General

Customers can be wrong

Posted on by Blog

Is the customer ever wrong? That was a question that I posed to the wonderful Doug Shaw at the CIPD Conference in Social Media last year. I was being mischievous. Because the answer is, of course. Sometimes the customer IS wrong. Let me give you some examples.

I was out for dinner on Saturday night and when we went to order the waiter had a somewhat quizzical look in his eye. We were ordering from the menu, we were ordering perfectly good dishes, but he felt that there were better dishes on the menu that we could be eating. He recommended, we went with his recommendations and we had an amazing meal. For the record, that was Khan’s of Brixton….it doesn’t look much, but the food is amazing.  The thing was, he was trying to give us a better experience.

I’ve come across suppliers, in the past, who have turned work down because they didn’t feel it was their strong suit. I’ve complete respect for that. I’ve also come across suppliers who have tried to convince me that I wanted product A not product B. Not because product A was better, but because they couldn’t do product B. I’ve less respect for that.

I may have been wrong in both cases, but the honesty and the integrity of the supplier was the differentiating factor. And likewise, as an HR practitioner, sometimes you will come up against circumstances where the client or customer is wrong. They want to do one thing, you believe that another thing is right. If you have the best interests of the business and the client at heart, then you should feel free to challenge and free to try to guide them to a better solution. The old HR adage of, “I explain to them the risks and then I let them make the decision”, is an out dated, ill thought through, pile of steaming nonsense. That is not adding value in any shape or form.

Challenging a CEO, or senior manager, who has their mind set on one thing and influencing them to do something else is scary. It can be risky and in some organisations it can be dangerous. But be under no illusion, that it is right. Just choose how you approach it, choose how you do it and be prepared to be proved wrong. We all are sometimes.

Like suppliers, as an HR professional, you should be looking to build a long-term sustainable relationship. That means that a level of openness, honesty and challenge is always appropriate even if it isn’t always welcome. Customers aren’t always right, sometimes they need a little guidance. It can be hard work, it can be unforgiving, but it is one way to really add value to your business.

If you don’t believe me, watch this:

Innovation versus process: Day one of #CIPD12

Posted on by Blog

Life is about contrast, the good and the bad, the brave and the faint hearted, the inspirational and the disappointing. The great thing about contrast is that it helps you to form an opinion, helps you to learn and, if you take the time to reflect and consider, it can help you to grow.

The first day of the CIPD Annual Conference has been a lot about contrast.

As an opening session, Gary Hamel was never going to disappoint. Energetic, humorous, informed and challenging.  Some of the quotes alone were worth attending for,

“No-one grows up wanting to be a manager”

“Markets are better at allocating resources than managers”

“Management was created by engineers and accountants…..and it shows”

And my personal favourite,

“Organisations are like dogs, really good at peeing on lamp posts, not so good at doing the tango”

But entertainment is one thing.  Was there substance behind it and what did we know that we didn’t know before we entered the room? The answer to the first question is yes, the answer to the second….not so much. But ou often don’t need to learn, just being reminded can be powerful.

The basis for future organisational success and growth needs to be about defining a higher purpose which we can all collectively work towards. Management is a tool that has developed to ensure conformity, but the organisations that will thrive and succeed are those that are not focussed on conformity, but focussed on innovation. And as HR people the fundamental issue for us is not developing better processes, better tools or better methods, but helping to develop better principles. In order to innovate and create at speed we need to focus on decentralization and not centralization.

Music to my ears.

The thing is, though, as an HR profession we have been focussed on the antithesis of these principles. We have become focussed on process and procedure. We desire conformity and control more than anything and this lust has led us on an ongoing agenda of centralization and aggregation. We have shown the greatest lack of ingenuity, innovation and free thinking since the lemmings all decided it was a good idea to follow one another off the cliff.

But life is full fo contrasts and on leaving the session, I went in to another (to remain unnamed) where I was presented with a “case study” full of process and procedure. And when I say full……I mean full. There isn’t enough Valium in the world to get me through that session.

If this is an organisational challenge then it is one which we are ill-equipped and ill prepared to tackle as we currently stand. Both a risk and at the same time an amazing opportunity. Because if we can get our own house in order, then we can play an important role of the evolution of business, work and the workplace.

From what I see though, we have a long way to go.

Let it all out

Posted on by Blog

Some people will tell you that there is no place for emotion in the workplace. These are the same people that will tell you that everyone is equal, that fear is irrational and that there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

The workplace is full of people and people are full of emotions. These are the facts of life.

As a HR professional, there are times when you will see the extreme of emotions, the good, the bad and the downright ugly. You have to be ok with that and you have to react to that with skills that they will never teach you in school.

People laugh, people cry and sometimes, people shout.

Shouting is ok. Shouting is natural. Shouting is an expression of frustration, of need, of incompetence, of disappointment and desire. Shouting isn’t desireable, but it is acceptable.

As a HR professional you are going to get shouted at. Because you’re a safe place, not a soft place, for these emotions to be expressed, because you’re neutral and because you, alone from many others, will tolerate it.

And tolerate it, you must.

Remember, that when someone is shouting at you, they’re doing so because they are hurting. Remember that they don’t care about your process, or policy. Remember that they want to be treated as a human, because the hurt that they are feeling is the hurt that only a human can feel.

Keep calm, listen, keep your voice low, ask questions, seek to understand. Seek to help, remember that you are the person that can resolve the hurt.

That is the value that you can add. And it is the value that often individuals seek from their HR partner. The forms and processes can wait for another day. But the person in front of you can’t. They need you, they need your help, and they need it now.

So what are you waiting for?

A rewarding conversation

Posted on by Blog

I read a lot of blogs from the HR community, both here in the UK and in other less developed countries….like the US. I read good, bad and indifferent posts about a range of subjects. I read about engagement, resourcing, learning, strategy (pause for theatrical laughter) but I seldom read about reward.

The very essence of employment is reward. We might try to shy away from it, we might try to avoid it, but put simply, work is undertaken only for reward. Whether it is the exchange of goods, the promise of salary or of course the contentious bonus.

We work for return.

So why is it that we talk so much about so many other areas of our remit, but so little about reward?

Is it too hard? Is it too sensitive? Or have we forgotten the essential element that underpins our existence as HR people, because we would rather focus on the froth?

Reward has been the driver behind so much of our corporate success and corporate failure over the last gazillion decades. It has taken more mainstream column inches than any engagement initiative or recruitment technology. Yet for all the creative thinking that the blogosphere offers, so little of it is dedicated to the biggest prize of all.

When I’ve written about reward in the past it has had a mixed reaction.

My mind boggles, I need to address these topics, I need to think about these things more clearly. I don’t have the answers, I’m not even sure I have the questions, but I know that as a profession we need to be thinking about this topic in so much more detail.

So…..why aren’t we?