Author: Blog

Unconscious immunity

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I can remember at some point in my childhood, my brother and I were having a pointless argument over a pointless topic in only the way that loving siblings can. I can’t remember the specifics, there were far too many brotherly tiffs to record them all, but I know that he was teasing me over something that I had tried to do and failed badly at. And my mother said,

“Those who never try, never fail”

Those who never try….never fail.  Ok so this was said as a rebuke to a 9-year-old evil tempered older brother. But some 30 years or so later I was sat in the US thinking about the future of HR and why we seem incapable as a profession of shaking off the shackles of mainstream perception and the words start to take on a separate but equally  valid meaning.

So many of us out there in the profession are seeking some sort of unconscious immunity.  If we say nothing outside of “the box”, then there is no chance that we will be ridiculed.  If we keep our counsel on subjects that are out of the strictly defined “people agenda” then we will never look stupid. If we don’t talk and stay silent, then we might not look stupid and might raise our credibility.

Of course, when you read this – like me – you’ll think this is a nonsense.  It makes no sense right?  Why would not saying something be more likely to improve your credibility than saying something? But then you are reading this from a rational objective and not an emotional one. And the way that we interact in business and express our views is, in my opinion, more based on the latter than the former.

Saying nothing is a seemingly sure bet.  If you say nothing, you will seldom be wrong. The view on the monthly financial report, the question on the marketing plan, the point on the supply chain strategy that just doesn’t sit right.  Raising them…..well you could be totally wrong and make yourself a laughing-stock. But not raising them………?

Don’t get me wrong, I can be guilty of this myself. Sitting in a meeting and thinking “that doesn’t make sense” but saying absolutely nothing. Not always, but sometimes. And I need to challenge myself to break this habit.  You don’t change anything by staying silent, you change by speaking out.

Very little grows in the shadows, it grows in the glare of the midday sun.  You put yourself out there and of course there is the risk that you may just get something wrong. But let he who is without asking a daft question, throw the first stone.  And you never know, once in a while, you might say something that really changes the game.

Recruiters: Stop playing God

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Sometimes it is the small things that remind you of a bigger issue.  I was in my hotel room in Berlin on Wednesday night when I saw a tweet from Katie McNab, Recruiter for PepsiCo about women who use their partner’s email addresses on job applications. In her words,

“It makes them look like children who can’t be trusted with their own comms”

We had a bit of back and forth over the subject and I think it is fair to say that there was little or no common ground (you can see some of the conversation here).  Katie was firm to her view that this was “inappropriate” and given that she is a recruiter, speaks at conferences and well regarded, I guess I have to bow to her superior knowledge – again in her words,

“placing judgment on people is part of the job”

and according to Katie, I was in the minority (although looking through the timeline there was only one person who agreed and one who didn’t – which is a kind of soviet democracy!).

But it has been niggling away at me. I did a little interview with DriveThru HR where we talked about the skills gaps that we are facing in the global economy.  Manpower, BCG and the CIPD have recently reported that managers were finding it more difficult to attract the right talent.  Good candidates are staying put and have a world of opportunities at their feet should they wish to move. Put simply, recruiting “talent” is going to get harder.

If you listened to the twittersphere and blogosphere you’d understandably be mistaken for believing that the answer is to “go social” and of course that is an element of changing attraction strategies.  But it seems to me we also need to challenge some of the institutional slothfulness of in-house recruiters. Katie is right, we all make assumptions about people, that is human, but we need to be challenging these and minimising them – not celebrating them in public.

Recruitment isn’t about judging people, it is about discovering people.

And recruiters need to stop playing God.

As well as being quasi-discriminatory (although I am sure not in intent) diminishing an application because of a candidate’s CHOSEN means of communication is either naïve, arrogant or idiotic in the extreme – I really can’t decide which.  There is absolutely no legal, morale, organisational or rational argument behind doing so. There could be a million reasons that an individual chooses to include a partner’s email on an application but that is their choice.

Increasingly we will need to be searching for talent, lifting up rocks, thinking creatively about how we bring people in, how we train them, how we help them to meet the requirements of the job and leave our own prejudices and judgments at the door.  The good companies and recruiters will get this and make a name or career for themselves. The bad ones? Well they’ll keep talking the talk in public, but failing to walk the walk where it really matters.

Which, let’s be honest, is no bad thing really.

It just makes it easier for the rest of us.

Are you a hoop creator?

