HR

That’s a good question…

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One of the most important tools a HR pro can have is the ability to ask good questions. You won’t find it in many of the “earn yourself a seat at the table” articles, but trust me it’s true. Good questions are your best friend.

Why?

To start with, good questions help you out when you don’t know what else to say. They help you enter a conversation and are a brilliant way of interacting above your organisational level. Generally, the more senior you get, the more you like the sound of your own voice. Asking questions plays right in to that sweet spot and gets you noticed.

Good questions help you learn. They give you knowledge, insight and understanding that you otherwise would not obtain. They’re your key to learning more about the business and developing your commercial and strategic acumen. Good questions are personal development on speed.

Good questions help you avoid making a fool of yourself. Too many times when things go wrong you have the, “why didn’t you tell me” moment. Which of course has the answer, “you didn’t ask”. Good questions replace volume, they get to the issue quicker than lots of questions and they identify issues before they happen.

Good questions make the other person work. You only have to develop your repertoire of good questions once, but you can deploy them time and time again. The person on the receiving end, however, has to do the thinking. Not only does it make them smarter (and they’ll thank you for that) it also means you can spend the time listening, it’s a win win.

It’s too easy to think that getting yourself noticed, getting influence, getting that organisational recognition is about being heard. And too many HR people spend their time talking and talking to try to fill that space. Next time you’re tempted, ask a question instead (but make it a good one), and see what the response you get is.

Trust me, you’ll never look back.

 

The feedback paradox

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In HR we absolutely LOVE feedback. We talk about it, write about it and tell everyone that they need to do it.

Until it comes to unsuccessful job candidates. And then we will do absolutely anything to avoid it.

Take any group of recruiters or HR people and ask them about giving feedback to unsuccessful candidates and you’ll hear a range of opinions. But you’ll rarely hear anyone espouse that we should be giving feedback to everyone.

And normally the excuse is we don’t have time.

But the truth is that we don’t see the value. We’re only interested in the hire, not the potential hire. We don’t want to improve the talent pool, we want to take from it. We’re not interested in helping people, we’re only interested in them helping us.

If we do give feedback it tends to be generic, unhelpful and unactionable and (I’d suggest) in most cases dodges the real reasons that a candidate didn’t make it through. Don’t believe me? Ask any recruitment consultant what their major gripes with HR professionals are and not providing decent feedback will come up in the top three. Guaranteed.

We can do more.

Giving good feedback, however you manage it, could make a real difference to a candidate going forward. It could be the difference between them getting a job or not. It doesn’t take that long and it feels like it should be a common courtesy and it won’t do your employer brand any harm at all.

So what are we all so scared of?

The fraud of discretionary effort

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When I write about employee engagement, I tend to hear the same response, “it’s about driving performance”. Normally inferring that this is how HR can demonstrate that it is “adding value” and “being commercial”.

Which is nice….

Let’s take a far-reaching view of return on (human) capital. You take employees, you pay them nothing and you make them work every single day of their lives.

That’s slavery. But it is one hell of a return on investment.

Now I’m not for one minute suggesting that the supporters of employee engagement are in any way advocating bonded labour, I merely raise it as a starting reference point of what we mean when we talk about “adding value” through human capital.

Pretty much any employee engagement plan talks about discretionary effort. What is discretionary effort? Essentially it’s about asking people to give more than the financial expectation we have placed upon our working relationship.

So here’s the thing.

Let’s imagine we’re in the queue to get an ice-cream. We may smile, joke or even chat up the vendor hoping to get an additional scoop. But ultimately if we pay for two and get three, then we’re happy. If we pay for two and get one, we complain.

But what if we pay for two and get two? Well that’s the expectation. Isn’t it?

If we believe we are paying fairly for work, then what we pay should equal the return that we get. Shouldn’t it?  When we set out to recruit, we say “this is what we want you to do, this is how we want you to behave and this is what we are going to pay you”.

And then when someone joins we say, “Surprise! That’s just the minimum expectation. We actually expect you to do a whole lot more or we’ll term you disengaged. And nobody round here wants to be in the disengaged box…..”

That’s paying for two scoops and being disappointed that you didn’t get three.

If you want to measure something, measure how much potential value your organisation is destroying in the people who it employed to do the job. My guess is you’re paying them already for “discretionary effort” and what you’re not getting it, you’re blaming them.

Employee engagement, the drive for discretionary effort is simply a way of placing the responsibility on employees for the failure of the organisation to have fair expectations for fair reward.

Or to put it simply;

If you’re not getting what you paid for deal with it,

If you want more, pay more,

And never expect to get something for free.

The great engagement swindle

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I’ve written before about employee engagement, but its a subject that can’t take enough kickings.

I’ll put it simply, employee engagement is the biggest corporate swindle since Asil Nadir thought, “no-one will notice”.

Let’s be clear:

Engagement does not pay the bills.
Engagement won’t cover your medical costs when you take a fall.
Engagement won’t keep the heating on in your retirement.
Engagement doesn’t make you healthy or happy or even a better lover.

Engagement doesn’t even have a standard meaning, definition or measure. It’s a fabrication.

The biggest con about employee engagement? The goal is to drive commercial success, whilst dressing it up as employee welfare. Look at any purveyor of employee engagement services and they will talk about driving business performance.

Employee engagement doesn’t replace talking to people, caring for people, listening to people. It doesn’t replace paying people well, investing in their benefits and providing a decent pension scheme.

Do things right as an organisation, treat people well, don’t treat them like fodder and you’ll be surprised how much they’ll do for you. Not because they’re engaged, but because they want to.

How about we measured leadership engagement instead? How engaged is your leadership team with employees? How well do they know them? When was the last time they had a human to human conversation with someone in the organisation they didn’t know?

Employee engagement is the classic example of human resources forgetting about humans and focussing on resources. It’s bad mumbo jumbo dressed up as science.

Employee engagement is an idea that’s long over stayed it’s welcome. Let’s kill this vacuous, malevolent concept once and for all.