change

Are you ready for the end?

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I’m not the sharpest tool in the box. I’m ok with that. The reality finally struck me that in a matter of weeks our world might be on the verge of substantial change. There is a very real chance that we could be collectively making the decision to leave the european union.

It doesn’t matter what I think, or what you think, the implications will be ours to deal with – both good and bad. In many ways, it is hard to think of a profession or an industry that will be more directly involved in unpicking the implications of that decision than the HR profession.

Nothing will happen too quickly, we won’t wake up and be faced with a series of challenges – other than uncertainty – but we would need to start thinking through the type of employment framework that we believe is right for the country and how we want our world of work to be designed.

Those for an exit will tell you that it will give unrivalled freedom to do what we want. Those against will tell you that nothing much will actually change. The reality is probably somewhere in the middle, away from the rhetoric and fear mongering.

But we do need to think through the type of economy we want and how we would go about building the arguments for creating it. The arguments of freedom come with the significant risks of exploitation and loose practice. Yet what is clear is that the “one size fits all” approach of central legislation does not fit the difference in the economic models of the UK and other countries.

What would you keep, what would you change? Have you thought it through?

Our entire landscape would be subject to debate and consideration. From immigration and skills, through discrimination, compensation and employment protection and litigation. We would be at the centre of some of the most contentious discussions and debates and we need to understand and find our voice.

Many think it will happen, I’m clear it could happen. In the event that it does, the HR profession will have a responsibility to lead business, to make its collective voice heard and to stand for something. We will have an opportunity to shape. And if we fail to take it, rest assured someone else sure as hell will.

Structural madness

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I used to work in an organisation that liked to restructure on a regular basis. The joke was that you could tell which day of the week it was based on whether there was an announcement about some sort of change. If you stayed in the organisation long enough, you got to see all the things that were undone, redone. It was a kind of cyclical musical chairs, but without the music, or a winner.

The more I learn about business and organisational performance, the more I realise that restructures mostly don’t improve either. And if there is any improvement, it is normally only marginal compared to the uncertainty, insecurity and disruption that are caused.

Most reorganisations fall into four categories:

  1. A new leader arrives and determines that they want to do things differently
  2. Something is not happening that the organisation wants to happen
  3. There is a need to reduce the cost base of the organisation
  4. Somebody leaves or there is an organic reorganisation of work and responsibilities

I’d go as far as to say that only the last of these makes any real sense at all.

The first is normally driven by the need of a new leader to stamp their authority, to have things working “their way” and to make people realise that there is a new regime in place. Now this “may” be true, but other than make things work from their perspective, will it really drive any meaningful shift in performance? The counter argument is that it probably won’t hurt – but then is that really a meaningful basis for any management intervention?

The second is where we enter the territories of madness….if you want something to happen that isn’t happening, if people aren’t talking, if there isn’t cross selling, if you don’t have the lead generation that you want. A structural change is not going to make these things happen. Nor will it get you liked, loved or adored.  A behavioural change, on the other hand, just might. People don’t do things differently because they’re organised in a different way, they do it because they understand things in a different way – they change their hearts and heads, not their seat.

As for three, there are the rare occasions when people are sat around in a business not doing anything. But in most cases, they’re carrying out the tasks that the organisation has historically deemed necessary. Wholesale structural changes to take out cost rarely work, without a subsequent change to the business operation or model. And if you’ve got an individual who is a problem? Deal with them, not the poor suckers around them.

A few years ago, I was talking to a successful leader of a business area who was referring to a competitor announcing another restructure. “I don’t think we’ve structurally changed things since the 70s” they told me. When I asked them how they’d accommodated all the changes and developments in the world and in their industry they answered, “we talk about it, work out what we need to do and get on with it”.

Hard to put it simpler than that.

Technology, analytics, data, life – start from the beginning

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I’ve just got back from the HRTechFest in Washington. Last time I went to one of these, I wrote this about Technology being HR’s biggest asset. I still think it is – so take a look.

This time, I was struck this time about the commonality of a lot of the themes that people were talking about inside and outside of the sessions. I heard a lot about:

Transparency – the increasing expectation from employees that they can see the workings of an organisation beyond their own personal experience. Whether that is of compensation, decision-making structures, or promotion opportunities – to name but a few.
Customisation – no single person is the same and we therefore need to create employee experiences that recognise the different choices that individual employees will want to take at different stages of their lives and careers.
Experimentation – we need to be more comfortable with being less perfect and in trying things out to see how and if they work. Whether it is data, technology or traditional interventions, we need to love and embrace the pilot.
Analysis – data, data everywhere….and we need to start using it sensibly. Almost every presentation or conversation I had talked about the data underpinning decisions, but used it in a practical and sensible way – not for show, but for real, purposeful thinking.

But the biggest thing that I realised was that the companies talking about this were drawn from right across the board. The likes of Twitter and Hulu and Google and Hootsuite were rubbing shoulders with the likes of Barclays, Cimpress, NBC and health and education providers.

The challenges and themes were the same, but the routes to the mountains were different. And I think this is a factor that we sometimes overlook. If you want to develop transparency of compensation, then you’re going to take a different route in a company which has been in existence for less than 10 years and has a couple of hundred of employee to one that has thousands of employees and a lot with a length of tenure two or three times longer than the other company.

Our skill is in understanding our organisational starting place and identifying the path to take. That’s a significant part of what we bring to the table. Sometimes change is fast, sometimes change is slow. Sometimes things aren’t achievable right now because a whole load of other things need to be done first. And that’s ok.

We all need to aspire to be better, we all want our organisations to change and develop, to create better working environments for our employees and better workplaces for society. To do that we need to constantly take a step forward from the place that we started. Recognising the challenge is as important as recognising the goal. That way, we make long-term sustainable change. The sort that really, really makes a difference.

There is no “Digital Revolution”

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Every day, I hear people in business talking about digital transformation, digital disruption, the digital revolution. I hear them talk about their organisations becoming digital businesses.

But the thing is, in most cases they aren’t becoming anything of the sort.

We can’t underestimate the impact that technology has on the way we interact as consumers, as employees, as enterprises and service providers. But we need to be careful to avoid the easy distraction of the simple half-truth.

Before “the digital revolution”, we didn’t refer to ourselves as physical businesses. And to that point, it is hard to put a finger on when physical became digital. The calculator? The mainframe? The mobile phone? The internet? When was the start of the end and the end of the beginning?

It really doesn’t matter what sector your organisation operates in, finance, retail, leisure, media or public services. The chances are that the principal purpose for which you employ people and go to work every day isn’t “digital”, but something else. To insure people against loss, to sell people the means to keep warm, to provide entertainment, content or security, health and wellbeing.

I’m not splitting hairs, my experience of working in various organisations over the years has taught me that in times of change, in times of disturbance or disruption, the survivors are the ones that understand what they do and what they exist for. They have a purpose that transcends the means of delivery.

They remain single-mindedly focussed on this core purpose and reason for being, but completely open minded to the way in which they can execute it in a changing world. This differentiation between intent and execution is critical for organisational alignment and strategic direction.

As HR leaders, we can really demonstrate our value when organisations undergo change and there is no doubt that new technologies provide opportunities that need to be optimised and embraced. To do that, we’ve got to understand what our businesses are really about, how they make money or fulfil their public service remit.

The nature of business, of organisations, has changed before and it will change again. There will be new entrants to our worlds and established names will fall by the way. In many cases, the biggest difference between those that win and those that lose, will not be the change itself, but the ability to understand what stays the same.