Talent

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.

It’s your money I’m after baby

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So most of us go to work because we need the money.  We can put lots of wonderfully worded, good intentioned arguments together about how money is not the motivator, but let’s be honest job satisfaction doesn’t cut it when it comes to paying the mortgage.  We may choose one job or one type of work because we prefer it and trade-off some money, but essentially we are all there because we have something that we need to pay; food, shelter, energy bills, addiction to Coco Pops etc.

Which is why pay is such a sensitive issue within organisations.  Ask any compensation related questions in a survey and you will get significantly lower results than for environment or leadership for example.  I’ve worked in organisations with very defined pay structures, I’ve worked in organisations with broad pay bands and I’ve worked in organisations where there was little if any structure at all.  And I’ve heard the dissatisfaction from employees in each different scenario.

But there are two specific things that are on my mind at the moment, which I think are interrelated: negotiating salary increases on internal moves and counter offering to defend against poaching. Both are event-based situations that occur outside of the normal salary management process and require both a strategic and tactical approach, because invariably they also involve your organisational talent.

I know that decisions in either case will depend on a number of factors, the employee’s current salary, their “demands”, internal comparators, affordability etc. However, those are the mechanisms, I’m interested more in the moral/emotional arguments that are expressed in these circumstances. Is it ok to negotiate a bigger increase when you are promoted internally or should you just get what you’re given? Is it right to counter offer or should you accept that people will leave and move on?

I’ve worked in cultures where if you were being offered a promotion and you tried to argue for more money it would be seen as a black mark on your career.  You were expected to answer the call of duty and THEN get rewarded when you delivered (although funnily enough, that was always after the next milestone….). But I know in other organisations it is run of the mill stuff.  Similarly, I know organisations that see resignations as the quick route to ex-communication, with no thought for trying to retain people, and others that will fight tooth and nail for their “talent” regardless of whether they are really…..talented.

So, more questions than answers I guess. Am I making too much of this and getting confused? I know the theory, but does anyone really operate like that or are we all in the quagmire of uncertainty when it comes to pay and talent.  Is it fair game for employees to use their skills to negotiate more if they can? After all they need to feed their families and over the past few years we have hardly done much as organisations to bolster the psychological contract.

Do we need to accept as employers that this is fair game? Work is part of a transaction for money and any opportunity that arises to improve your lot, you’re in your right to take.

Recruiters: Stop playing God

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Sometimes it is the small things that remind you of a bigger issue.  I was in my hotel room in Berlin on Wednesday night when I saw a tweet from Katie McNab, Recruiter for PepsiCo about women who use their partner’s email addresses on job applications. In her words,

“It makes them look like children who can’t be trusted with their own comms”

We had a bit of back and forth over the subject and I think it is fair to say that there was little or no common ground (you can see some of the conversation here).  Katie was firm to her view that this was “inappropriate” and given that she is a recruiter, speaks at conferences and well regarded, I guess I have to bow to her superior knowledge – again in her words,

“placing judgment on people is part of the job”

and according to Katie, I was in the minority (although looking through the timeline there was only one person who agreed and one who didn’t – which is a kind of soviet democracy!).

But it has been niggling away at me. I did a little interview with DriveThru HR where we talked about the skills gaps that we are facing in the global economy.  Manpower, BCG and the CIPD have recently reported that managers were finding it more difficult to attract the right talent.  Good candidates are staying put and have a world of opportunities at their feet should they wish to move. Put simply, recruiting “talent” is going to get harder.

If you listened to the twittersphere and blogosphere you’d understandably be mistaken for believing that the answer is to “go social” and of course that is an element of changing attraction strategies.  But it seems to me we also need to challenge some of the institutional slothfulness of in-house recruiters. Katie is right, we all make assumptions about people, that is human, but we need to be challenging these and minimising them – not celebrating them in public.

Recruitment isn’t about judging people, it is about discovering people.

And recruiters need to stop playing God.

As well as being quasi-discriminatory (although I am sure not in intent) diminishing an application because of a candidate’s CHOSEN means of communication is either naïve, arrogant or idiotic in the extreme – I really can’t decide which.  There is absolutely no legal, morale, organisational or rational argument behind doing so. There could be a million reasons that an individual chooses to include a partner’s email on an application but that is their choice.

Increasingly we will need to be searching for talent, lifting up rocks, thinking creatively about how we bring people in, how we train them, how we help them to meet the requirements of the job and leave our own prejudices and judgments at the door.  The good companies and recruiters will get this and make a name or career for themselves. The bad ones? Well they’ll keep talking the talk in public, but failing to walk the walk where it really matters.

Which, let’s be honest, is no bad thing really.

It just makes it easier for the rest of us.

The real definition of Organisational Development?

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If there is one term that I hear more and more, but means less and less it is “Organisational Development”.  I’m not sure I was ever taught what it meant all those years ago when I sat my IPD exams nor did I ever witness anyone talking about it as I cut my teeth in the profession. Yet in the last couple of years I seemed to have been invited to more conferences, training days, seminars and webinars on Organisational Development than anything else.

But the thing is….and not for the first time…..we don’t seem to know what we’re talking about.

At a recent conference I attended, the session on OD was the most popular of the lot. Not because of the quality of the speakers, they were neither spectacular nor dismal, but because we were all there hoping someone was going to tell us what it was all about (for the record: they didn’t, so I’m none the wiser).

One of the biggest mistakes that we make, in my small and completely humble opinion, is the confusion between OD and OD interventions.  Typical of the profession, we are happy getting down and dirty with the practicalities and less happy talking about the more ethereal overall concepts. One of the questions raised by a delegate prior to the conference was how to evaluate the success of an OD programme. I guess my answer would be that the problem is the question not the evaluation.

I’m not a big believer in making things complex, there are theorists out there who will tell you the models and thinkers that are best positioned on OD….when I have time to read, it is not going to be on that topic. I tend to take a simple view of all things HR and that includes OD.

If you look at the development of a human it is an organic (by definition) process. We know that humans develop differently; at different speeds, in different ways and with different results.  Within a lifetime there are various stages of development and we “do stuff” to support and aid that development. Whether that is early years stuff, learning the first words etc. Whether that is educational stuff, schooling, further or higher education. Or indeed, whether it is more experiential stuff such as the first job.

And this “stuff” is the group of interventions that support development, sure they can be evaluated and measured (if you absolutely feel the need to) but in themselves they are not the development.  You can measure exam results, but what is done with the learning is the important thing.  Likewise in Organisations, there are interventions that support the development but these in themselves, I would argue, are not Organisational Development.

Instead the overall journey that grows and develops and organisation and the big and tiny interventions as well as the less substantive, but no less important, natural development and growth of the organisation through experience, trial and error, but – and this is an important factor – in a semi-cohesive progression towards an agreed general strategic direction. That for me, comes closer to trying to encapsulate this concept of OD.

And if that all sounds woolly, I guess that is because to a certain extent I think it is. On the other hand, we could just go back to measuring process badly. Because we know how to do that.