Author: Blog

Professional bodies are out of touch

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In the last of the themes from the Strategic HR Network Annual Congress which were mentioned on the Employment Intelligence blog, I wanted to touch on perhaps the thorniest of issues, the view that was expressed that our professional bodies are out of touch.  Specifically this was in reference to the Charted Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD).

Now it would be easy for me to set about the CIPD here, but only a loud mouthed idiot with a small brain and too much time on their hands would do that…. But I do want to address what I think is an issue with the Institute and in, what I hope, will be a balanced way.

First and foremost I’m going to say that the CIPD are NOT intellectually bankrupt, far from it.  The question here is the perceived relevance. There was a show of hands at the conference asking who was a member and I would say about 80% were.  The next question was whether those members thought the CIPD was adding value to the profession, the response was significantly underwhelming.

To put this in context, this was a relatively small sample size and most people there were HRDs or Heads of functions. I’m sure that if you were to canvas a similar group at a different level of seniority, the response would be quite different. So what’s happening?

I think the CIPD are failing to connect.

What we are talking about here is a lack of customer insight.  As someone who has spent a large part of their career in retail, customer segmentation and differentiation of offering was something that was core to our way of being.  We understood the various groups, we understood what was important to them and we understood how to target our offering to them in a way that was meaningful and valuable to them. As a side note, I should add that we also knew that some people would never engage – as will be the case for the CIPD.

You could argue that the content and services are there and if members don’t wish to engage then what can the CIPD do? If you took that view as a business, you’d be closing down pretty quickly.  One of the biggest mistakes that organisations make in seeking feedback is that they inadvertently speak to the converted – the “fans”.  If you send out a questionnaire, or you speak to people “in store” (read at a CIPD event for comparison) then you are already speaking to people who are engaged.  Therefore the information that you get back won’t help you one iota. But nonetheless you use it to justify what you’re doing, “80% of respondents said we were doing a good job” etc.

The problem is disengaged people don’t respond.  And in the group of disengaged members there will be again different segments, the passively disengaged, the actively disengaged and the vehemently disengaged.  The last segment isn’t worth engaging with, they have no intention of engaging, probably have membership because their employers pay for it and use it only for perceived employability.

What should be of interest are the other two groups and how they can be “brought back into the fold”.  Clearly this isn’t easy as the fact that they aren’t engaged means that you need to go and seek them out.  But with a membership database cross referenced with attendees at conferences, networking events and branch meetings you would have thought that it would be possible. And then they need to really listen and understand WHY these groups aren’t engaged.

My guess is there will be a myriad of reasons, some reasonable, some unreasonable. Some based on fact and some based on misinformation.  But if we want an institute that is truly representative of our profession then it needs to ACTIVELY embrace as wide a population as possible and to try a meet the needs of as many as possible.

This isn’t rocket science and I would love to be told that the CIPD are all over this and that I am teaching the proverbial sucking of eggs.  Personally, I’ve been party to a lot of interaction and communication, at least in an online space, but from the views that I heard at the conference a lot of others don’t seem to feel that way.

The real definition of Organisational Development?

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If there is one term that I hear more and more, but means less and less it is “Organisational Development”.  I’m not sure I was ever taught what it meant all those years ago when I sat my IPD exams nor did I ever witness anyone talking about it as I cut my teeth in the profession. Yet in the last couple of years I seemed to have been invited to more conferences, training days, seminars and webinars on Organisational Development than anything else.

But the thing is….and not for the first time…..we don’t seem to know what we’re talking about.

At a recent conference I attended, the session on OD was the most popular of the lot. Not because of the quality of the speakers, they were neither spectacular nor dismal, but because we were all there hoping someone was going to tell us what it was all about (for the record: they didn’t, so I’m none the wiser).

One of the biggest mistakes that we make, in my small and completely humble opinion, is the confusion between OD and OD interventions.  Typical of the profession, we are happy getting down and dirty with the practicalities and less happy talking about the more ethereal overall concepts. One of the questions raised by a delegate prior to the conference was how to evaluate the success of an OD programme. I guess my answer would be that the problem is the question not the evaluation.

I’m not a big believer in making things complex, there are theorists out there who will tell you the models and thinkers that are best positioned on OD….when I have time to read, it is not going to be on that topic. I tend to take a simple view of all things HR and that includes OD.

If you look at the development of a human it is an organic (by definition) process. We know that humans develop differently; at different speeds, in different ways and with different results.  Within a lifetime there are various stages of development and we “do stuff” to support and aid that development. Whether that is early years stuff, learning the first words etc. Whether that is educational stuff, schooling, further or higher education. Or indeed, whether it is more experiential stuff such as the first job.