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I’m not a fan of Holby City, I’ve spent enough time in hospitals to not need to watch pretend ones. But I am a fan of Luther (why psychopathic cops chasing sociopathic criminals should be more attractive to me than hospitals is anyone’s guess). And it was whilst waiting for the latter that I caught the end of the former and particularly this quote,

“We need to complete this for HR, they like to make us jump through these hoops”

I tweeted it and the rest of the evening was spent messing about with Emma Vernon, Mervyn Dinnen and David Kelham (amongst others) on the topic of #hoopcreation.

We laugh…..but hang on sec….isn’t that what people see as us? And isn’t that because a lot of what we do IS hoop creation?

“We need to create a process for that” – HOOP

“I think we need to review the form” – HOOP

“We need a sign off procedure” – HOOP

Do we REALLY need these things? Or do we need to communicate better, to build relationships and to trust people? Are we covering our inability to influence with a series of hoops?

I’m going to challenge myself….and I challenge you…..next time you’re talking in this way ask yourself this, “is there a legal, regulatory or business critical imperative for doing this? Or am I just indulging in hoopcreation?” And if you’re feeling really brave, go and find some of those hoops you’ve already created and work out ways to throw them away.

I’m telling you, not only will the business thank you, you might actually free up some time to do something that adds real value. How about that for a win win?

How not to engage with customers

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I don’t profess to be any sort of marketing or customer service guru. That said, having spent the best part of a decade working in retail, I know a little about managing customer relationships and expectations. 

At the weekend my daughter fell in love with a certain pair of Converse shoes (for those of you that care, they’re the waterfall blue, double tongued variety).  The thing is, the shop that we were in didn’t have her size and so when we got home we went on the internet and eventually found a pair at a shop called Ozzy’s & Archive. Click, click, credit card. Job done.

Until Monday evening when I received an email saying,

“Hi Neil,

Thanks for your recent order of the Converse shoes!

Some bad news im afraid. We have just gone out of stock with this shoe!

We are changing our stock system and some so we are having to manually change stock levels on the site for now, unfortunately you placed an order before we had chance to change your items stock levels online.

Its upto you what you would like to do. Whether you want to choose another item to replace the shoes, or just have your order cancelled. Whatever you want, just let me know!

Again, sorry for the hassle,

Something about the tone really got to me (maybe the excessive use of exclamation marks).  As a customer, I don’t really care what your systems issues are, that is the rational explanation that YOU have for YOUR service failure, it isn’t the emotional attachment that I had with the product that (in my mind) I had already bought. And to compound this, there was there was no recognition of the disappointment – just a choose something else or get your money back standard response.

On the bottom of the email, however I noticed a Facebook page. So I thought I’d check it out. I “liked” the page (which felt somewhat counter intuitive…but hey!) and saw that there was a post about not winning a Retailer of the Year award. At this point you’ll understand I felt obliged to post something, so I wrote a comment on their wall:

Sadly rubbish customer service from Ozzy’s and Archive. You are a long way from Retailer of the Year if you can’t show your stock levels correctly on the site, take an order and then respond with a “choose a different product or have your money back” routine. One lost customer.

I checked back a little while later and lo and behold……my comment had disappeared.  Censorship? Well hang on a minute….so I wrote another comment:

Hi there, I wrote some feedback on here about the poor customer service that I received from Ozzy’s and Archive but it seems to have disappeared. Surely you haven’t deleted it?

And then things just got worse……within 10 minutes that comment was taken down too and my ability to post anything on that page was revoked.

Clearly someone didn’t want people to see any bad comments about their service. Which is what brings me here to write about this today.  The world with social media is a conversation, you might be able to constrain what people see or hear (to a certain extent) but you can’t control what they say.  And ignoring a negative situation, surely doesn’t change how people feel.

Engaging with customers that are disappointed and upset is as, if not more, important than engaging with customers that are advocates.  You can try to control the message, but somehow it will always get out. So wouldn’t it be better in the first place to engage?

Ozzy’s and Archive gave me bad customer service. It wasn’t abysmal, but it was pretty ropey. Through the way that they’ve handled it, however, they have turned a disgruntled customer into someone who wants to write about it and tell the world what a rubbish company he thinks they are. They had a choice how they reacted and treated me and they chose to try to make the problem go away.

Sadly for them, it didn’t.

As a side note, Ozzy’s emailed me again last night elaborating on their justification for their failure, but sadly I can’t reply as their Mailbox quota has been exceeded (how many more customer service crimes can one company commit?). If you want to see the screen prints of the various comments then you can see them below (I don’t normally take screen prints – as you can tell from the other tab open on the first one! – but funnily I had a hunch about this. Oh and I no longer like their page……but Maddy does have a new pair of Converse on the way to her……just from a different shop.

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