HR

Lies, damned lies and business

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Business is full of lies. FACT.

Sometimes the lies are big, sometimes the lies are small. Sometimes the lies are inconsequential and sometimes they rock the foundations of the civilised world. But like the urban myth that you’re never more than 8 foot from a rat, in business you’re never more than one cubicle away from a lie.

And that is just the way that it is.

I’m not going to try to argue that the Nick Leeson, the Olympus Corporation, Lehman Brothers or Jérôme Kerviel lies are in any way appropriate or defendable.

But the only difference between these and the others is the size and the consequences, those that make a moral judgment would be better off looking closer to home.

Is it a coincidence that so many public limited companies come in within their stated profit targets every year? Good management or good financial management? Over perform and you run the risk of raising expectations for future years, underperform and you run the risk of your share price being devalued and your tenure being reduced.

If you release provision in a bad year to bolster the bottom line, or take bad news in a good year to managed down profits, are these really lies? Well yes, in the truest sense of the word they are. But they are universally accepted and ignored.

And in the same way how many companies that state “people are their greatest asset” would stand up at the AGM and announce,

“Profits? Shareholder return? Pah…..we’ve got great people….we rock!”

Business is full of lies.

Anyone who has ever answered the question, “Which dress do you prefer?” with a, “they both look great, but I prefer that one because it matches your eyes, not because there is anything wrong with the other one which is perfectly lovely and looks great on you in every single way…..” (you can tell I’ve practised that).  Can easily transfer this to, “you performed really well and we really enjoyed meeting you, unfortunately we need to make a decision and there were candidates who better matched the criteria for the role”.

Likewise the “bijou property with unusual features and scope for improvement” can easily become, “we are committed to the development of all our employees and helping them fulfil their career potential”.

The language of business is a weasel mix of truth and lies, correct. But it isn’t any different from any other part of society. Politicians, Teachers, Doctors, Sportspeople, Charities, Husbands, Wives, Children.  Let he is who without sin etc. etc.

It is very easy for the press, for the public, for the politicians to highlight individual failings and to find a helpful scapegoat.  Business shouldn’t be held to any higher moral standard than we would hold anyone else. We shouldn’t confuse profit-making with profiteering, we shouldn’t engage in duality or assertions of duplicity. We should be open and honest about our imperfections and the societal need for conformity and complicity.

Lies are an everyday part of our lives and in covering over this fact we are of course reasserting its veracity; an inconvenient, but inescapable truth. Just like any other context, business needs lies to survive, it needs lies to maintain balance and it needs lies to underpin its existence. But like in our social lives, like in sport, like in the church, sometimes a lie becomes so big, so grave that it causes damage, hurt and concern. The fact that in business they are reported more sensationally, doesn’t mean that they are more prevalent or indeed any worse.

Business is full of lies. Guilty as charged. But lets face it, it isn’t in the dock all alone.

Ordinary leads to ordinary

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One of the biggest problems within the HR profession, is a lack of innovation. By this I don’t mean harebrained schemes dreamed up in those horrible “away days” that come to nothing, or worse, that actually come to something…….pointless. I mean true innovation. The creation of new and different ways of thinking about situations, and the definition of exciting future realities.

Why?

Because we worry too much about “the practicalities”. The moment that anyone starts to suggest ideas, to progress thoughts that are maybe slightly out of the everyday is also the moment that others start to provide reasons why it wouldn’t be possible.

Because we have to deal with practicalities right? We have to take into account the reality?

Yes. And no.

You see the problem with staying rooted to the practicalities is that you are anchoring your reality to the now, to the understood and known and therefore any solution you pitch will also fall into the understood and the known. It won’t be a game changer, it won’t radically alter anything. It will be humdrum.

When you frame your thinking in the ordinary, your solutions will be ordinary.

Now I know that at this point people will start telling me that there have been innovative solutions for mundane problems. Think Velcro, think Tippex, think Elastoplast. But innovation that shifts our paradigm does so because it pays no account to practicalities….it redefines them.

Think the internet. Think the steam engine. Think the transistor.

These are not answers to problems; these are enhancements to society. If we accept the workplace is a community, then we too should be striving for innovative enhancements rather than tactical solutions. Not every idea that we ever come up with will fly, but if we stop worrying about the here and the now and start defining the future, we’re more likely to find a shining jewel.

Practicality is the enemy of innovation.

Frugal HR

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There was a time when the newspapers were full of the “end of DIY”. We were all so cash rich and time poor that it was much easier to get on the phone (or increasingly the internet) and get someone to come and do it for us. Broken gutter? Kitchen door not working? Skirting board looking a bit 1960s? And within a click or a call we were all good…disposable income spent, time saved, work carried out.

The thing is that underlying this apparently virtuous circle of events was a slightly darker reality. We were slowly becoming unable to carry out these relatively mundane and low skilled tasks. Why learn to do something, when it is quicker and cheaper to call someone in to help? Why bother debasing ourselves to these menial tasks, when we have so much more important things to focus our minds on? Like which of the 96 TV channels we are going to watch an American import on this evening.

But wait. What is this? Is this some attempt at a social critique of our times?

No, not really. Just a cack handed metaphor for the way that I see the HR profession developing. You see, back in the early days of my career, when livestock filled the street, we were all obsessed by the pending devaluation of the florin and Cliff Richard had just had his first number one hit, HR people had to do fairly much everything for themselves. So we weren’t called HR then, but that is another story and one that I don’t have time or space for here.

