The big admin blob that drains us all

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I was struck the other day by a post that Tim Baker shared on Linkedin suggesting that one in three HR professionals in the UK were considering leaving the profession, with 41% suggesting unnecessary admin as one of the causes. Now, of course, the company behind the research has a solution and….surprise, surprise…that happens to be exactly what they do as a company. But despite my loathing of this kind of “research”, (so much so that I’ll share link above to Tim because he’s worth connecting with, but I won’t share any links to the company, because…it is very average), yes, despite all of this, it did get me thinking.

I wouldn’t mind betting if you asked 100 random employees what they thought of HR in their organisation, one of the things the majority would raise is the unnecessary paperwork, the bureaucracy, the processes that seem both endless and pointless. And I wouldn’t mind betting if you spoke to 100 random HR professionals and asked them what they liked least about their jobs, they’d say the unnecessary paperwork, the bureaucracy and the processes that nobody seems to follow and so are endless and pointless.

So what on earth is going on? Who is responsible and simply, why can’t this all stop? As someone who has raged against process most of my career, to the understandable frustration and eye rolling of my colleagues, and who has (sometimes successfully but mostly unsuccessfully) tried to reduce it, I’ve got a few theories:

  1. The power of one – Every form that’s created or process that is added is only looked at as a singular piece of work, not in the entirety of the experience. So every time something is added, it seems eminently reasonable in isolation. But lumped together with everything else, the whole thing becomes an unmanageable blob.
  2. The lack of measures – I don’t know of any organisations, although they might exist, where there is a firm rule on the amount of admin that any one person is expected to do and therefore a finite limit. Why does this matter? Because if you had a firm rule and you were at the limit, then to add something in, you’d need to take something out.
  3. The fear of lawyers – Well, it isn’t really the lawyers, they’re generally an amiable bunch, it is the over regulation and imposition of onerous burdens of proof on the employment relationship that means that the simplest way to defend against anything is to document it to within an inch of it’s life. Although, I’m told by those on the inside that law companies are the worst for following any kind of process – surely what’s good for the goose is good for the gander?
  4. The calibre of the profession – If you’ve only ever worked in process heavy, admin focused HR functions then how can you be expected to know that anything else is possible? And anyone who suggests it can must be mad, bad or ready for retirement! But where are the creative thinkers coming through the profession who want to shape a completely different future of work? Oh yes, they’re working from home and on Teams meetings all day…adding value.
  5. The belief in a silver bullet – The very average research was carried out by a company that sells tech solutions. As long as I’ve worked in the profession we’ve been told that tech is going to be the answer, most recently AI. Systemising or automating rubbish doesn’t stop it being rubbish, it just makes it expensive rubbish that likely disappoints.

HR teams say they want to be more strategic and less admin focused, yet they are the ones that create the admin in the first place. Businesses say they want their HR teams to be more strategic and less admin focused, but they rarely hold them to the account. Managers say they want to be able to get on with their jobs, but they don’t want to take the responsibility for making decisions. Sometimes it seems to me we all want the same things, but maybe it suits us all better the way that it is.

Fast news is bad business

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When I was starting off in business, we didn’t know a lot about what other organisations were doing. Of course there were newspapers, there were magazines and there were conferences, but the speed at which we learnt what was going on was…slow. You might get the odd piece about the biggest brands of the day (at the time in HR management that was Marks and Spencer), but for most organisations in most sectors, in order to understand what someone else was doing, you had to give them a call.

Fast news and the impact of the internet and social channels on our personal attitudes and opinions is well researched and it would be surprising if this didn’t replicate itself in the world of business as well. Of course, the widespread access to data and information has many benefits as business leaders, we have more evidence available to us at the touch of a button than ever before. But at the same time, I wonder whether it can be a driver of poor corporate decision making and ultimately bad business too? Does the fast spread of corporate news and opinions lead to pressure in the boardroom to make decisions that previously we would have taken much longer to make?

There are two examples that spring to mind, the first relates to the corporate response to the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. The world was rightly shocked by the events and many people felt personally compelled to make statements, take action and show support. Almost overnight companies replicated those personal actions, but the speed at which they did that led to many being called out for hypocrisy. How much of this was due to the speed of decision making, the need to respond publicly as other brands took to the world stage with their positions? What actions would the organisations have taken if social media didn’t exist and they could have taken the time to reflect on the right course of action based on their organisation?

The second example comes on the back of the pandemic and the almost exhausting debate about whether office based workers should return to their places of work. Corporate after corporate came out in 2020 and 2021 with big bold statements about “working from anywhere”, that this was all about “trusting their workforces” and that this was the “future of work”. In order to get cut through in the noisy post pandemic debate, proclamations became bigger and bolder each time (whilst they sold off real estate or withdrew from leases – but that’s another story) in a reflection of the “war for talent”. They hadn’t conducted any analysis or research, they just parroted what others were doing in the corporate panic. That so many of them are now going back on the original stated position tells you all you need to know about the way in which this decision was made.

