Organisation

A million small things

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“It isn’t the [add subject in question], it’s the culture” 

I’ve read this a few times over the past couple of weeks and each time become increasingly more irked. The first time was on the blog of my friend and co-collaborator Rob Jones in a rather lame and cack handed defence of appraisals. Another time was from the enigma that is @fizzywizzy in relation to Lloyd’s bank introduction of quotas for female managers.

Of course, I get the point both are trying to make. But it also reminds me of one of the biggest weaknesses of the profession. The inability to see both the big and the small, to navigate the interconnected nature of everything that we do around people, to wrestle with the simple complexity that is the world of work.

If a culture isn’t made up of the interventions that an organisation has, what is it?

Culture doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Culture doesn’t make itself. Culture isn’t a higher being. Culture is a result of the million small things that we do at work every day. From a Human Resource perspective, culture is defined by every touch point that we offer to anyone in our organisation. The relationship between culture and intervention is multi faceted and multi directional.

The suggestion that somehow “culture” sits outside of the practical and the pragmatic is both dangerous and lazy. Dangerous because it allows us to excuse failure. Lazy because it suggests lack of influence.

If you want to develop your organisational culture, if you want to build and grow your organisation, start with the small. You can make a million small things happen much quicker than you think. And each of those, if correctly designed, thought through and implemented will go much further to developing your culture than big strategic round tables or away days.

The big is made of the small, the small influences the big. Culture is everything that we do.

It isn’t the culture that’s the problem, it’s everything we do.

Lessons in life

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When I think about the things that my father taught me, two immediate pieces of wisdom come to mind:

– Never put a cork back in an open bottle

– Life is too short to stuff a mushroom

I’m sure there were others. He probably told me not to go in to hotel management (I listened), not to get married young (I didn’t listen) and not to do drugs or get a tattoo (I’m staying silent on these elements).

That’s the way we roll.

When I think about my approach to organisations, to management and leadership, however, I realise that I’ve maybe taken a little bit more on board over the years. Dad was a leader, a leader of people in some of the hardest circumstances that you can imagine. He ran prisons throughout his career, dealing with the good, the bad and the ugly.

Dad believed in trust. I know, because I heard this time and time again. He believed that people were best when they were trusted and should be trusted until they proved they couldn’t be. Dad believed in fairness, in equity and in transparency. Dad believed in building a workplace that showed respect and in turn earned respect.

My dad was a pretty awesome guy.

When I talk to people about my organisational philosophy, they often tell me that, “it won’t work in larger organisations”, or “it is fine in the creative industry”. I even hear, “that’s fine with professional people, but my staff….”

All of which are, of course, just excuses for inaction and ineptitude. Because dad was doing this years ago and in environments that would make your hair curl. Indeed, when a prison publicly melted down in 1995, they called on my dad.

Dad turns 70 today. We don’t always have a perfect relationship, we don’t always see eye to eye, we argue and say things that we don’t mean. But deep down, I’m starting to realise that so much of what I believe, so much of what I do, so much of who I am is driven by the way in which he ran, led and managed his organisations.

I hope one day to get to the top of my profession, in the way my father did. To be the exemplar, in the way he was. And when I do, I know that so much of everything that I believe is down to the early lessons I learnt as a kid. The beliefs bashed out over the dinner table.

Life IS too short to stuff a mushroom. You should NEVER put a cork back in to an open bottle. And you should lead people with dignity, respect and trust. Those are the lessons that my father taught me.

You can’t ask for more than that as a son.

Back to reality

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I am first and foremost an HR practitioner. That is the job that I’m employed to do, that I’ve trained to do and that I’ve fulfilled for the best part of two decades. Every day, every morning I get up and go in to work to practice my profession. The following day I come in and I see the results and the impact. I see it year after year. I was with my last company for nine years, I’ve been with my current company for over five years.

When we get things right, I get to see the results.
When things go wrong, I take responsibility.

That is the responsibility beholden on the practitioner to do what is organisationally sustainable, what is culturally achievable, to fulfill their mandate as an employee and as the temporary guardian of their remit.

As an outsider, you can talk. You can make proclamations. You can enthuse and criticise, propose and deny. You wake up and all that is left of the previous day’s noise are the final echoes reverberating around the empty stadium of your mind. You rarely see the results and never accept the failures.

Innovation, revolution, chaos and new agendas are so much easier when you only have responsibility for your self image.

If I have a wish for 2014, it is for an honest, open conversation, practitioner to practitioner, about how we can make the working lives of our employees better and at the same time improve the performance of our organisations. Without the guff and the noise of those that have no responsibility other than for themselves.

I want to hear about how we might incrementally improve things for real, not rip the rule book up in our dreams.

If you’re a practitioner I’m interested in what you’ve done, where you’ve done it, what you’ve learnt from it and what you would do differently. If you’ve got strong views but no evidence of achievement, my question to you is, why not? Why can’t you demonstrate what you believe? What are you doing to find an organisation where you can work, long term, to deliver that vision?

2014, let’s make it the year that the realists, the pragmatists, the grafters take back the agenda. Let’s make it the year that those who are delivering change, every day, lead the conversation.

Debate is helpful, ideas are good. And even better when they’re focused on delivery and grounded in reality. Let’s make this the year where we move the conversation back there.

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.