Fair pay, fair play

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I read this article at the weekend by Will Hutton talking about his work on public sector pay.  I had a meeting with Will a few weeks ago, alongside with a couple of other private sector HR people, to discuss the issues of fairness in pay and particularly the use of performance related pay in his work for the coalition government.

Unlike the comic stereotypes that get bandied around in the press, the general consensus was that the Government should not look to performance related pay as the silver bullet that would solve all of the ills.  And that is certainly shouldn’t be a replacement for a living wage.  At the end of the session I made the point that you couldn’t look at pay structures in isolation.  That pay only becomes a media topic, when people feel it doesn’t equate to worth.

There was hardly ever any discussion of Sir Terry Leahy’s remuneration, although it was of a magnitude that a cashier or shelf stacker would find hard to imagine, but what about Andy Hornby?   No-one would discuss the level of financial reward that Sir Alex Ferguson receives, but compare that to their reaction to Fabio Capello?

People will accept top people being paid good money, even in the public sector, if they can see it is justified

Perhaps unsurprisingly then, Will’s comments really resonate with me.  Levels of pay in the public and private sector are sensitive issues, but only when they feel out of proportion to the experience of the end-user.  But of course that is easier to do in some circumstances than others, a Head Teacher’s pay could be linked to the performance of a school and that would be visible and arguable to the public. But would that be as easy for the Head of the Environment Agency?

Will’s conclusion is a bonus-malus system could and should be introduced for certain senior roles. It is brave thinking and likely to be hugely unpopular with those senior individuals and the management associations, but constructed properly it could go a long way to convincing a sceptical public that reward is earned. 

Every small business person knows that if they do well they get the benefits, but if they don’t it hits them directly in the pocket.  As a principle, that can’t be bad.

Light touch HR

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I was interviewing  for HR business partners not so long ago, when I realised that throughout the interviews I’d used the phrase “light touch” on numerous occasions.  I wasn’t making a point of returning to this phrase nor using it in the same context each time, but I kept on coming back to the same sentiment.

What is light touch HR? Let me use a metaphor.

Anyone who has ever been to a really good restaurant and experienced really good service will understand.  The waiters are present, they anticipate your needs, they provide you with the things that you want but they also delight you. However, they do it without ever being over bearing or conspicuous. There are no steadfast “rules” but there is an attention to individual need.   Everything is controlled, organised, well thought through and impeccably delivered.

At the other end of the scale, you have fast food. And actually the offer here is no bad thing either, delivering basics in a quick, efficient and timely manner.  What you see is what you get.  There are HR departments working on these lines across the country and they are hugely successful within their businesses in providing the level of service and support that people need.

Somewhere in the middle, you have a glut of offerings that range in their quality,

  • Those that try to be in the top-tier but over-engineer their service delivery and become intrusive, inflexible and unwelcoming
  • Those that promise exquisite treasures but cannot provide the basic infrastructure to support it
  • Those are both mediocre in terms of service and product

I don’t know of many, if any, HR teams that are delivering a level of “light touch” perfection on a regular basis, I’m sure they exist.  But it is achievable, as long as we get the right focus, the right skill sets and the right approach to our customers then we can make sure that we delight each and every one.

Create value

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If you had to rank the professions on their level of creativity, where would you rank the HR profession? Probably somewhere on the continuum between accounting and marketing, probably closer to the former and further from the latter.  Creativity doesn’t figure highly in any core competencies I have ever seen and the nearest that we get is the more “business acceptable” innovation.  Somehow creativity feels soft, it raises images of artists and writers and nebulous concepts, whereas we of course want to look hard and mean and commercial and worthy of the much vaunted “seat at the top table”.

Of course, we deal in a world full of commercial imperatives that cannot be denied.  Most of us work in businesses that either need to make a profit, balance the books, or make savings regardless of the sector.  The question is not the what, but the how and creativity is a much undervalued tool in the drive for commercial solutions.  We need an answer, we look to past experience, to other businesses and to the HR press seldom do we look at our business, look inside ourselves and search for a new or different way. A way that is bespoke to our business and provides a competitive edge.

I’d suggest the first step any HR professional should ever take in considering a solution is to ask what the real problem is and only then to consider whether a solution is actually required and why? What value will it add? Is this driven by business need or by some other force.  What is the least intervention that would solve the problem and how does it fit culturally with the way that the business behaves?

Creativity requires you to be brave. It requires confidence and self belief and a willingness to plot a unique course.  But it also requires a closeness and in-depth understanding of your business and a desire to make a difference. Being creative isn’t the antithesis of being commercial. It is the start.

Performance management – a human approach

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HR people typically over structure. Whether the profession attracts people who need structure, or whether the insecurities of being in HR leads to it is a subject for another day.  But nonetheless, the structure is there and in many cases becomes an incapacitating force against driving business performance.

Nowhere can this more keenly be observed than in the struggle for a performance appraisal or management system that works.  I can’t count the number of times that I have seen and been involved with the redesign, revamp, and yes, restructure of a process that was meant to drive the performance management culture, but ended up being an unpopular, badly used and inhibiting mechanism.  And the reason for this is that the structure that we are trying to apply, in itself is the down fall of the process.

Consider this.  I have two children, both are very different and both are equally as wonderful and as valuable to me.  If you asked me to assess them against a set of criteria, say…academic ability, creativity, helpfulness around the house, sense of humour and ability to pick their pants up off the floor then they would both score very differently (for the record neither would score highly on that last category.  So which is the best child? Well of course, neither is the only answer.

But yet we feel somehow the need to apply such structures to our businesses to try to force “the conversation” normally through a fear that managers aren’t doing it “properly”.  And rather than exploring why that might be and what we can do to facilitate this, instead we structure and apply process neither of which lead to any better conversation.

If you work in HR, you are used to delivering good and bad messages because we spend our time doing both.  If you work in other areas of the business you don’t necessarily have that experience and so it feels like a big deal and no form or rating system in the world is going to help that.  But coaching, support and practice will.  We don’t need a form, we don’t need to compare people with one another and we don’t need a competency framework.  Leave it free form and humanistic and focus your energies on helping people out of their comfort zones.