsession”. However, when we look at it, most of the companies we are familiar with in Turkey also have a similar obsession with customer satisfaction, but on a different scale.
The Digital Age and Customer Disruption
The term “obsession” is crucial here. Customer satisfaction goes beyond just importance—it’s an obsession. If you obsess over something in everyday life, it means constant focus, with nothing else on your mind. And, just like when someone becomes obsessed with a person, you continuously try and try different approaches until you achieve satisfaction. There’s a form of ingratitude in this obsession with customer satisfaction. You can achieve customer satisfaction at a specific moment, but after a while, the same product or service fades away, no longer satisfying the customer. The expectations of the customer are not being met, and this timeline is shrinking. The consumer society we talk about is something we are all part of.
This is also true for businesses, meaning commercial enterprises with business clients. Commercial businesses have such a big opportunity ahead of them that they can become dissatisfied with the services provided by their suppliers. Three years ago, they were very happy, and the same applies to individuals. People can quickly give up and switch to another competitor. With digitalization, this has become even easier. With the internet, this step became easier. Previously, we didn’t know who our competitors were. We only knew them from TV ads or billboards. But with the internet, as our access to information increased, our competitors started to reach us as well. Even tiny companies began to reach the same market and customer base.
But with digitalization, the maneuverability of the customer has increased as well. We call this disruption, as you know. A company comes along and can easily disrupt your services and steal all your customers in an instant. Therefore, considering we live in such a world, think about the world of Spotify or think about the banking world today. In a bank, I had my own experience for 20 years. I had been working there for 20 years and had never worked with any other bank, both individually and corporately. But when an issue arose at the bank, when they struggled to process one of my transactions and delayed it, within 15 minutes that evening, I decided to move all the institution’s salary accounts. And it only took me one day to do that. Getting the loans, having my credit cards issued, everything took just 15 minutes. We live in such a world. Therefore, even the smallest dissatisfaction can lead to losing everything, losing the customer.
Embedding Customer Obsession in Organizational Culture
Now, what this obsession with customer satisfaction tells the organization is: “Never give up. Try again, and if that doesn’t work, try something else.” The word obsession tells us that—”Never give up. Keep trying.” Now, you might say, “You’re talking about the customer satisfaction obsession of global giants, can you relate this to human resources?” I’ll get to that in a moment.
Now, not being able to have this obsession, not being able to replicate it, and not being able to make it part of the organizational culture is actually the point where corporate agile transformation programs fail. Many companies—banks, insurance companies, telecom companies, manufacturing companies—say, “We learned from the world leaders, we’re going to be agile too,” and start agile transformation programs. For this, they create 50, 100, or 200 teams within the company and spend tons of money to adapt to working systems like Scrum and Kanban. But in the end, since they couldn’t create the obsession with customer satisfaction and didn’t build that culture in the organization, no result is achieved, and the desired result is not there. What we need to do first is this: We need to replicate the obsession with customer satisfaction. We need to embed it in our culture.
Redefining High-Performance HR
Now, let’s move on to human resources. When we talk about high-performance HR, we need to do the same thing. What’s happening in the world, what’s going on? What are world leaders and the companies we just saw doing in the field of human resources? Let’s first start with “what high-performance HR” means.
In the past, HR was always and everywhere considered high-performance HR when it made senior management happy. Employee satisfaction was being discussed. The time when this was mentioned was around the late 90s, the beginning of the 2000s. Before that, the phrase ’employee satisfaction is important, employees are very important to us’ was not being said. But since the early 2000s, HR has been saying this sentence in senior management meetings. They create projects and initiatives for this sentence. But ultimately, in traditional organizations, when HR satisfied senior management, it was often enough to carry out their work and make people say ‘our HR is doing well.’ Employee satisfaction rates, turnover rates, and some low KPIs always had an answer. For example, ‘The pandemic came, that’s why it happened, it’s not HR’s fault. People don’t appreciate the company. As senior management, you’re being too lenient. People don’t value it,’ and there was always an excuse for everything. And here, to be considered high-performance HR in the eyes of senior management, it was enough to satisfy senior management. We know that this is still the case for many companies today, including those that we consider modern companies and even those that have undergone agile transformation.
However, it’s not like this in world-leading companies. It really isn’t. And senior management only cares about whether employees are truly satisfied with HR. ‘Are employees satisfied with our HR? Are they satisfied with our information technologies? Are they satisfied with our solutions?’ They look at the employees, and you can see the roots of this in interviews and discussions from 1988 with Steve Jobs at Apple. They have been like this since then. They have been like this for large companies that have been around for a long time. But in new companies, we see this pattern everywhere. If employees are not satisfied with HR, then HR’s performance is low. It’s that simple.
