HR

Sack the HR department?

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Scanning the social media airwaves this weekend, a title immediately grabbed my attention, “Sack the HR department!” the title of a white paper from the “Great Place to Work Institute”. You can read the entire paper here but the summary highlighted a number of reasons why staff don’t have high opinions of the HR department.

HR function outsourced so more remote

HR staff seen as ‘whistleblowers’

HR staff not following their own rules about recruitment and promotion

HR turning a blind eye to managers likewise who don’t play by the rules

Line managers expected to carry out HR role with little or no training

HR seen as out of touch with the rest of staff

I’m not a great fan of “research” papers that are essentially there to sell a service. But the summary points resonated with a number of arguments I’ve made in the past.

I struggle to think of an example of an outsourced HR solution that has added long term value to the organisation and improved the service for employees. I’ve heard the arguments, sure, but the evidence? Last April I wrote a piece about the “Sausage Machine”. The outsourcing process, however, is the sausage machine on steroids, supposed efficiency drives and incentivises the dehumanisation process. It is as simple as that.

Trust is a theme that I’ve come back to time and time again. Most HR departments aren’t trusted and this makes any sort of intervention or improvement in the employee experience almost impossible. If you’re not trusted, your work won’t be trusted. If you can’t deal with confidentiality, you won’t be confided in.

And a lot of this is underpinned by the relentless desire by HR to be seen as “commercial”. Which so many read as, “doing whatever I’m told by the big bosses” and which, of course, in many cases is exactly the opposite. Sometimes saying “no” well is the most commercial thing you can do. If you want evidence just look at the role of HR in most of the corporate failures in the last ten years.

But perhaps the biggest warning light to the profession, is being out of touch. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Most HR departments don’t have a clue what is going on in their organisations. And sadly, most think they’ll solve this by learning to read a P&L. In the same way that there are no answers at the bottom of an empty glass, nor is their organisational insight at the bottom of a balance sheet. Well, certainly not the sort we’re looking for.

So does this tell us anything new? Not really. Does it tell us anything we don’t know? Probably not? Will we pay attention? I guess the good will but the bad won’t.

And that is the fundamental problem with the profession.

Two magic things

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I want to introduce you to two magic things that will make your work easier.

Two things that will make you a better leader.

Make you a better a manager.

In your darkest hours there are two things that you can look to hold on to.

The only things you’ll need to move onwards.

If you want to be a better person, be a better you.

Take the two things, “Thank” and “You” and combine them together.

Rejoice in them, use them, spread them liberally.

Live them, be them, make them your own.

Every day, you can let people know that you’re grateful.

The big, the small and the middle.

Because the magic can exist for everyone.

If only we’d let it flow.

Four decades of connection

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I was born in Cardiff on November 11, 1973. It was the same year that Motorola showcased the first mobile phone, although I was ten by the time the first handset was commercially available. I’m not sure either of these things really concerned me, but for the record it was also the year that Ethernet was developed, in case you’d care to know?

By that time, I’d moved to the Isle of Wight. I moved there in 1979, the year the Commodore PET was released here in the UK. For a (then) astronomic £914 you could get yourself a whole 32KB of RAM. It was also the year that the compact disk was invented, but I don’t really think I cared. I was settling in to a new school and making new friends. Life is tough when you’re six, you know?

I was still there in 1990, when Microsoft released Windows 3.0 to take on the dominance of Macintosh and IBM. In 1991 when the first website was made publicly accessible by the clever chaps at CERN. And 1992 when IBM introduced the ThinkPad. But I was more interested in sex, drugs and rock and roll. I was a six former god dammit and I was ready to shape the world.

In 1993 I was living in France. That was the year that the IBM Simon was launched, arguably the world’s first smart phone it combined a phone with a pager AND a fax. It was also the year that the first Pentium processor was released by Intel. I’m not sure I noticed. I was too busy falling in love and reading poetry. These things take time to do properly.

I got married in 1995. The first Playstation was launched that year. I had other things on my mind. Hutchinson communications were launching this brand called, “Orange” and Sun Microsystems announces this thing called Java. I was more interested in coffee. It is important to get your priorities right.

When I was making friends, we hung out, we played, we talked. When we partied, we arranged things by phone, or letter, so we had to plan things well in advance. When I was falling in love, we braved the cold winter evenings to find a phone box at an allotted time. We hand wrote letters and we accepted silence.

On Saturday night, I got to spend an evening with friends and family to celebrate my birthday. It was a collection of the old and new. People there that had been with me throughout my life, people who I had grown up with, played with, drunk with, fallen in love with, cried with and married. And people who I’ve met more recently, that I’ve felt a connection to, that are close to my heart. We’ve got to know each other through so many different ways.

Whilst I’ve been growing up, technology has been too. And in the same way that it has become more consumer focused, I’d like to think I’m also a more sophisticated, more complicated, but ultimately more user-friendly version of my former self.

Yet still some basic facts remain.

