CIPD

Why I work in HR

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I don’t believe that anyone should hate what they do. I don’t think anyone should come home from work at the end of the day and, just like the day before and the day before that, feel dejected, desperate or despondent about their working life.

I don’t believe that anyone should feel afraid or intimidated, should fear their work, their colleagues or their boss. I don’t believe anyone’s health, welfare or security should be placed in jeopardy by their need to earn money.

I believe work should be a place where people can come and be themselves, whatever their religion, gender, sexuality or any other “defining characteristic”. I believe work should be a place where you are judged on what you contribute, not who you are.

I believe work should be meaningful, even when it’s repetitive. That everyone can find their own purpose in what they do. I believe in empowerment, trust and shared responsibility. I believe that work should be rewarding, for everyone.

I believe in fairness and equity. That differences in compensation and reward should be justified and that everyone should have the chance to progress if they have the desire, capability and opportunity. I believe that the success of the enterprise should be enjoyed by all.

I believe work can and should be better. And simply, despite the distractions, the snide comments and the jokes. That’s why I get up in the morning. That’s why I work in HR.

Why do you do your job?

Government doesn’t make bad employers

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Before the election I was asked to write a piece for HR Magazine laying out my dream policy. The sad fact is that whichever party had come to power the idea of providing free cheese and wine to HR Directors was never really going to get any traction. We can but dream. But, if you’re really interested, you can see the series of articles here.

Since the election, I’m hearing a lot of noise from left leaning, liberal, tree hugging, social media loving types, highlighting the risk to the world of work and employee rights from a right of centre government. And whilst it isn’t surprising (we all know the pantomime lines after all) it does seem to neglect the power that organisations have themselves to create good work and a good working environment.

There seems to be a perspective on organisations that “if you allow them to do it, then they will” which I find patronising and naïve in equal measure. The fact is, that lots of us work incredibly hard year in and year out to make work better AND make profit. That doesn’t mean that we always get it right and it doesn’t mean that there aren’t dodgy employers out there either.

The irony is that the same people who preach trusting employees in the workplace, reducing policies and procedures and placing the emphasis on adult to adult relationships seem to change their tune when it comes to CEOs and their relationship with Government. Employees should be treated like grown ups, but companies? Heaven forbid.

I’ve been involved in the Good Recruitment Campaign, a brilliant initiative from the Recruitment & Employment Confederation supported by many, many large employers who want to ensure high standards in recruitment. I’ve also been involved in the superb Learning to Work initiative from CIPD, which also has many, many high-profile businesses working to help reduce youth unemployment and connect the unemployed with opportunities in their businesses. These are just two, I could go on.

Beside these organised initiatives, there is also good practice going on in organisations up and down the country. Leadership and management teams that are trying to run their organisations well and responsibly and also provide shareholder return. After all, we all benefit from successful companies.

We have it in our power to be either good or bad employers, to treat people well or to treat them badly, to be supportive or attritional in our working relationships. No-one makes us do anything and ultimately we have the choice. The Government doesn’t have to set the agenda for HR, we can set it for ourselves. Instead of whinging and whining about matters beyond our control, let’s get back in to our businesses and make the argument for doing the right thing, regardless of who is or isn’t in power.

It’s not you, it’s me

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I’ve never met a CEO who didn’t want a world class HR service.

I’ve met a number who didn’t know how to articulate it, who described HR but called it something else, who talked about the importance of talent management, skills development, workforce planning, incentivisation and organisational performance.

But I’ve never met one who has said, “people are not important and I don’t care what I get out of them”.

On the other hand, I have met a lot of CEOs who are fed up with their HR functions, with their HR teams. Who see HR as a barrier to all the things that they want to achieve and who focus on areas that they don’t see as important.

If you look at any survey of CEO priorities or concerns, you will see time and time again “people” concerns in the top five check it out, year on year on year. There is no shortage of opportunity for us, to be involved, to influence, to be central to the development of our organisations.

So what’s the point of this? The point is simple.

Where we fail. WE fail. It isn’t our organisation, it isn’t our company, it isn’t our CEO. It is our inability to win the debate, to drive the agenda, to create the opportunity. And the bitter sweet thing about this, is that we have total control.

I’m fed up of hearing about the organisation that didn’t want this, or the CEO that didn’t like that. We need to focus the debate on our own performance and the standards within our profession. If you talk to any headhunter working within HR, they will tell you of the dearth of talent. If you ask them about their experience working with HR as a client, they’ll tell you of their despair.

This isn’t about rebranding, or “having a dialogue”. This isn’t about changing our name or shiny new logos. This is about a fundamental shift in the standards that we accept in our profession and being relentless in challenging ourselves to do more.

And I understand that there will be people saying, “Morrison is banging on again” and yes I am, and I will continue to do so. Because I’m passionate about the work I do and the work that my team does. I see organisations that are demonstrating real commitment and value. But they are the few and the far.

Too often, I see sub standard HR professionals and HR teams. That are failing to embrace the opportunity that is right in front of them. Don’t listen to me, read all the articles and the stories about them. Go speak to “normal” people and ask them their experiences with HR.

The HR agenda is being hijacked by a tree hugging, granola munching minority, that talk about creating something new. These are the same people who left corporate life because they couldn’t make change happen and couldn’t stand the pace. Otherwise they’d be doing exactly what they were talking about inside their previous organisations.

And whilst they will tell you that they can make change happen from outside, the truth is they can’t, because the agenda they espouse and the mistruths they propagate are exactly the things that frustrate the CEOs. They are the weak and sickly branches of our profession that need to be clinically lopped off in order to allow us to grow and flourish.

I’d love this to be the year that we really wake up, but I don’t think that’s going to happen just yet. But if we are to move forward, we need to embrace the undeniable truth…..

It’s not them, it’s us.

You’re not as big as you think

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HR likes a fad, like a fat boy likes the cake shop and similarly gorges and over indulges until all proportion and perspective is lost. Sadly I’ve witnessed a few of these over the years and my fear is the latest one is the much misunderstood and misused term “BIG data”.

I’m certainly not anti data, or anti analytics. And I’ve said before that an HR person who “doesn’t like numbers” is a bad HR person.  I just think the idea of data being BIG in HR is a bit of a myth.

Why? Well, let’s start with the numbers:

59.3% of all UK employees are employed in SMEs, each employing less than 250 employees.

18.8% of the remaining 40.7% of those employees are employed in the Public Sector the majority of whom are in parts of the sector with no integrated HR or employee data management systems or holistic analytical capability.

Which leaves us with 21.9% of the UK’s employees very few of whom are employed in organisations of significant scale. So if they want to be playing with BIG data, they’d need to be capturing a shed load (and a half) of employee data sets.

Which, I can tell you, most of them aren’t.

So what happens? Instead of focussing on the real questions and issues, we make daft statements such as, “talent analytics and big data are must have capabilities in HR”  when the fact is that most organisations don’t have anything vaguely approaching big data, in fact, they have relatively small data.

And then our press, our journals, our conference organisers and our professional bodies create the impression that everyone else is doing something, when the reality is that they’re not. Yes organisations may be doing data analysis, but that’s no different this year than it was last year or the year before.

My advice to you is to stop worrying about big data in HR. You don’t have it now and you probably never will. Instead focus on small data and BIG THINKING, taking the information that you have and being really curious and inquisitive about what you can learn from it.

The real magic happens when insight and intuition come together to create the perfect harmony of head and heart, of thinking and feeling, of gut and brain.

Not when you try to play keepy up with an imaginary trend.

Because at the end of the day, we are dealing with real people, not fads, and that’s where we make a difference.