Do you want, or need, to talk with someone about an HR challenge your cultural organization is facing?
For the next few months, the three members of the Fractured Atlas People team — Nicola Carpenter, Jillian Wright, and me — will be available a few hours each week for anyone interested in picking our HR brains. We’re offering this free of charge as a way to share experience and expertise with cultural sector colleagues.
Over the years, we’ve been fortunate to build a strong People team function at Fractured Atlas. We started on this path initially because we wanted to create a place where we all enjoyed working. We realized over time that honing a solid People function could also help us attract and retain talent so we had a better shot at achieving challenging, world-altering goals. These world-altering goals are aimed at providing the over 1,000,000 awesome artists in our network with the things they need to be even, well, awesome-er.
“HR” often conjures images of people conducting performance reviews, selecting health and dental insurance benefits, and resolving staff disputes. While that’s certainly part of it — and something we give a great deal of time and thought — it’s not the entirety of the domain or the stuff that really gets us excited.
What changes the game are things like:
- Creating innovative organizations where people can do their best work and thrive;
- Defining and building a shared purpose organizational culture;
- Creating a recruiting and hiring process to build strong, diverse teams that have high levels of trust, engage in healthy conflict, and achieve more together than the sum of their parts;
- Investing in staff development because “learning to earn a paycheck” is not a viable staff development strategy;
- Managing change initiatives and the impact of change;
- Creating flexible and remote work arrangements;
- Goal setting and tracking that allows everyone in the organization to see how their daily work contributes to the company’s overarching goals and strategy.
The Fractured Atlas People team has been invited to participate in learning lunches, deliver presentations, and teach courses about our strategic HR efforts. Discussing the efforts that have resulted in, among other things, the percentage of coworkers of color on staff increasing from 10% to 40% over the past few years. Creating a software engineering team that’s now more than 50% female. Ongoing Crucial Conversations training for staff. Completely renovating our office to create physical space for staff with various working styles. Creating a hiring pipeline and process that adjusts for bias and inherent attitudes so we don’t just keep finding and hiring clones of the same stellar people we already have on staff.
Want to get a better sense for the things we’re happy to chat with you about? This is a list of the things we worked on in 2016 alone.
If you’re interested in having a conversation, email us at HRhour@fracturedatlas.org
Please include a brief description of what you’d like to discuss. If we think we can be a help to you, and still have time slots available, we’ll send you a link to select a time. (The meeting will take place on Zoom video conference; although, if that’s not an option for you, we’re happy to chat by phone.)
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