The thing that connects my school friends, to my professional friends, to my social friends, to my family is mutual respect, love, understanding. It is true connection. It isn’t about the means or the reason, it isn’t about the timing or the technology. It is about the people.

I’m incredibly blessed to have such amazing friends, family and colleagues. People who interest, challenge and care for each other. And people who care for me.

So as I start my 41st year, as I write this blog on my MacBook Pro, using WordPress on broadband, before publicising it on Twitter and LinkedIn, I want to say an old-fashioned thank you. Thank you for being you, for those that were there and those that weren’t, for those that I speak to once a day and those that I speak to once a year. Life is nothing without people, life is nothing without connection. Both old and new.

We learn when things go wrong

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One of the things about a customer focussed organisation is that they are constantly evaluating their performance. They look for improvements, they look for modifications, they look to ensure that every customer is treated as well as every other one. They delight in calling out issues and changing practices. The converse, is the organisation that is resistant to change, that had ingrained systems that are more important than the customer and has practices that suit organisational ease rather than customer delight.

Over the last week I managed to watch a little bit of both in operation, a small but fascinating insight in to the organisation that learns and adapts, and the organisation that reacts and closes ranks. Unfortunately, in order to do so, I had to undergo a period of somewhat arduous fieldwork beside the Indian ocean. Now I know what you’re thinking, but every now and then you need to take one for the team. You can thank me later.

Example one started in the hotel. This was a hotel that prided itself on its customer service, if I’m honest it was almost intrusive at times, but there was no doubt that they were there to serve. Midway through the fieldwork period, we witnessed a tropical storm (see I told you I was taking one for the team) which came in late one day and lasted overnight. The result was that everyone took the sensible decision to stay in bed and arrive for breakfast at the very last-minute. And in the name of science, clearly we had to be there to witness events unfold. The normally serene and organised dining room lost it a little as orders bombed in from left and right. Our order for coffee somehow got lost, not once, not twice, but three times.

These things happen, I get that. But I raised it in a polite, but clear manner. Like I can.

Over the coming days, I was amazed at the number of staff who apologised or mentioned the issue. People kept asking how things were, whether everything was ok. It wasn’t just in the dining room, it was by the pool, by the beach, in the other restaurant. There had been a breakdown of service and people wanted to make it right. To the point that I almost greeted the cleaning lady with,”YES I got the effing coffee okay?” It wasn’t as if I’d ordered a pink flamingo on toast…..

Example two takes place on the plane back from the field trip. Cattle class, in case you ask, exploration budgets aren’t what they were you know….. When my co-researcher told me the seats for the flight back, I sigh and respond that this will mean two of us won’t get a choice of meals, they’ll be run out by the time they get to us and we’ll only get offered fish. And, guess what, that’s exactly what happened. I’m I gifted? Not at all, I just watched what happened on the earlier flight out when we were sat in the row behind. History repeats itself and all that.

We are in the middle four seats, the co-researcher, me and the two lab rats. The way they start with the meal service means that one side gets served before the other and twenty minutes later when they get to the other side, guess what. The popular meals have gone. For info, field research shows chicken beats fish hands, beaks, fins down every time (which begs the question, why not have more chicken meals and give your customers what they want – but that’s another story). There is a zone, from about row 37 to 34, seats E,F,G and H which every time loses out. FACT.

If you sit in these seats, you are more than odds on to have no meal choice. But, to my knowledge, the cost of a seat in this unhappy zone is just as expensive as the golden triangle of 36 to 40 which guarantees first choice of meals, which can’t be right. The system was set up to deliver bad customer to those in the unhappy zone.

Now I know you’re now thinking, “get a life Morrison….there are more important things” and yes there are. But two things I’d say, firstly if your organisation is set up to systemically give better customer service to some customers than others, just because of random factors such as seat numbers you’ve got a problem brewing. And secondly, it was a goddamn long flight and only so many books a boy can read before going google eyed.

So I raised the issue, in a polite but clear manner, like I can.

The response was that I got to choose my lunch, so I shouldn’t quibble about getting no choice for dinner. When I pressed and pointed out that whilst they served in the way that they did, this would always be a problem, I was given a customer suggestion form and told to fill it out. They then went on to pass some snide remarks about me, unfortunately picking the only other language on this planet that I happen to be fluent in. Later in a conversation, the senior stewardess confided that I could make the suggestion but she didn’t seem to have much hope anyone would listen. The impression I was given was, that’s the system, we have no choice, just like you the customer we have to like it or lump it.

Sadly, this is the approach too many organisations take both internally and externally. The system rules the brain. The customer or employee is the recipient of the system, not the driver. That’s just the way it is. I know we can’t always get things right first time, I know that things will go wrong. But hiding behind the system, explaining away problems and ignoring poor service won’t help us learn and develop. It also won’t help us get things right. Treating people like humans, explaining the problems and checking how to make things better on the other hand, might just improve things for everyone – both customers and employees alike.

Now wouldn’t that be cool.