This is a special episode of TED Talks Daily featuring author Patty McCord.

It's from The Way We Work, an original video series from TED.

In each episode, leaders and thinkers offer practical wisdom and insight into how you can

adapt and thrive at work when the rules are always changing.

You can find Season 1 of the way we work on

TED.com. HR jargon makes me crazy. We have to have all these stupid acronyms that describe things

that nobody understands. OKRs and PIPs. I think we can run our businesses by just talking to each other

like regular human beings. We might actually get more done.

I really always wanted to be an HR professional.

I wanted to be able to speak the language of management.

And you know what I've learned after all this time?

I don't think any of it matters.

There's all kinds of things that we call best practices that aren't best

practices at all. How do we know it's best? We don't measure this stuff. In fact, I've learned

that best practices usually means copying what everybody else does. Our world is changing and evolving

all the time. Here's some lessons to help you adapt. Lesson one, your employees are adults. You know,

we've created so many layers and so many processes and so many guidelines to keep those

employees in place that we've ended up with systems that treat people like their children.

And they're not. Fully formed adults walk in the door every single day. They have rent payments,

they have obligations, they're members of society. They want to create a difference in the world.

So if we start with the assumption that everybody comes to work to do an amazing job,

you'd be surprised what you get.

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