And when we look at it from this perspective, in companies that are adopting these changes, we see many practices in HR. For instance, there is a constant effort to create new tools, work with IT teams, collaborate with software companies, provide mobile access, and offer opportunities for employees to handle all their tasks through mobile platforms. Companies that are aligning with these trends are investing significant money and effort. However, despite all these efforts, the returns haven’t been as expected in large companies, including some of Turkey’s prominent ones. The impact and returns on the effort haven’t been realized. The reason for this is that our HR teams haven’t fully embraced what world-leading companies have learned. Just like world-leading companies say, ‘Our customer obsession is critical. Our customers, managers, and employees – for HR – we do whatever it takes to make them happy and keep them satisfied. We never give up, we try again, and if that doesn’t work, we try another way.’ HR departments need to turn this obsession into a mindset for employee satisfaction. This is one of the most important points. There is a huge exponential difference between caring about this and turning it into an obsession, and I can emphasize that.
The Importance of Trial-and-Error and MVP in HR
And here, a trial-and-error culture needs to be established. In this trial-and-error culture, we can see that companies are constantly making adjustments to their products to satisfy their customers, without waiting for customer demands, making decisions based on customer behavior and reactions. They evolve their products and services based on this. They don’t wait for the customer to say that they’re happy with something or dissatisfied with something. They can’t afford to wait for that. By the time the customer expresses their opinion, it may already be too late, and the customer may have left. So, a customer calling or sending an email to tell you they are happy or dissatisfied is already too late. By the time that information reaches you, the customer may have already left without informing you. Therefore, all these companies are constantly doing trial-and-error to keep customer satisfaction high and minimize losses. They’re constantly making micro-changes to their products to capture the perfection of the moment. This sentence is very important: ‘The perfection of the moment.’ In other words, the perfection of the moment right now won’t be the perfection of the moment six months later, because a competitor will have emerged, or something else will have been done. Or another company will have offered a new opportunity. So, to capture the perfection of the moment, you have to be constantly in a trial-and-error mode. A company like Spotify, or many companies here that seem easy to copy and disrupt, are not easily disrupted because they never stop; they’re always doing trial-and-error.
Just like this, in human resources, we also need to constantly engage in trial-and-error to satisfy our employees. But there is a problem here. When we look at human resources projects, project planning, and initiatives, we generally see that they are following traditional methods, which is the first issue. Even if they proceed with agile methods, we see that they are only applying the traditional method iteratively and incrementally, without changing anything else. And that’s why our final point is this: the MVP concept (Minimum Viable Product) needs to be fully embraced by everyone. Both companies and human resources.
MVP is a concept born from customer satisfaction obsession. If you have an obsession with customer satisfaction, you do MVP. If you don’t have that obsession, you wouldn’t feel the need for an MVP. There is a sense of fear in the obsession, a fear of losing, a fear of decline. There are many sensitivities within that state. While dealing with these sensitivities, no one would sit down and try to undertake a huge six-month project. Instead, there are constant one-week or two-week trials, getting feedback from micro-pilot teams, employees, or customers, and not tolerating going down the wrong path. Quickly pivoting, abandoning the original idea, and starting over—this is what MVP is.
Conclusion: Creating a High-Impact HR Function
For traditional organizations, MVP is the solution tool for customer satisfaction, and human resources departments should use MVP in every opportunity and in every way for the applications they develop. One word that needs to be highlighted here is ‘minimum.’ It is not about reducing things, but rather, through a few weeks or a few months of work, without making large investments, human resources should support activities aimed at improving and enhancing the employee experience. High-performing HR; when we properly integrate these two aspects—experimentation, constant trial and error, and consistently using MVP—we can truly create a human resources function that makes a difference. We see this in all global giants abroad, and we also witness their practices in Turkey.
-Thank you very much. – Thank you. Of course, from here, we actually need to connect the next presentation to this. We will hear about that from Selam Ömer in the next summit. We need to link employee satisfaction with employee analytics, alongside customer analytics. Absolutely. Well said. Thank you very much, Mr. Dinçer. You’ve already shown your references, if I’m not mistaken. Those who wish to reach out to you can certainly contact you through these addresses. I greatly value partnership, so thank you for these contributions, and most importantly, for the accelerating effect. I send my love and respect to you and all your employees. Thank you. Goodbye. Thank you. Dear friends, now we are sending off Mr. Dinçer. But our summit continues at full speed. We are on the fourth day. As you know, we’ve had three full days, and today has been another full day. But it’s not over. We still have three very valuable panels with important topics ahead. Just like in the previous days.