External consultants were few and far between. Ok, you might pull in a Compensation or Remuneration specialist to help you with your pay strategy, benefit review or a bit of job evaluation, you’d have a Recruitment Advertising Agency that might advise you on your copy or your “house style” and of course your legal advisors to tell you what you shouldn’t do, but not what you should do (there are a range of options…..). But that was fairly much it. The rest, you used your internal knowledge, your external networks and if you couldn’t get the answer, you researched and created.

Of course, that was after the last recession and budgets were tight. But as young HR professionals we learnt to turn our hands to a number of things. We might not have been experts, but we knew a bit about fairly much everything.

L&D? Check. Resourcing? Check. Employee Relations? Check.

And here is a thing…..we used to represent the company at Tribunal ourselves.

Over time I’ve seen things shift. Partly because the economy picked up and we had more “disposable cash” in our budgets, partly because we were being constantly bombarded with articles and case studies about companies that had implemented x, y and z (the organisational equivalent of keeping up with the Joneses) normally instigated by the suppliers with the sole aim of showing their wares in the market place and drumming up more business and partly because of the shift to the Business Partner model which led HR generalists to think that they were too strategic and important to sully their hands with the likes of practical HR solutions when they could be sitting in meetings talking about……stuff.

Rather than reskill the profession, which is what many would like us to believe, in many cases we have instead deskilled the profession. There is only so much room for strategic thinking within human resources. So what value is being added by the others?

In the same way that many of us have to learn to tighten our belts at home, to rediscover lost skills for cooking, sewing, mending, fixing, creating….the current economic situation offers an opportunity for HR professionals to really hone their skills and to become proper generalists. There will always be a need for external support and guidance, but that will never beat the learning of new skills, the development of our own abilities and the broadening of our own talent profiles.

There is time to think about the greater bigger issues of the workplace, there is a need to consider the greater strategic issues of the day, but a good HR professional also knows what great looks like and how to deliver it themselves. Being practical, being hands on, these aren’t bad things. The sooner we get the balance back in our professional lives the better.

And given the economic environment that we’re in there is no better moment to start than right now. And who knows, we might all have a little bit of fun in the learning process too! Now who could argue against that?

Paid internships – a red herring?

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Not a day passes without a post or article coming before my eyes which berates the use of unpaid interns.  There are a lot of seasoned campaigners in this area, there a lot of people starting to speak out, there are petitions, there is general outcry and, quite frankly, there is a lot of group think and often a failure to grasp the real issues at the heart of the problem.

The question of internships is complex. First what constitutes an internship and what constitutes work experience or training? There seems to be general consensus, including from the report from the Panel on Fair Access to the Professions and more recently in their follow-up Common Best Practice Code for High Quality Internships, that internships are different to work experience, on many levels but not least on the duration of the placement.  But a lot of the newspaper reporting and outcry seems to fail to take this into account…..like this.

So if we can agree what we are talking about, then lets move us on to pay.  The argument put forward is simple, internships are work. There is a national minimum wage, therefore internships should be paid. Which of course is a simple and compelling case that is hard to disagree with and one that I wouldn’t challenge where the internships are work. But does this solve the problems of internships? No, it really doesn’t.

In fact it goes nowhere near…..and this is where I want to challenge those that are jumping on the band wagon.  Let us think back to why we argue internships should be paid. Well part of it is of course just a question of fairness of treatment, but part of it is about fairness of access. When internships are unpaid, it unfairly advantages those who can afford not to be paid for a period of time. And those that can afford not to be paid for a period of time are generally supported by their families, therefore leading to social disadvantage.

But unpaid internships aren’t new, the minimum wage legislation is (well comparably!). Pay doesn’t solve the access to opportunity – look at the figures on diversity in judges if you need any convincing. This is instead a question of advantage leading to advantage.  Simply arguing that internships should be paid, will not solve the problem and in many cases  will simply lead to the children of those who can most afford it being made better off, not better access to intern opportunities for those that can least afford it.

Which I don’t think is what people want.

So the real question we should be asking is, how to do we open up opportunities to a broader community and have a socially mobile society? And that is a really tough one.

When we talk about social mobility, we naturally think of people moving upwards.  A good thing.  But, if we accept the proposition that opportunity is finite, then in order for some people to move up, then others need to move down.  A bad thing. In order to offer internships to those that deserve but can’t afford them, we need to take them away from others, those that don’t deserve them but can afford them.  Is that really going to happen just by making employers pay? I don’t think so. What is the incentive to challenge the status quo?

Which brings me to Etsio. Now I’m not going to try to defend what could be seen as charging people to work – I don’t know what the experience is of the people undergoing the internships,but I don’t like the look of some of the “offers”. However, intellectually speaking a straight commercial approach could be seen as a more honest and open approach to the offering of internships than the “old school tie” or “old boys/girls club” approach that is prevalent in many sectors and which, I’d argue is overall a bigger inhibitor to social mobility.

I’ve written before about the gap between employers’ needs and the provision of the education system.  Access to good quality vocational training is really important in filling this gap and who is better placed to provide it than employers? It wouldn’t be a hard intellectual argument to say that if we could set a quality standard for the provision of internships and vocational training by organisations, that they should also be able to charge for it in the way that the FE and HE sectors charge for their courses. And of course, then you could extend the argument to say that people should be offered the same financial assistance offered by Government for education in the form of loans to undertake internships/vocational training. Perhaps this could provide a longer term sustainable approach to the UK skills gap?

I’m not necessarily advocating any of this, and I’m certainly not condoning the use of interns as “cheap labour”, I’m just pointing out that we need to think differently and look at the situation in its entirety rather than focus on a rather simple, populist element. So, next time you see or hear comment on internships and pay, do me a favour and think through what we really need to achieve here and not just what is simplest to get your head around? That way we might collectively go some way to solving the real problem.