Of course, the internet, social media and fast news aren’t going away so what does that mean for the leadership of organisations? It means we need to have a clearer North Star for our organisational culture, it means those of us in HR need to be stronger in ensuring that decisions (no matter what the external pressure) are aligned with that North Star and it means we need to go slower on things that will be harder to unravel if they go wrong – just like any other major business decision. Fast news can be really bad business, sometimes we need to close our eyes and our ears and ask ourselves what we think is the right answer, instead of asking what others are doing. Sure we might not be first, but we need to ask whether we’d rather be slow and right or repent at leisure.

D&I isn’t dead, it just smells funny

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The desire to make workplaces more diverse and inclusive has been going on for at least as long as I’ve been in a job. As a Personnel Officer, one of my early tasks was completing diversity returns to the Government, I’m not sure they ever achieved anything but the intention was there. I remember the IPM (as it was then) snowflake campaign, remember that? And I’ve seen the law change, develop and progress over the years. Are things better now than when I started in work? Yes. Are they as good as they need to be? No.

And throughout the majority of my career it is fair to say the broad consensus, in the UK at least, has been that fairer, more equal workplaces are a good thing. I think that still remains the case to this very day. If you asked ten people whether they thought selection, progression, and promotion should be based on ability and past performance, or whether it should be based on gender, race or some other characteristic I’m pretty certain they’d all say the former. And yet over recent years it has sometimes felt like one of the most divisive debates in the world of work. So divisive, that most people don’t want to write or talk about it.

Look across the pond and you can see this playing out in the proclamations being made by the incoming administration. Is this really one of the most important issues for the leader of any nation to address? Probably not, but then it really isn’t about that it is about throwing some proverbial red meat to supporters in the artificial culture wars. But on the other side of this argument, in the opposition trenches, there are people equally to blame; people making similarly ridiculous proclamations but without the established power. The people that declare that your personal behaviours and beliefs are not enough, the people that have denied large sections of the population a voice in the name of redressing historical unfairness, the people that make others feel scared to think, feel something different or to ask questions, the people who actively seek to divide rather than to unite.

And this is the nonsense that detracts from the real work that is happening in the vast majority of organisations across the UK, where people are still trying to create better, more inclusive and diverse workplaces because it makes good business sense and because it is the right thing to do for our communities. These are the hard yards that make a bigger difference than the soundbites or statements, the icons or the indices. Whatever the campaigners on either side say, do you think it will result in fewer women being employed or promoted? That it will setback our understanding of supporting neurodiversity in the workplace? That it will mean that we see fewer black and asian executives?

D&I isn’t dead, although there are parts of the current approach that definitely do smell funny. And that happens when the agenda steps into social engineering and unfocused activism rather than being about driving better business outcomes, driving organisational performance and customer satisfaction and moving slowly, but steadily closer to a meritocracy for all.

Sometimes things change

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One of the very few things that GPs and HRDs have in common, is that people tell us their personal woes. Actually, I suspect the other thing we might have in common is that people complain about the service they get from our profession, but that’s a whole other post for a whole other day. And whilst it isn’t physical ailments that people talk to HR professionals about, at least not in my experience, what they do share gives you an insight into what is going on and going wrong in the world of work.

In the 30 years I’ve been doing this, I’ve spoken to hundreds of people from outside of my organisation, normally the conversations start with a, “they can’t do that can they?” or a “what are my rights in x situation?”. And the honest answer is normally, “yes” and “very few”. Of course there are a number of cases where organisations, or more commonly individual managers, have behaved very badly. But in the vast majority of the cases the issue is simply that the organisation and the employee want to go in different directions.

You can, and I would, make an argument that organisations are bad are taking their workforces on a journey of change. So often, management spend lots of time thinking and planning change and then communicate it and expect people to come along in a matter of days. I’ve written about that previously and the disconnect between the psychological preparedness of leadership and that of their workforces. But the whole responsibility doesn’t lie with just the organisation it lies with individuals as well.

Sometimes we have to recognise that the organisation is going in a direction that we don’t want our own careers to go in, and we have to take the only action available to us – to leave. It doesn’t need to be an acrimonious split, it is a simple, grown up, thought through recognition that the things that we want are not in alignment with the things on offer from the organisation. Think about it in terms of your favourite restaurant or bar changing owner, or changing its offering to something you don’t enjoy – would you still go along and give them your money?

Of course, sometimes there are economic arguments in favour of staying and it goes without saying that there are different degrees of choice for different groups of workers. But quite often the one’s that I hear from who have the biggest issues are those with more choice. So what makes them stay? Personally, I think it comes down to a lack of ownership, an unwillingness to take responsibility for choices, and not being open to the recognition that sometimes things change in a way that doesn’t suit you.

But if you can do these things, if you can flip them on their head then acceptance and embracing a different direction is simply part of taking care of yourself and your health and wellbeing. Come to think of it, maybe that’s another thing we share with GPs.