Organisation

A fine balance

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Being a working parent is tough. I don’t need to explain that to anyone with kids.

Being a single working parent. Well, it takes tough to a new level.

My experience of the last week has shown me just how tough that is. I’m lucky, my wife is in hospital and this is only temporary. I’m lucky that my job allows me a level of flexibility. I’m also lucky that I have an incredibly supportive and understanding employer. I’m not so sure, that many employers are.

“Dad, I’ve lost my tie”

“We really need to prioritize this search, I’m uncomfortable with how we’re progressing”

“Someone has stolen my PE kit. I need a new one or I’ll get detention”

“Can you give me your views on this document? By tomorrow am”

“Dad, we’re making scones tomorrow. We do have the ingredients don’t we?”

“We’ve just received a grievance. How do you want to play it?”

“Can you help out at scouts tomorrow night? We’re short on leaders”

“I need you to dial into a conference call at midday”

“Dad….have you fed the guinea pigs?”

We have guinea pigs?????

The conflicting pulls and demands, the geographical disparity of events. The constant feeling of being behind. The guilt that comes from feeling that you are achieving everything, but none of it properly. The fatigue.

The moment you look in the fridge and realise there is nothing to eat.

So I know that people who live in circumstances like this have a better chance of setting up support systems to help them. I also know that if I was doing this permanently, I’d have to choose to make certain sacrifices to ensure balance.

But that is the point. As organisations, when we talk about being family friendly, we know what we mean, but do we know what people actually need? If I had a pound for every manager that over the length of my career had talked about “intermittent absence” or “loss of concentration” related to family concerns.

If organisations are focussed on output rather than input. If they are truly about finding and nurturing the best talent. If we genuinely see people as our greatest asset. Then some of them are going to be in family situations that make work hard.

That doesn’t mean they’re slacking, it doesn’t mean that they don’t want to work, it doesn’t mean that they don’t value or respect you as an employer. It just means that they are constantly balancing and weighing up conflicting commitments.

Lets put it this way, if you had the choice between completing that “important” report or making sure that your kids were picked up on time and not left standing in front of the school, what would you choose?

Most of us, if we could, would choose both.

Ordinary leads to ordinary

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One of the biggest problems within the HR profession, is a lack of innovation. By this I don’t mean harebrained schemes dreamed up in those horrible “away days” that come to nothing, or worse, that actually come to something…….pointless. I mean true innovation. The creation of new and different ways of thinking about situations, and the definition of exciting future realities.

Why?

Because we worry too much about “the practicalities”. The moment that anyone starts to suggest ideas, to progress thoughts that are maybe slightly out of the everyday is also the moment that others start to provide reasons why it wouldn’t be possible.

Because we have to deal with practicalities right? We have to take into account the reality?

Yes. And no.

You see the problem with staying rooted to the practicalities is that you are anchoring your reality to the now, to the understood and known and therefore any solution you pitch will also fall into the understood and the known. It won’t be a game changer, it won’t radically alter anything. It will be humdrum.

When you frame your thinking in the ordinary, your solutions will be ordinary.

Now I know that at this point people will start telling me that there have been innovative solutions for mundane problems. Think Velcro, think Tippex, think Elastoplast. But innovation that shifts our paradigm does so because it pays no account to practicalities….it redefines them.

Think the internet. Think the steam engine. Think the transistor.

These are not answers to problems; these are enhancements to society. If we accept the workplace is a community, then we too should be striving for innovative enhancements rather than tactical solutions. Not every idea that we ever come up with will fly, but if we stop worrying about the here and the now and start defining the future, we’re more likely to find a shining jewel.

Practicality is the enemy of innovation.

Frugal HR

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There was a time when the newspapers were full of the “end of DIY”. We were all so cash rich and time poor that it was much easier to get on the phone (or increasingly the internet) and get someone to come and do it for us. Broken gutter? Kitchen door not working? Skirting board looking a bit 1960s? And within a click or a call we were all good…disposable income spent, time saved, work carried out.

The thing is that underlying this apparently virtuous circle of events was a slightly darker reality. We were slowly becoming unable to carry out these relatively mundane and low skilled tasks. Why learn to do something, when it is quicker and cheaper to call someone in to help? Why bother debasing ourselves to these menial tasks, when we have so much more important things to focus our minds on? Like which of the 96 TV channels we are going to watch an American import on this evening.