And this “stuff” is the group of interventions that support development, sure they can be evaluated and measured (if you absolutely feel the need to) but in themselves they are not the development.  You can measure exam results, but what is done with the learning is the important thing.  Likewise in Organisations, there are interventions that support the development but these in themselves, I would argue, are not Organisational Development.

Instead the overall journey that grows and develops and organisation and the big and tiny interventions as well as the less substantive, but no less important, natural development and growth of the organisation through experience, trial and error, but – and this is an important factor – in a semi-cohesive progression towards an agreed general strategic direction. That for me, comes closer to trying to encapsulate this concept of OD.

And if that all sounds woolly, I guess that is because to a certain extent I think it is. On the other hand, we could just go back to measuring process badly. Because we know how to do that.

Enough with the case studies

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How many companies are there in the FTSE100?

Daft question right?

So how about this one….what percentage of UK companies do they constitute?

The answer is less than half of one percent. And even if you take out sole traders the number doesn’t quite reach 1%.

SME’s employ 13.6m people within the UK and firms employing less than 100 people account for 65% of new jobs created each year. If you include the companies sub FTSE100 but not classified as SME you get somewhere near to 90%.

So why is it that we seem so fixated by a limited number of companies explaining the “right” way to do HR and people management?  If you look at any conference list or journal article you will invariably see the usual suspects arise.

Now I should add that I don’t have anything against these companies or the people who speak per se.  But I don’t think that the constant focus on a select group does anything to improve the collective knowledge of a profession or helps creativity, entrepreneurialism or innovation.

When I was learning my trade it was Marks and Spencer’s that were being hailed as the people to aspire to.  That was in the mid 90’s and of course not many years later they were experiencing the worst, self-imposed, decline in their history.  Likewise not so long ago Royal Bank of Scotland were being hailed and recognized for their success in people management – I don’t need to add much more to that. And one of the latest entrants to the scene seems to be Nokia, which I find curious given their current “burning platform”.

So given that there s why does this happen? Well I think there are a couple of factors at play,

–       We think that big is beautiful and assume that because an organisation is large it is good. The only reason a company is in the FTSE100 is because of its financial muscle, not its intelligence

–       Once you’re on the circuit, you’re on the circuit – easy for lazy conference organisers and big brands require no explanation (is there anyone in American HR who hasn’t been made aware of Zappos?)

I’m not saying that interesting ideas can’t come from the big boys (although I do think size inhibits not enhances innovation) but by the law of averages there must be a whole host of other people out their doing good things. If we’re really interested in driving innovation and creativity in the profession then we need to hear from companies and HR Directors who are doing truly intelligent people interventions, ones that are culturally sensitive, business focussed and have demonstrable value (no this isn’t a pitch for business!). And from the feedback that I heard recently, I’m not alone.

Conference organisers/journalists – take note.

Metrics are a false idol

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The following posts build on the guest post at XpertHR about Commercial HR and looks at some of the themes in a bit more detail.

There was a time when I was pretty hung up on HR metrics. I’d read Huselid, Becker and Beatty, I’d read Ulrich…well some of it….and I was pretty convinced that all we needed to do was to be able to measure what we did in HR and then the world was ours for the taking.

The pattern that I, and I imagine many others, went through was this,

–       Measure stuff

–       Get criticism of measured stuff being inconclusive

–       Decide you’re measuring the wrong stuff

–       Try and measure some other stuff

–       Fail because that stuff is too hard to measure

–       Go back to measuring original stuff because it is simpler

I wrote about a specific example last week, when you look at “Time to fill”, a simple measure that tells you very little. And within that pot you can add a whole host of traditional HR measures. But, unfortunately, the “better” measures either don’t actually exist or require so many different pull or push sub measures that they become and industry in themselves.

So in the end we stop doing and start measuring…..Genius!

Thinking of it another way around.  What if I asked you the following questions?

How fit are you? Have are you feeling today?

In order to answer this do you need to check your BMI, your blood pressure, your recovery time, your heart rate and a red blood cell count?

Or can you intuitively answer the question because of a number of micro observations that you have made throughout the day, how quickly you got out of bed in the morning, how your trousers felt when you put them on, how you felt when you had to run for the bus or climb the stairs because the lift was broken?

Now I’m not saying that the measures aren’t important to do every now and then – in the same way you go for a medical – but if we spent more time in our businesses being observant, being intuitive, asking questions, listening and feeling, my guess is we would come to better conclusions than we would by measuring a whole load of HR process.

And in the meantime we’d learn a whole lot of things and build a whole heap of relationships that would add more value than sitting in our department crunching meaningless numbers.

Surely that’s got to be the elusive win-win?