Organisation

Where are you going?

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As I stood on the train platform this morning, I waited side by side with the same people that I stand with every morning, making their way in to our capital city to do business – we have a long, but a relatively straightforward commute.

Just before Christmas, I made the mistake of being in one our capital’s busiest train stations at rush hour and stood in a queue for the underground. Four or five trains must have past before I managed to even get to the front of the queue.

No, this isn’t a moan about the joys of commuting, (you can follow #traincrimes on Twitter for that) instead it started me thinking about the physical construction of our businesses and our locations and in particular the impact on health, wellbeing and productivity.

Let’s take an employee that lives in one of the commuter belts south of the city that serves that busy station, they have a house that they have a significant mortgage on, but they want a family and can’t afford to live in the centre and have enough room. So instead they buy an overpriced house within a “reasonable” commuting distance, but so does everyone else, so every morning they get on a train that doesn’t have enough seats and stand for forty minutes or so in to the centre where they queue for a tube train to take them another twenty minutes to their place of work.

In that hour and a bit, they’ve experienced, physical discomfort, stress, anxiety and pressure. And then they arrive at work, ready to earn a living and serve the company that employs them. How ready are they and how much are they really bringing to work? And multiply that by the number of employees in the building.

At the same time, the company itself is paying higher rent and rates, higher salaries and competing with a greater range of companies with a similar offering, all so that the employee can afford the overpriced house in the same commuter belt as every one else. All siting for the same fish in the same pool, all with the same challenges. What differentiates them?

And why do we do this? Well ask people and they’ll tell you that, “that’s where business is done”. But is it? We talk about operating in a global economy, we have meetings and conference calls around the world, we can connect with people from different countries and different continents at the click of a button. But if we want to do business, we need to be in the same place?

The economics just don’t make sense. How is it that the business that are supposed to be driven by capitalist virtue, don’t respond to market forces which would quite clearly drive a different agenda and a different set of behaviours? My guess is that there is something about the vested interests of the senior population.

We talk a lot about the correlation between the quality of workplace and the quality of work, but we seldom talk about the location of the workplace and the quality of life. People will jump to the simple (and incorrect) answer that we need to be allowing more people to work flexibly and encouraging remote working. The problem with this is you lose as much as you gain.

The future? It’s regional diversification. The economic arguments are clearly there, but moreover the employee benefits are also achievable – a rare alignment – which could be one of the keys to improved productivity. The clever are starting to understand that and the first movers will be the winners. But they’ll also realise that this isn’t just chasing cheaper rent – its changing your organisational model.

Who are you trying to convince?

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Nobody wants to work for an organisation that sucks. Well, unless you’re a vacuum engineer, in which case you don’t want to work for a company that blows.

We all want to work for a “Top Best Company Employer” (names confused to protect the innocent). And that’s lucky, because there are a number of different awards that exist to help us work out where to go, to assist us in our search, point us along the path……

Once a year the good and the great gather together to celebrate their competitive awesomeness and show just how incredibly good and best and top they absolutely are.

Which is nice.

They share it on Twitter, photos of the people that they value enough to take to the ceremony. And they celebrate – back in the workplace – disproportionately with cupcakes (much cheaper than a gala dinner ticket).

But when the metallic balloons have deflated, the cakes have gone stale and the “Celebration” chocolates (did you see what we did there?) have melted. When the PRs have issued their press statements about the CEO’s being “proud” and valuing the importance of “their people” and “their contribution”. When the attention has gone back to the sales figures, the balance sheet and personally benefiting from that contribution.

What then? What does it tell us?

Are we really proud of celebrating that as a company we don’t dump all over our employees? Is that where we’ve sunk to? That we need to have a trophy cabinet of awards in reception that show we aren’t complete and utter ba***rds?

If we are really concerned with being a good employer, why then do we need to share it with the rest of the world? Why can’t we just be one and be happy with it?

Because we want to convince people we’re not awful. Because people think we are. And truth be told, we probably know that we are too….just a little.

That’s why we make it an objective of our HR departments, we incentivise (and punish) line managers to achieve higher and better ratings, we provide incentives to employees just at the time we’re completing the surveys (purely coincidental you understand).

