Organisation

The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple

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With all the explosive power of a damp squib, the Culture, Media and Sport Committee came and went.  Of course there was a lot of attention and a lot of talk and a lot of commentary, but the morning after are we really any better off or more informed? Are we really any closer to understanding what happened at the News of the World?

The reason that the committee was interviewing Rupert and James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks is because of the serious actions that seemingly took place at the News of the World and a need and desire to understand what went wrong.  Yet from a lot of the online commentary yesterday you would be forgiven for thinking that this was more about trying to get one over and humiliate an individual media mogul, than any exploration of truth.  If you haven’t seen the witch’s scene (below) from Monty Python and the Holy Grail – it was pretty reminiscent.

In the end, what we got was a relative plausible story from the Murdoch family about how their business was run (personally I think Brooks was less convincing).  I know saying this won’t make me the most popular with many, but anyone who has actually worked in a large multi national conglomerate will know that there is an absolute requirement to devolve power and responsibility to people within the organisational structure. It is also worth pausing for thought here at the number of HR commentators that talk about devolution of responsibility and empowerment as being positive attributes – until it involves someone who they politically or morally dislike when it becomes a character flaw.

What we didn’t get was any further insight into the events that took place or indeed any revelations that would help us to better understand.  Apart from one shameful incident with an intruder and a foam pie, there was little to talk about. And in truth they were the only one to land a blow and the foam had more substance than anything else to come out of the MPs’ questioning (sorry all you Tom Watson fanboys – but he didn’t get anywhere).

As I’ve said many times before, organisations are complex and intricate.  If we genuinely want to understand the reasons behind the issues at the News of the World – to then help us understand what is also probably going on at other newspapers too and how to prevent it – then we need to take off the blinkers of preconception and start to think about how large organisations work, how cultures develop and the balance between control and leadership.  As a profession HR is perhaps best placed to lead some of this thinking.  We should be talking about the issues that really matter and considering how the insight that we have from working in businesses, might shed some light on the goings on at the News of the World.

It might be helpful, it might be developmental  and it would certainly be more productive than a peasant mass screaming for a hanging.

Are you a hoop creator?

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I’m not a fan of Holby City, I’ve spent enough time in hospitals to not need to watch pretend ones. But I am a fan of Luther (why psychopathic cops chasing sociopathic criminals should be more attractive to me than hospitals is anyone’s guess). And it was whilst waiting for the latter that I caught the end of the former and particularly this quote,

“We need to complete this for HR, they like to make us jump through these hoops”

I tweeted it and the rest of the evening was spent messing about with Emma Vernon, Mervyn Dinnen and David Kelham (amongst others) on the topic of #hoopcreation.

We laugh…..but hang on sec….isn’t that what people see as us? And isn’t that because a lot of what we do IS hoop creation?

“We need to create a process for that” – HOOP

“I think we need to review the form” – HOOP

“We need a sign off procedure” – HOOP

Do we REALLY need these things? Or do we need to communicate better, to build relationships and to trust people? Are we covering our inability to influence with a series of hoops?

I’m going to challenge myself….and I challenge you…..next time you’re talking in this way ask yourself this, “is there a legal, regulatory or business critical imperative for doing this? Or am I just indulging in hoopcreation?” And if you’re feeling really brave, go and find some of those hoops you’ve already created and work out ways to throw them away.

I’m telling you, not only will the business thank you, you might actually free up some time to do something that adds real value. How about that for a win win?

How not to engage with customers

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I don’t profess to be any sort of marketing or customer service guru. That said, having spent the best part of a decade working in retail, I know a little about managing customer relationships and expectations. 

At the weekend my daughter fell in love with a certain pair of Converse shoes (for those of you that care, they’re the waterfall blue, double tongued variety).  The thing is, the shop that we were in didn’t have her size and so when we got home we went on the internet and eventually found a pair at a shop called Ozzy’s & Archive. Click, click, credit card. Job done.

Until Monday evening when I received an email saying,

“Hi Neil,

Thanks for your recent order of the Converse shoes!

Some bad news im afraid. We have just gone out of stock with this shoe!

We are changing our stock system and some so we are having to manually change stock levels on the site for now, unfortunately you placed an order before we had chance to change your items stock levels online.

Its upto you what you would like to do. Whether you want to choose another item to replace the shoes, or just have your order cancelled. Whatever you want, just let me know!

