cipd12

The focus of HR isn’t to be commercial: Day three of #cipd2012

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A time for some final conclusions from the CIPD conference, before I jump on the train and head back to the world of work, emails and slightly irate family members wondering why I’ve been living it up in Manchester. Living it up is probably too grandiose a term, but from the time of some of the text messages I received last night/this morning, there was a party going on…..somewhere.

Anyway, I digress. Back to the matter in hand. Or the matter that should be in hand, but strangely isn’t. And by that I mean, the standard of our profession.

It seems almost a lifetime ago now that I was watching Gary Hamel on stage as the opening keynote to the conference. Gary was inspirational he was challenging. he built on the opening address from Peter Cheese. They both talked of setting a high bar for the profession, of re-engineering our purpose for the future world of work. It was heady stuff and long overdue.

But so much of what I’ve seen and experienced since then has reminded me how far we have to go. Slipping back into our comfort zone of process and procedure, of task and activity, of compliance and control. I attended a session yesterday entitled, “Commercially focused HR Business Partners” partly because I wanted a laugh and partly because I’m kind of curious about why we are still having this particular conversation. I wrote about “Commercial HR” a while back for the kind people at XpertHR. You can find that series of posts here. I also had a great conversation with FlipChartRick about this and his experience of another session, “How can HR improve its influence with the Board” and he has written a post about it here.

The thing that strikes me most is this; we should be bringing something unique to our organisations, something that other departments can’t bring and which outsourcing can’t do more cheaply. At the session on Commercial HR, I asked a question of the speakers – whether the debate about commercial HR wasn’t actually defunct and redundant and shouldn’t we talk about values led and culture led HR instead? The general consensus was that yes it was….and then they went back to discussing “commercial HR”. You see, I don’t understand how anyone can get any joy out of work without being interested in the operation of their organisation, the purpose, intent and performance. It would be like driving a car without looking out of either the windscreen or in the mirrors. In order to be of any sort of use, you need to be commercially aware, but that isn’t the same as being commercially focussed.

As Rick points out in his post, “you don’t need to do the CFO’s job but you at least need to learn his language”. Correct. You don’t need to try to outdo the experts in the room, but you do need to understand the conversations that are going on and be able to contribute. However, our focus should not be commercial. It should be something else that brings something new to the table. Can you imagine how things might have been different in some of the companies that have recently encountered “credibility” issues if they had experienced a strong voice talking about the importance of values, culture, integrity and sustainability? What is they had experienced someone working with the senior team and coaching them on tackling their challenges in a different way? Both because they understood the business, the challenges but also because they brought a different angle, a different approach to solving them?

I don’t buy this constant banging on about being commercial. I’ve never been anything else and nor have the people who I’ve recruited into my team and have worked with. I get that there are HR professionals out there that aren’t and they will never be successful, but it isn’t and shouldn’t be the focus of our profession – it is a pre-requisite to being a good business person. Our higher purpose, our contribution should be something else. Our focus should be on performance through people and the culture, values and leadership of our organisations. Really, it should. Trust me.

The youth unemployment challenge: Day Two of #CIPD12

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I’ve written about unemployment, skills and training on a number of occasions – because it is an issue that is close to my heart and because it is an issue that is close to the heart of our economy and future competitiveness.  I was therefore, absolutely delighted to see it taking centre stage on day 2 of the CIPD Conference with a panel discussion involving Peter Cheese, CEO of the CIPD, Michael Davis, CEO of the UK Commission for Employment and Skills, Anne Pickering, HR Director for O2, Toby Peyton-Jones Director of HR for Siemens UK & North West Europe and also Jo Swinson, Minister for Employment Relations and Consumer Affairs.

The debate was a good one and unsurprisingly a number of key themes and issues were highlighted. The current issues that we are experience in youth employment are structural and not cyclical. This is not an issue just driven by the current economic environment, but has been a long time coming as highlighted in this blog by Mervyn Dinnen, caused by a decline in entry-level jobs and a reduction in big one company towns.  Add to this the contradiction of employers requiring work experience and young job seekers’ inability to get that work experience and we have ourselves a problem.

The problems are long-term and structural and likewise the solutions will also be long-term and structural. O2 talked about their inability to actually predict the skill sets that will be required in the future because of the speed of change in technology, requiring them to focus on recruiting mindset and broad skills instead. Siemens, in a rather germanic way, talked about how they had mapped out future mega trends to help understand the markets that they would need to be growing in and therefore which future skills they would be needing.

And of course, there was talk of the education system, vocational training, the role of universities and work experience schemes.

It is probably here that there are more questions than answers. Clearly there is a need for reform, but as I’ve written before, we seem to be dancing around the edges and sending contradictory messages. Take this, all the panelists including Swinson were extolling the virtue of other routes into employment other than university. Agreed. But we don’t seem to act as if it is.

As I tweeted at the time, I struggle to understand why we happily loan someone £27k to study for a degree in Zoology, but we won’t loan a job seeker money to undertake unpaid work experience, workplace training or even to start their own business.  When Government funds workplace schemes they give the money to the employer and the job seeker has to apply for it. Almost as if we don’t trust them with the money in the way that we would someone going to University.

It also strikes me that we place the power with the organisation and not the job seeker. Would an alternative model be to provide the funding to the job seeker? Although it wouldn’t change the overall outcome it would change the ethos. If I think Tesco aren’t providing as good an opportunity as Asda or Lloyds as Barclays then I can take my money to the employer I think would train and educate me best.  Creating competition between employers as well as between job seekers. It would also potentially open up more opportunities with SMEs and other companies who may not have the resources and the structure to apply fo Government funding in the way that larger organisations can.