That’s why we systemise “being good”. Not because we believe it’s right, but because we don’t know how to do it any other way. And we shout about it, because WE need to tell you, about US.

Employees, job seekers, candidates are savvy. They don’t get fooled but marketing, by PR, by stunts or by branding. They research, they speak to people, they look at a thousand different points of data, not necessarily the ones that you want them to see.

Like the middle aged guy diving the oversized, oversized, flashy car. Hanging out awards that show how great you think you are begs the question,

“Why?”

Is it because you’re genuinely the real deal and if so, why do you need to tell me? Or, as I suspect, is it because you’re compensating for a lack of “substance”…..you know……somewhere else….

The myth of entitlement

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Throughout the entirety of my career, I’ve repeatedly come face to face with two of the most common myths within the workplace;

  1. Organisations somehow owe something to employees
  2. Employees somehow owe something to organisations

As if there is some unwritten obligation to be fulfilled.

There isn’t. This is the myth of entitlement.

Organisations are collaborations that exist to serve others. There is not a single one, private, public or third sector that exists to serve the needs of its employees. Not one.

And likewise there is not a single employee that exists to serve the needs of its employer.

This misapprehension is reflected in our professional practice and driven by our inability to understand the basic economic transaction that exists within the workplace.

Organisational purpose is delivered by labour and labour is rewarded for that delivery.

But before I’m accused of taking some neanderthal backward step to the dark ages of lords and masters, let’s also be clear about a few other things.

  • Employees have choices. Most organisations have doors and people are free to come and go as they choose.
  • Employers have choices. Employment is not guaranteed and organisations are free to hire and fire as they choose.

The relationship that brings employee and employer together is one to organise labour to deliver collectively for a defined purpose. And that purpose is the economic driver and the one and only reason that both exist.

Far from being backward, realisation and acceptance of this is the key to understanding and building an adult relationship within the workplace. It is central to building a healthy and sustainable organisational culture that understands the balance and trade offs that exists.

Yes so often it is missing and instead replaced with an over inflated expectation of our worth and our value, both as an employer and employee.

Strong healthy employment relationships are psychologically the same as any other relationship. They require balance. And they require an acceptance that if that balance is broken, if the needs are not being fulfilled, either party has the freedom to act.

The myth of inclusivity

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I’ve been involved in a lot of debates about diversity and inclusion recently. The conversations are fascinating and the views diverse in themselves. With one particular area of seemingly strong consensus when confronting the issues that we face;

It’s never our fault.

Of course, this is completely natural. We all like to think of ourselves as liberal minded, inclusive and welcoming people (well most of us). It’s just everyone else, they’re the problem.

Going back over thirty years I can remember my Grandmother telling me she wasn’t a racist like those other people, she even used the “Paki shop”. Whilst we can all look at this with the shock that time permits, she genuinely meant it. But this isn’t a generational thing, how many of us can hand-on-heart, honestly say that we don’t have perceptions and expectations of the opposite gender?

So if we all want this all inclusive, welcoming, meritocracy, what gets in the way?

When we talk about the culture of our organisations, we talk about the way in which people behave, the way in which people act towards one another, we talk about our values and we talk about the way in which we do things.

In HR we talk about how we can underpin the culture with our interventions; recruiting to fit, rewarding to incentivise, training to develop and structuring to facilitate. We build our organisations to reinforce the very cultures that contradict our conscious intention.

Culture gets in the way of and we reinforce the culture through our actions and our formal and informal systems. It’s rarely our intent.

The challenge we have is to get beneath intent and start to challenge these behaviours, systems and structures. Which invariably means challenging the way in which we feel naturally comfortable in doing things, how we make decisions and how we design our businesses.

Diversity and inclusion aren’t improved by tokenism, “programmes” or initiatives. They can’t be when our organisations are still constructed around an infrastructure that is decidedly “exclusive” and rewards people for conformity of behaviour and compliance to a set of unwritten rules.

The start of the path to improving organisational inclusivity is recognising that we are all part of the problem. The smallest act, or use of language multiplied a million times a week, the unintended consequence of doing something the way we’ve always done, the choices and decisions that we’ve learnt to make.

We have the power to make things better, we can choose to make a change, but in order to do that we need to do two things; accept that we are not ok and that, at the end of the day, it IS all our fault.