change

Education is too important for politicians

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I’ve written before about our supply chain.

It always strikes me as bizarre that as a profession we talk about the value of people, but we seldom discuss, in real detail, the production of the resource that is central to our being.

Education.

Anyone who has been involved in education in any form will know that the one thing that defines our education system is constant change.

We plan our education policy on cycles of a maximum of five years. And yet our educational cycle is a minimum of 14 years. Which means that as a child, as a student, you could easily have four or five different educational policies in place during your education.

Different targets

Different focus areas

Different  inspection regimes

Different syllabuses (syllabi?)

Different exams

And the changes introduce unnecessary drag and inefficiency in to the supply chain as teachers and leaders attempt to understand, assimilate and implement the requirements of the latest policy.

But not only does that inefficiency mean that we’re not maximising the return on investment in educational resource, it also means that we are providing confused and often contradictory messages to both students and parents.

If we are serious about skills and education providing a competitive advantage to the UK, we need to take a longer term approach that builds consistently towards a future skills agenda and underpins our economic success.

Which means taking it out of the hands of politicians and raising it above the quagmire of vote winning, electioneering soundbites and delivering it into the hands of expert educationalists and economists.

I wrote a piece for HR Magazine recently on this, but simply put, if we want to be serious about our role in the strategic direction of our organisations and United Kingdom Plc, it needs to start with us taking education seriously.

So when the canvassers come and stand on your doorstep, don’t just ask them what their policy on education is, ask them how they’re going to ensure long-term stability in education.

Regardless of who is in power.

We are our choices

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Can you imagine being told by your supermarket what you had to buy? Or your hairdresser telling you how your hair should be cut? How about local bar or pub deciding what you wanted to drink? I know for one that I wouldn’t put up with it and I guess is that it wouldn’t take long for you to get fed up either.

Because we like the choice. We like the feeling of control. We like to be in charge of our own destiny. Now of course, we could debate for hours, whether we are actually in control, or having the living daylights manipulated out of us on an hourly basis. But stay with me.

It’s well known that the idea of a “war for talent” makes me want to self castrate with a rusty set of hair clippers. I’m also not going to go down the Gen Y debate, because there are too many haters out there and I can’t be arsed.

But. And this is a big but (no jokes please). I do think the relationship is changing between employers and employees.

Yet, so much of what we do is still grounded in the paternalistic past where the boss knew best. How we pay, how we offer benefits, how we train and develop. How we promote and manage careers.

We provide very little choice in organisations, very little flexibility and very little responsibility. Instead we standardise, homogenise, process and commoditise the employment relationship. Partly because it makes things easy for us, partly because it retains control.

But it misses a trick. If the future of employment relationships is less permanent, less linear and generally more two-way. Then shouldn’t we be designing our organisations to genuinely give choice and ownership to employees? Not merely paying lip service to it.

It is nice to talk about the way that management is going to change. The way in which the organisation is going to change. The way in which careers are going to change. But how is the organisational infrastructure going to change and who is thinking about it?

That’s what I’d like to know.

Why HR should hate change just a little bit more

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I often hear HR professionals express how comfortable they are with change, how much they like it. I find this both peculiar and a little bit terrifying. The curse of many a modern business is the almost incessant approach to instigating  change. Initiative after initiative, programme after programme, with never enough time between them to properly evaluate or measure impact.

Normally these initiatives are driven by the leadership team and eagerly pounced on by HR leaders to show how committed they are to delivering the corporate agenda. I figure that’s why so many of them profess to like change; it provides the organisational hard-on of temporary, central importance.

Most of the time, we completely overlook the emotional and psychological impact of change. Success is measured in operational plans, in business cases, on gant charts and in milestones. Success is a tick box exercise.

And of course, as we all know, if the change really was that successful, it would only need to be done once.

Many organisations, many if not most employees, are change fatigued. They’re walking zombie-like waiting for the next initiative to come and fail. In the meantime, trying to do their jobs despite the machinations of their leaders to seemingly make things harder. Don’t believe me? Spend a day in any FTSE100 company or any part of the public sector and speak to the people actually doing the work.

Where is HR in all this? Well certainly not where it needs to be, understanding the impact of the changes on employees, diagnosing real organisational performance issues and challenging the business to fine tune and not continually volt-face like a goldfish in the throws of a drug induced epileptic fit.

I don’t want HR people to like change, I don’t want them to be comfortable with it. I actually want them to hate it a little bit more, to be wary of it. That way, they might take it a bit more seriously and think about the implications on the wider organisations. Not just where they’re going to get the next pat on the head.

Back to reality

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I am first and foremost an HR practitioner. That is the job that I’m employed to do, that I’ve trained to do and that I’ve fulfilled for the best part of two decades. Every day, every morning I get up and go in to work to practice my profession. The following day I come in and I see the results and the impact. I see it year after year. I was with my last company for nine years, I’ve been with my current company for over five years.

When we get things right, I get to see the results.
When things go wrong, I take responsibility.

That is the responsibility beholden on the practitioner to do what is organisationally sustainable, what is culturally achievable, to fulfill their mandate as an employee and as the temporary guardian of their remit.

As an outsider, you can talk. You can make proclamations. You can enthuse and criticise, propose and deny. You wake up and all that is left of the previous day’s noise are the final echoes reverberating around the empty stadium of your mind. You rarely see the results and never accept the failures.

Innovation, revolution, chaos and new agendas are so much easier when you only have responsibility for your self image.

If I have a wish for 2014, it is for an honest, open conversation, practitioner to practitioner, about how we can make the working lives of our employees better and at the same time improve the performance of our organisations. Without the guff and the noise of those that have no responsibility other than for themselves.

I want to hear about how we might incrementally improve things for real, not rip the rule book up in our dreams.

If you’re a practitioner I’m interested in what you’ve done, where you’ve done it, what you’ve learnt from it and what you would do differently. If you’ve got strong views but no evidence of achievement, my question to you is, why not? Why can’t you demonstrate what you believe? What are you doing to find an organisation where you can work, long term, to deliver that vision?

2014, let’s make it the year that the realists, the pragmatists, the grafters take back the agenda. Let’s make it the year that those who are delivering change, every day, lead the conversation.

Debate is helpful, ideas are good. And even better when they’re focused on delivery and grounded in reality. Let’s make this the year where we move the conversation back there.