Three months in: Anna Ruediger on people, performance and doing HR differently
Anna Ruediger reflects on her first three months at Humankind, from early surprises to the ideas and moments that have shaped her view of what great people work can be.
Three months in - and a few things I didn't expect
At university, I loved HR. I went all in, excited to build a career in it. And then my early experiences with actual HR departments quickly put me off - too much focus on rules and policies, surface-level care for people, and a habit of seeing someone only in their current role, not their future potential. So I took a different path: strategy, leadership, performance.
After a year off to think hard about where I could make the biggest impact, I knew it was somewhere in the leadership space. I'd heard Humankind was different. The question wasn't do I want this, it was could a role like this possibly be real?
Three months in, I can say it is. At Humankind, I’ve seen how possible it is for organisations to do better for their people - and to do better business because of it.
Day one, and the welcome was real
Messages from our CEO before I'd even started. A desk set up and waiting. People checking in, rather than just CC'ing me into things. I came into this role from outside traditional HR, and instead of that being a gap to manage, it's been treated as an asset. A lot of our team bring a different lens to this work - and I think that's part of why Humankind does it differently. We're not weighed down by the way HR has always been done.
The belief underneath it all
Give people a great employee experience, and you get great organisational performance.
Great employee experience comes from clarity of strategy, leaders who know how to lead, structures that match the strategy, and ways of working that let the team deliver. Simple on paper. Hard in practice - especially when you're growing fast, stretched thin, or your leaders haven't built the muscle yet. That's exactly the problem rules-and-policies HR was never built to solve, and it's where our team comes in.
We work alongside leadership teams as a squad - pulling on each other's domain expertise and collective wisdom to deliver more for our clients than any one of us could alone.
Inspire Day
That belief showed up again last week at Inspire - our annual team day, named after one of our values summarised in this line: we keep the human in the loop, even as we harness new technology and ideas, leading by example as much as by what we say.
The whole team flew in from across the country. We kicked off the night before with the launch of our founder Samantha Gadd's new book, Employee Experience Design - a fitting way to celebrate the thinking that underpins so much of what we do.
The day itself opened with reflection: who inspires us, and where we have (and haven't) had the chance to use our strengths this year. A simple exercise, but a useful gut-check on whether the work is playing to people's capability.
In the afternoon we ran a design sprint - fast, demanding, genuinely creative - and walked away with three directions we're excited about: recruitment, compensation, and AI in organisational design.
The session that's stayed with me most was from futurist Melissa Clarke-Reynolds. One line in particular: that AI is, in a sense, disembodied intelligence - as if intelligence sits only in the head, and not also in the heart.
It's a sharp way to frame what's at stake in the future of work. Capability isn't the same as humanity. And what it means to be human, as Melissa put it, is in part that we are not alone.
That's a useful thing to hold onto in a year where so much of the conversation is about what machines can do. The work we do is, fundamentally, still about people doing it together.
Three months in, I'm genuinely excited about what's next - for our clients, for the ideas we sprinted on, and for what it means to keep designing work that brings out the best in people.