But wait. What is this? Is this some attempt at a social critique of our times?

No, not really. Just a cack handed metaphor for the way that I see the HR profession developing. You see, back in the early days of my career, when livestock filled the street, we were all obsessed by the pending devaluation of the florin and Cliff Richard had just had his first number one hit, HR people had to do fairly much everything for themselves. So we weren’t called HR then, but that is another story and one that I don’t have time or space for here.

External consultants were few and far between. Ok, you might pull in a Compensation or Remuneration specialist to help you with your pay strategy, benefit review or a bit of job evaluation, you’d have a Recruitment Advertising Agency that might advise you on your copy or your “house style” and of course your legal advisors to tell you what you shouldn’t do, but not what you should do (there are a range of options…..). But that was fairly much it. The rest, you used your internal knowledge, your external networks and if you couldn’t get the answer, you researched and created.

Of course, that was after the last recession and budgets were tight. But as young HR professionals we learnt to turn our hands to a number of things. We might not have been experts, but we knew a bit about fairly much everything.

L&D? Check. Resourcing? Check. Employee Relations? Check.

And here is a thing…..we used to represent the company at Tribunal ourselves.

Over time I’ve seen things shift. Partly because the economy picked up and we had more “disposable cash” in our budgets, partly because we were being constantly bombarded with articles and case studies about companies that had implemented x, y and z (the organisational equivalent of keeping up with the Joneses) normally instigated by the suppliers with the sole aim of showing their wares in the market place and drumming up more business and partly because of the shift to the Business Partner model which led HR generalists to think that they were too strategic and important to sully their hands with the likes of practical HR solutions when they could be sitting in meetings talking about……stuff.

Rather than reskill the profession, which is what many would like us to believe, in many cases we have instead deskilled the profession. There is only so much room for strategic thinking within human resources. So what value is being added by the others?

In the same way that many of us have to learn to tighten our belts at home, to rediscover lost skills for cooking, sewing, mending, fixing, creating….the current economic situation offers an opportunity for HR professionals to really hone their skills and to become proper generalists. There will always be a need for external support and guidance, but that will never beat the learning of new skills, the development of our own abilities and the broadening of our own talent profiles.

There is time to think about the greater bigger issues of the workplace, there is a need to consider the greater strategic issues of the day, but a good HR professional also knows what great looks like and how to deliver it themselves. Being practical, being hands on, these aren’t bad things. The sooner we get the balance back in our professional lives the better.

And given the economic environment that we’re in there is no better moment to start than right now. And who knows, we might all have a little bit of fun in the learning process too! Now who could argue against that?

It’s all about trust

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So loudmouth Morrison spoke at the CIPD conference last week about social media. And to be honest, in my reflection on the event I’m not really sure I was talking about social media. Ok…..so I WAS talking about social media….but it was more of an example of where I think organisations and HR teams go wrong. And the lessons are applicable to so many other areas.

I was talking about TRUST.

So this is an old-fashioned concept, right? Work is all about supply and demand. Anything else is just side dressing.

I’m not so sure.

The thing is this, how many of you can turn around and say, “we truly trust our employees” or “we trust our employees to do the right thing for us and for them”? My guess is that a lot of you will be saying yes…..yes we do.  So then let me ask you this…..why do you have so much of your HR infrastructure set up to kick into play when something goes wrong?

I’m talking about disciplinary procedures, performance improvement procedures, policies on this, that and the other. Ways in which we monitor, evaluate, measure and generally rip the soul out of the heart of the organisation.  We all do that. Be honest…..don’t we?

So why is trust so hard? Why is it that we manage the majority with the fear of the minority? Why do we shy away from the bold actions of trust, individual responsibility and mutual support and respect? Why do we seek to punish people for “non-compliance” rather than seek to understand?

Because we are weak, scared and generally under prepared to deal with the responsibility of managing the expectations that are set upon us. So control, structure and managing to the lowest common denominator are simpler, less scary and without doubt more certain.

And that, my friends, is the challenge that we’re up against.  Whether we’re talking social media, or whether we are talking about any other aspect of the human experience at work.  We need to decide if we’re prepared to truly trust, or if we want to say we do but orgainse ourselves as if we don’t.

There’s a huge opportunity out there, there is a changing agenda. The brave and bright will get it, the rest will become a thing of the past. You have a choice.