Again, sorry for the hassle,

Something about the tone really got to me (maybe the excessive use of exclamation marks).  As a customer, I don’t really care what your systems issues are, that is the rational explanation that YOU have for YOUR service failure, it isn’t the emotional attachment that I had with the product that (in my mind) I had already bought. And to compound this, there was there was no recognition of the disappointment – just a choose something else or get your money back standard response.

On the bottom of the email, however I noticed a Facebook page. So I thought I’d check it out. I “liked” the page (which felt somewhat counter intuitive…but hey!) and saw that there was a post about not winning a Retailer of the Year award. At this point you’ll understand I felt obliged to post something, so I wrote a comment on their wall:

Sadly rubbish customer service from Ozzy’s and Archive. You are a long way from Retailer of the Year if you can’t show your stock levels correctly on the site, take an order and then respond with a “choose a different product or have your money back” routine. One lost customer.

I checked back a little while later and lo and behold……my comment had disappeared.  Censorship? Well hang on a minute….so I wrote another comment:

Hi there, I wrote some feedback on here about the poor customer service that I received from Ozzy’s and Archive but it seems to have disappeared. Surely you haven’t deleted it?

And then things just got worse……within 10 minutes that comment was taken down too and my ability to post anything on that page was revoked.

Clearly someone didn’t want people to see any bad comments about their service. Which is what brings me here to write about this today.  The world with social media is a conversation, you might be able to constrain what people see or hear (to a certain extent) but you can’t control what they say.  And ignoring a negative situation, surely doesn’t change how people feel.

Engaging with customers that are disappointed and upset is as, if not more, important than engaging with customers that are advocates.  You can try to control the message, but somehow it will always get out. So wouldn’t it be better in the first place to engage?

Ozzy’s and Archive gave me bad customer service. It wasn’t abysmal, but it was pretty ropey. Through the way that they’ve handled it, however, they have turned a disgruntled customer into someone who wants to write about it and tell the world what a rubbish company he thinks they are. They had a choice how they reacted and treated me and they chose to try to make the problem go away.

Sadly for them, it didn’t.

As a side note, Ozzy’s emailed me again last night elaborating on their justification for their failure, but sadly I can’t reply as their Mailbox quota has been exceeded (how many more customer service crimes can one company commit?). If you want to see the screen prints of the various comments then you can see them below (I don’t normally take screen prints – as you can tell from the other tab open on the first one! – but funnily I had a hunch about this. Oh and I no longer like their page……but Maddy does have a new pair of Converse on the way to her……just from a different shop.

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HR isn’t Marketing, it is unique

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“There are so many similarities between Marketing and HR” seems to be one of the hot phrases and concepts at the moment. For this I read, “HR can learn a lot from Marketing”. From this I read, “I want to play with the cool kids and the cool kids play in Marketing”.

Are there really a lot of similarities between HR and Marketing? Well only if you have a rather narrow and ill-defined concept of both HR and Marketing, then yes. Sure there are elements of cross over, it would be hard to think that on employer branding or indeed on some other areas of recruitment that there wasn’t something that the HR profession could take from Marketing. And if you look at employee engagement, then of course I there are definite synergies.

But to suggest that these elements are the only aspects of either Marketing or HR that exist seems slightly bizarre. I’m not going to dissect the Marketing profession; I’ll leave that to someone else with more time. HR professionals would be better off stopping chasing the perceived sexiness of one profession (there is NOTHING sexy about the dirty end of product marketing I can tell you) and instead look at the entire remit of an HR role

–          Compensation, benefits and remuneration strategy

–          Industrial relations, trade unions and collective negotiations

–          Employee relations, individual dispute resolution

–          Learning and development

–          Talent management and career planning

–          Health and Welfare

–          Organisational development

–          Organisational design and structure

–          Recruitment and selection

–          Coaching and facilitation

The list feels almost endless and of course highly variable depending on the industry and the organisation.  The thing is, HR has the potential to be one of the truly multi disciplinary roles within the business, with elements of Finance, Sales, Strategy, PR and yes Marketing to name but a few. We may be specialists in certain areas, but we are generalists in the true sense of the word.

Valuable HR teams work collaboratively with all functions and departments, not just on their HR needs, but also on the entire people offering – pulling in specialist skills that add to projects or initiatives or even simple thought processes and planning.

True HR professionals don’t just want to play with the sexy, they want to play with the valuable and sometimes that means being a geek or a nerd.  And that’s ok. Just ask your friends in the bowels of the Marketing department, they know all about that.