Organisation

The soft, warm fart of social acceptance

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It’s lovely to hear the things we want to hear. We all love the platitudes that make us feel reassured and purposeful. The temptation is to surround ourselves with those that will reassure us and help confirm our undoubtedly righteous intentions. After all, nothing feels better than being right. Right?

But what if we aren’t?

And perhaps more importantly, what if we are neither right nor wrong, but could just be…..well, better?

Because growing and learning are about being willing to hear the voices that dissent and challenge. Success is built on the painful acceptance that we don’t always get things right. Confidence comes from the ability to face up to those who think differently and appreciate their views and opinion.

It’s easier to bathe in the relative comfort of the soft warm fart of social acceptance then to look in the cold hard mirror of critique and appraisal. And the world is full of the sycophants, the placaters and appeasers who will tell you and your organisation the very things you’ve just told them.

Having the confidence to embrace and engage with the voices that jar, the opinions that trouble and the thoughts that counter, is the sign of an organisation or person at peace with themselves.

Marginalisation, exclusion and avoidance are the sign of a closed ecosystem and a troubled mind. And whilst it won’t necessarily end in despair, it will always stop you being as good as you could possibly be and fulfilling your potential.

Seek the solace of platitudes, by all means, but you’ll always seek it at your peril.

The consumerisation of #HR

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We’ve made the world of work far too complicated. We’ve over engineered, over intervened and created a myriad of artificial constructs that add neither value nor protection. Over the years I’ve written time and time again about the need to declutter, to reduce the number of processes and procedures to make it simple.

The brilliant Josh Bersin summarises the arguments better than I can here, making the very important point that simple is actually harder to do than complex. This isn’t about being basic, it is about being sophisticated.

I’d take it one step further, it is about the consumerisation of HR management.

When I speak at conferences and talk about these themes, how we are doing far too much and confusing employees, I regularly get people come up to me afterwards and thank me. Not for enlightening them or teaching them something that blows their socks off, but for reminding them why they came in to the profession and giving them reassurance that they’re not mad.

Reminding them that it is OK to be focussed on the end-user.

You see, too often we praise the complex. We hold it up as an example of the development of the profession to heights before unknown. We litter the pages of our publications, the stages of our conferences with examples of HR interventions that most employees don’t understand, don’t want to be part of and don’t see the point of. And we hold them to high acclaim. Then we talk about how we need to demonstrate the value that HR adds.

We have become the coders of the management world, praising beautiful code over user experience.

But what if we were to focus our efforts on making the end-user, the employee, the primary driver of our interventions, of our services. What if we designed for them, rather than for us? What if we created value by providing products and services that people wanted, rather than they were told they needed.

What if we excited, entertained and enthralled?

I can tell you that any manager, any employee, any human would ask for simple people management processes and practices they could understand, communicate and apply. They’d ask for speed, transparency and accuracy. Like we would too.

If we want to really add value and demonstrate our worth within the organisational framework, we need to work harder on being simpler, not more complex. And focus on delivering what employees really want, not what we think will impress our peers.

Then, maybe then, we’d be seen in a whole different light.

Engage your brain

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There is an intrinsic stupidity around the work on employee engagement. But it’s not the one you might think it is, oh no. The real intrinsic stupidity, it goes a little something like this:

Bright eyed and bushy tailed HR professional receives the annual employee engagement survey results from ACME Consultants Ltd and declares, “we’ve increased engagement to our highest level yet, it now stands 69%”

And we need to reflect on this for a second.

– Is the stupidity that we are happy that we have staff that are less than three quarters engaged?

– Is the stupidity that we’ve taken our budget and spunked it up the wall to please ACME Consultants Ltd?

– Is the stupidity that we believe in engagement at all?

But as I say, we need to reflect.

Let’s for one slightly scary and heart stompingly dangerous moment make three bold assumptions.

– Three quarters engagement is not bad

– ACME Consultants Ltd aren’t a bunch of parasitical idiots

– Engagement is a purposeful measure

Bear with me, I know some of you are going to be hurting right now and I admit that as I write these words, my eyeballs are seeping a little bit of blood.

Because the intrinsic stupidity is none of these things.

It is this.

We increased engagement?

Did we?

What level did it start at?

How many disengaged people did you recruit?

The thing is, most people join a company motivated and happy. And yes, if you want to use the term, engaged. Most people are pleased to get a job offer and go along on their first day thinking that they’ve fisted laid the golden goose.

And then bad stuff happens. Because we disengage, demotivate and depress them with our poor management, disorganisation and completely ineffective HR management systems. We actively and slowly kill their passion.

That’s what we’re doing every day. We are managing the heart and soul and lifeblood out of the poor suckers who took the King’s Shilling in good faith. Maybe not consciously, but certainly effectively.

So this week and the week after. In fact, for the rest of your working life. Don’t focus on the shiny stupid nonsense that you think will engage people. Focus on the stuff that you do that actively disengages them.

Do less.
Think more.
Make it simple.

The fallacy of commerciality

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I’ve written before about my unease with the term “commercial HR” and I was expressing this at an event last week, when I was asked a question along the following lines,

“That’s fine for you to say, but when we’re going for jobs, when we are at interview, all we hear is ‘commercial this, commercial that’ and that’s the reality of the profession. So what should we do?”

And of course this is a completely fair and reasonable question. It IS ok being in my position and making bold statements about the ins and the outs of HR.

But more so, it got me thinking about why we talk about “commerciality” and how we can effectively challenge it as a meaningless concept within the profession.

It strikes me that when leaders and managers talk about commercial HR they normally mean one of three things,

1)  I want you to understand the numbers and the financial performance of the organisation. (OK, so I get this, I really do. We need to understand the key performance measures of our organisation, whether they are financial or otherwise. We need to understand how our organisation is measuring it’s performance. But is this what people really want? Because it’s dead easy to achieve and I’m not sure in itself it adds any value whatsoever).

I think the reality is, that it boils down to one of two other other positions,

2)  I want you to stop saying no to “the business” and start doing what we need. Stop being so focussed on people and start being more focussed on profit. That under performer over there? Why do we have to spend three months managing their performance, just get rid of them. Why are you think of health and wellbeing problems? The problem we have is that those lazy bastards are taken a lunch break when they could easily work through it. I need HR to step up and sort these things out.

3)  I want you to stop doing stupid HR initiatives that no-one understands, to think more about the business and to land the initiatives that you do effectively. I want you to disrupt employees as little as you can, to help them to perform better and to drive the organisation, but without creating an infrastructure that is so complicated that only Alan Turing could work it out. I want you to be effective in dealing with issues that arise and to deliver the basics quickly and efficiently.

If it is 2, then this is not the sort of organisation that you want to work in, unless you think you are big and strong enough to change the organisational culture, that the CEO and the HRD are aligned in wanting to improve things. You might learn something in the short-term, but unless the powers that be are willing to change, you won’t be happy and you’ll become a worse practitioner from it.

If it is 3, then this is the biggest lesson that you’ll learn in your career. If you can focus on meeting these challenges, if you can become the sort of HR practitioner that is seen to add value through well designed and organisationally focussed interventions that are implemented to perfection.

The use of “commercial” in describing the HR that we want is lazy and lacking in precision. So my advice to anyone asked about this in interview, or a recruiter taking a brief is to ask the following questions in order:

–  What do you mean by commercial?
–  What would you expect to see me (them) do differently?
–  How would the business be better by me (them) acting that way?
–  How would you measure success?

And if they can’t answer this comfortably, you’ve got to ask yourself who has the credibility issue, who is lacking in commerciality and whether you’d want to work in that company in the first place.