Ask the Analyst: What are best-performing organizations doing to move beyond traditional best practices?

Each week for The Briefing, UNLEASH’s weekly intelligence newsletter for senior decision-makers, we put an important question to the true HR experts: Our community of analysts.

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This week we asked them: What are best-performing organizations doing to move beyond traditional best practices?

Here’s their perspectives.

Nicole Roberts, HR Industry Analyst, 3Sixty Insights

The best-performing organizations are moving beyond the idea of blindly adopting ‘best practices.’

Many best practices are externally derived and based on what worked for another organization in a different context, industry, growth stage, or business model.

Instead, leading organizations are becoming more intentional about designing practices that fit their unique business objectives, workforce realities, and operating environments.

They are asking "What problem are we trying to solve?" before asking "What is everyone else doing?"

The common thread among top-performing organizations is not adherence to best practices. It is their ability to continuously evaluate, adapt, and design workforce strategies that are aligned with their business goals, culture, and competitive realities.

Nehal Nangia, Senior Director, Research, The Josh Bersin Company

Many organizations are stuck in traditional best practices that are no longer fit for purpose. However, these practices are often so deeply embedded in organizational systems and mindsets that institutionalizing new ways of doing things feels impossible.

But it is in fact possible!

The highest performing companies embrace change agility — proactively anticipating and adapting to change rather than reacting to change — constantly evolving their practices, anchored in human-centered leadership and a clear vision for business growth.

Here are five things these organizations do differently:

• They fall in love with the problem, not the solution.
• They innovate at the core, not just at the edges.
• They redesign work to add value, not complexity
• They take people along on the journey
• They recognize and reward experimentation, even when it doesn’t yield success

By adopting these behaviors, organizations move beyond dated best practices to tailored strategies that help them build the resilience to survive and thrive through disruption.

Rebecca Wettemann, CEO & Principal Analyst, Valoir

Best performing organizations are recognizing that they need to understand who their people are, what they know, and what they do to optimize workforce planning for AI automation and transformation.

Rather than thinking about AI as a productivity enhancer, they’re thinking about AI as a process changer.

This requires granular knowledge of existing processes and roadblocks, the data needed to inform those processes, and the skills their employees have so they can get proactive about reshaping work, not just saving time.

They’re also thinking proactively about how they reskill managers to manage the evolving workforce of the future and deal with the uncertainty and fear that AI is surfacing.

David Perring, Chief Insights Officer, Fosway Group

The key thing is mindset.

To move beyond traditional best practices, you need to have a strong sense of unease that the approaches of the past will be the springboard to success in the future.

So, what do I see? You can probably boil it down to these seven behaviors.

• Agile thinking - how do I deliver value fast and iterate to amplify outcomes?
• Intelligence driven – how do I use data and insight from HR and business systems to understand the best decisions I need to make?
• Relationship focused – what sort of culture and relationships really driven exceptional outcomes?
• An Uber-customer experience - not just better, but what can I do that is tangibly delightful because they make life easier?
• Energize the workforce – even through moments of strain, how does this power resilience and personal growth?
• Radical cost efficiency – what can I do to proactively seize ways to reduce operational costs?
• Deliver exceptional value – what truly contributes to the measures that matter and that drive a high performance organization?

Each one of these is so intertwined that you can’t really treat these as separate behaviors, but together they come together in a mindset I see the best HR teams carry.

It’s almost their DNA. And it’s that DNA that really enables them to move effectively beyond the traditional ways of doing things, when they need to, on the right themes, that deliver the most value.