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.

Enough with the case studies

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How many companies are there in the FTSE100?

Daft question right?

So how about this one….what percentage of UK companies do they constitute?

The answer is less than half of one percent. And even if you take out sole traders the number doesn’t quite reach 1%.

SME’s employ 13.6m people within the UK and firms employing less than 100 people account for 65% of new jobs created each year. If you include the companies sub FTSE100 but not classified as SME you get somewhere near to 90%.

So why is it that we seem so fixated by a limited number of companies explaining the “right” way to do HR and people management?  If you look at any conference list or journal article you will invariably see the usual suspects arise.

Now I should add that I don’t have anything against these companies or the people who speak per se.  But I don’t think that the constant focus on a select group does anything to improve the collective knowledge of a profession or helps creativity, entrepreneurialism or innovation.

When I was learning my trade it was Marks and Spencer’s that were being hailed as the people to aspire to.  That was in the mid 90’s and of course not many years later they were experiencing the worst, self-imposed, decline in their history.  Likewise not so long ago Royal Bank of Scotland were being hailed and recognized for their success in people management – I don’t need to add much more to that. And one of the latest entrants to the scene seems to be Nokia, which I find curious given their current “burning platform”.

So given that there s why does this happen? Well I think there are a couple of factors at play,

–       We think that big is beautiful and assume that because an organisation is large it is good. The only reason a company is in the FTSE100 is because of its financial muscle, not its intelligence

–       Once you’re on the circuit, you’re on the circuit – easy for lazy conference organisers and big brands require no explanation (is there anyone in American HR who hasn’t been made aware of Zappos?)

I’m not saying that interesting ideas can’t come from the big boys (although I do think size inhibits not enhances innovation) but by the law of averages there must be a whole host of other people out their doing good things. If we’re really interested in driving innovation and creativity in the profession then we need to hear from companies and HR Directors who are doing truly intelligent people interventions, ones that are culturally sensitive, business focussed and have demonstrable value (no this isn’t a pitch for business!). And from the feedback that I heard recently, I’m not alone.

Conference organisers/journalists – take note.

Metrics are a false idol

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The following posts build on the guest post at XpertHR about Commercial HR and looks at some of the themes in a bit more detail.

There was a time when I was pretty hung up on HR metrics. I’d read Huselid, Becker and Beatty, I’d read Ulrich…well some of it….and I was pretty convinced that all we needed to do was to be able to measure what we did in HR and then the world was ours for the taking.

The pattern that I, and I imagine many others, went through was this,

–       Measure stuff

–       Get criticism of measured stuff being inconclusive

–       Decide you’re measuring the wrong stuff

–       Try and measure some other stuff

–       Fail because that stuff is too hard to measure

–       Go back to measuring original stuff because it is simpler

I wrote about a specific example last week, when you look at “Time to fill”, a simple measure that tells you very little. And within that pot you can add a whole host of traditional HR measures. But, unfortunately, the “better” measures either don’t actually exist or require so many different pull or push sub measures that they become and industry in themselves.

So in the end we stop doing and start measuring…..Genius!

Thinking of it another way around.  What if I asked you the following questions?

How fit are you? Have are you feeling today?

In order to answer this do you need to check your BMI, your blood pressure, your recovery time, your heart rate and a red blood cell count?

Or can you intuitively answer the question because of a number of micro observations that you have made throughout the day, how quickly you got out of bed in the morning, how your trousers felt when you put them on, how you felt when you had to run for the bus or climb the stairs because the lift was broken?

Now I’m not saying that the measures aren’t important to do every now and then – in the same way you go for a medical – but if we spent more time in our businesses being observant, being intuitive, asking questions, listening and feeling, my guess is we would come to better conclusions than we would by measuring a whole load of HR process.

And in the meantime we’d learn a whole lot of things and build a whole heap of relationships that would add more value than sitting in our department crunching meaningless numbers.

Surely that’s got to be the elusive win-win?

HCM A depressing blast from the past

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Nothing says “past it” than a term that I came across yesterday for the first time in a long while. Human Capital Management. The words in themselves are enough to make my stomach turn. I know that linguistically it isn’t a million miles away from Human Resource Management, but the latter is a broad church, where as HCM has connotations that I find really quite disturbing.

Whereas the origins of the term date back to economic theory, it has been hijacked by the over willing, over eager consultants as a means of trying to squeeze metrics and measurement into everything. Thus driving “economic value” of the “human capital”. I’m not against measurement per se, but I do think we are on a hiding to nothing with it.

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure”

True, but also not so.

Because in the end, we are dealing with people, not buttons or levers and therefore we have to understand that much of our measurement will be qualitative. The example given yesterday was recruitment. I know quite a bit about recruitment metrics, I wrestled with them for years. Measure time to fill? Ok that tells you something….but what do you really want to know? My guess is the questions are more,

– Are we easily attracting the right people?

– If not why not?

Does time to fill answer that? No,but it is harder to measure what we want to know and therefore we measure the process, because that is easier and as HR people we are happier in the process than in nebulous concepts.

The other piece that rankles with the whole issue of HCM is the view that labour costs are just that….costs. As I said yesterday in the conversation, flip it around and it becomes investment. As you could buy a very cheap computer system or a very expensive one, you can also have cheap or expensive labour. Without knowing the effectiveness or the performance of both, you know nothing (and measuring that is almost impossible). If the cheaper computer system is causing employees to be less productive or is crashing then the actually cost of it could be higher.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, humans are wonderfully unique and unpredictable. We should be embracing that and looking at a more humanistic approach to managing and understanding them, not trying to convert them into something they are nor – measurable assets.

For me that’s why HCM deserves to be confined to the garbage can of failed approaches to people management…if there is still any room left in there.