Performance

The fraud of discretionary effort

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When I write about employee engagement, I tend to hear the same response, “it’s about driving performance”. Normally inferring that this is how HR can demonstrate that it is “adding value” and “being commercial”.

Which is nice….

Let’s take a far-reaching view of return on (human) capital. You take employees, you pay them nothing and you make them work every single day of their lives.

That’s slavery. But it is one hell of a return on investment.

Now I’m not for one minute suggesting that the supporters of employee engagement are in any way advocating bonded labour, I merely raise it as a starting reference point of what we mean when we talk about “adding value” through human capital.

Pretty much any employee engagement plan talks about discretionary effort. What is discretionary effort? Essentially it’s about asking people to give more than the financial expectation we have placed upon our working relationship.

So here’s the thing.

Let’s imagine we’re in the queue to get an ice-cream. We may smile, joke or even chat up the vendor hoping to get an additional scoop. But ultimately if we pay for two and get three, then we’re happy. If we pay for two and get one, we complain.

But what if we pay for two and get two? Well that’s the expectation. Isn’t it?

If we believe we are paying fairly for work, then what we pay should equal the return that we get. Shouldn’t it?  When we set out to recruit, we say “this is what we want you to do, this is how we want you to behave and this is what we are going to pay you”.

And then when someone joins we say, “Surprise! That’s just the minimum expectation. We actually expect you to do a whole lot more or we’ll term you disengaged. And nobody round here wants to be in the disengaged box…..”

That’s paying for two scoops and being disappointed that you didn’t get three.

If you want to measure something, measure how much potential value your organisation is destroying in the people who it employed to do the job. My guess is you’re paying them already for “discretionary effort” and what you’re not getting it, you’re blaming them.

Employee engagement, the drive for discretionary effort is simply a way of placing the responsibility on employees for the failure of the organisation to have fair expectations for fair reward.

Or to put it simply;

If you’re not getting what you paid for deal with it,

If you want more, pay more,

And never expect to get something for free.

The great engagement swindle

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I’ve written before about employee engagement, but its a subject that can’t take enough kickings.

I’ll put it simply, employee engagement is the biggest corporate swindle since Asil Nadir thought, “no-one will notice”.

Let’s be clear:

Engagement does not pay the bills.
Engagement won’t cover your medical costs when you take a fall.
Engagement won’t keep the heating on in your retirement.
Engagement doesn’t make you healthy or happy or even a better lover.

Engagement doesn’t even have a standard meaning, definition or measure. It’s a fabrication.

The biggest con about employee engagement? The goal is to drive commercial success, whilst dressing it up as employee welfare. Look at any purveyor of employee engagement services and they will talk about driving business performance.

Employee engagement doesn’t replace talking to people, caring for people, listening to people. It doesn’t replace paying people well, investing in their benefits and providing a decent pension scheme.

Do things right as an organisation, treat people well, don’t treat them like fodder and you’ll be surprised how much they’ll do for you. Not because they’re engaged, but because they want to.

How about we measured leadership engagement instead? How engaged is your leadership team with employees? How well do they know them? When was the last time they had a human to human conversation with someone in the organisation they didn’t know?

Employee engagement is the classic example of human resources forgetting about humans and focussing on resources. It’s bad mumbo jumbo dressed up as science.

Employee engagement is an idea that’s long over stayed it’s welcome. Let’s kill this vacuous, malevolent concept once and for all.

Information is energy, not power

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How does your organisation treat information? I mean proper information, the stuff that makes a difference.

The organisational response to feedback about their information flow is normally one of two things, to instigate more formal information sharing platforms, to berate management for not cascading the content of the already existing platforms.

Meanwhile, the real information flow in the organisation doesn’t change. Because it isn’t a process, it’s culture.

We all know the phrase, “knowledge is power” but the reality is that in far too many of our organisations information is being used as such by a large proportion of our people.

It strikes me the leader’s job is to use information as energy and not as power. We are there to disseminate the appropriate information at the right time to aid performance but also to retain information, to shield people if that information would hinder performance.

And that’s a fine balance.

I don’t buy the idea that total absolute information flow is the organisational gold standard. The demands to know everything is a simple means of recognising that information is seen as power within your business.

We all know that organisations produce ridiculous amounts of data and also, particularly in these fluid times, the agenda can change repeatedly. Sometimes it just isn’t helpful to know.

Culturally advanced organisations know when to share and when not to share. Likewise, people in culturally advanced organisations recognise what they need to know and what they don’t.

And that’s where we need to aim.

Make a difference

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“If it doesn’t make a difference, it doesn’t make a difference.”

I know that sounds ridiculously simple, but that’s because it is. In our running of businesses, in our organisations, in our practice, we need to ask ourselves one simple question, “does it make a difference?” And if the answer is no, then stop doing it.

The reality is that within most organisational situations, people are doing a huge amount of things that don’t matter. They don’t make the business perform better, fulfil some regulatory need or create value. They just exist.

If HR is to be the driver of organisational performance, it needs to be a force for change, highlighting inefficiencies and unnecessary bureaucracy and calling out redundant practice. Simply, we need to be as comfortable looking at process and improving it as we are creating it.

It also means that we need to understand the entire organisations, how and why it works and the levers and buttons that make it successful . Then we can be clear about how to help it become even better. By retaining a single and absolute focus on performance.

It probably isn’t popular or politically correct, in a world that loves a trier but hates a succeeder, however, it really is only the result that matters. If we want to be a profession with teeth, if we want to define relevance, if we want to have influence and reach, then focussing only on those things that really make things better, has to be the way.

And that starts with our practice, our behaviour and our thinking. Because if we want to be better, we need to be single minded. Focus on results, focus on performance, forget the rest of the nonsense. If it’s not making a difference, it doesn’t need to be done.