I’m sure there a thousand holes that can be picked in this argument at the moment and I need to reflect on it and work it through more. But it seems that we would have a better bet if we both empower the young unemployed to find work and challenge organisations to create it. Businesses are competitive by nature, shouldn’t we be making the most of that?

Innovation versus process: Day one of #CIPD12

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Life is about contrast, the good and the bad, the brave and the faint hearted, the inspirational and the disappointing. The great thing about contrast is that it helps you to form an opinion, helps you to learn and, if you take the time to reflect and consider, it can help you to grow.

The first day of the CIPD Annual Conference has been a lot about contrast.

As an opening session, Gary Hamel was never going to disappoint. Energetic, humorous, informed and challenging.  Some of the quotes alone were worth attending for,

“No-one grows up wanting to be a manager”

“Markets are better at allocating resources than managers”

“Management was created by engineers and accountants…..and it shows”

And my personal favourite,

“Organisations are like dogs, really good at peeing on lamp posts, not so good at doing the tango”

But entertainment is one thing.  Was there substance behind it and what did we know that we didn’t know before we entered the room? The answer to the first question is yes, the answer to the second….not so much. But ou often don’t need to learn, just being reminded can be powerful.

The basis for future organisational success and growth needs to be about defining a higher purpose which we can all collectively work towards. Management is a tool that has developed to ensure conformity, but the organisations that will thrive and succeed are those that are not focussed on conformity, but focussed on innovation. And as HR people the fundamental issue for us is not developing better processes, better tools or better methods, but helping to develop better principles. In order to innovate and create at speed we need to focus on decentralization and not centralization.

Music to my ears.

The thing is, though, as an HR profession we have been focussed on the antithesis of these principles. We have become focussed on process and procedure. We desire conformity and control more than anything and this lust has led us on an ongoing agenda of centralization and aggregation. We have shown the greatest lack of ingenuity, innovation and free thinking since the lemmings all decided it was a good idea to follow one another off the cliff.

But life is full fo contrasts and on leaving the session, I went in to another (to remain unnamed) where I was presented with a “case study” full of process and procedure. And when I say full……I mean full. There isn’t enough Valium in the world to get me through that session.

If this is an organisational challenge then it is one which we are ill-equipped and ill prepared to tackle as we currently stand. Both a risk and at the same time an amazing opportunity. Because if we can get our own house in order, then we can play an important role of the evolution of business, work and the workplace.

From what I see though, we have a long way to go.

Who are the CIPD and what do they want with us?

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Seems like a strange question to ask really. Who are the CIPD? And……what do they want of us?

Like many of you, I get a nice letter once a year asking me for money. I fill out the various forms and I put the invoice through to my accounts department where the good people that work there, happily process it.

And then once every so often I get a copy of People Management through the post and I read it….well sometimes. I used to look at the jobs, but not so much these days. I get invites to branch events….but they’re not really me. I’m not a “society” kind of a guy.

So what is in it for me and if those good fellows in accounts were to reject my payment, would I be willing to put my hand in my own pocket and cough up the hundred odd quid that I’m asked for?

I don’t know. Or at least I didn’t know.

A few weeks ago, I had the good fortune to spend some time with Peter Cheese, the new CEO of the CIPD for a coffee and a chat. Now anyone who knows me will tell you that I’m not slow to crack a few old surname jokes. And it would be easy to make some, although I’m sure Peter has heard them all.

But sometimes you meet someone who really inspires you, someone who makes you think. Peter is one of those guys. We share a lot of concerns and we share a lot of ideas about the future and so it would be easy to say that I’m just kowtowing to someone who thinks the same as me. Maybe I am. But I left our meeting more confident about the future of the CIPD than I have ever been before. Maybe this is the start of something?

Leadership is a funny thing, leadership is often about being unpopular. I have a feeling that Peter might be unpopular…at least with a vocal minority. But during the time that I spent with him, I have to say that I experienced a clarity of purpose that the CIPD has lacked for many, many a year.

Take the new look People Management magazine, it certainly feels different, it certainly looks different. The cobwebs of institutionalisation seem to have started to be blown away (although they still need to call in the web designers tout de suite). And as Peter says in his introduction to the latest edition, “We’re developing a clearer framework for the way we communicate, placing us at the heart of the changing worlds of work, organisations and work forces.”

The CIPD at the heart of the changing world of work, organisations and work forces…..now there would be a thing, a long overdue thing…..

The CIPD needs to be leading the debate, not following it. It needs to be pulling on the collective knowledge of its membership, the people who are there, day in and day out, working with organisations on their needs and challenges. Not just focussing on long and academically heavy studies that appear months after a news story has passed. The CIPD needs to be a voice for its members, not a voice for itself.

So, are we turning a corner? I’d like to think so.

A we enter our conference season, I look forward to a bright new dawn from the CIPD. I look forward to a renewed sense of meaning, I look forward to EVERY member having an equal voice and remembrance of the fact that a vocal minority are exactly that….a minority.

I look forward.

And, in my opinion, you should do too.

We still need to answer the questions that started this post.

Who are the CIPD?

And…….

What do they want with us?

There is a lot to yet be defined, a lot that is yet to be discovered and a lot that is yet to be concluded. But…….if you’d allow me this, I’d like to take the opportunity to misquote the inimitable Professor Green…..and allow my foible of playing with people’s names to emerge just a little.

“The future’s bright, the future’s Cheese.”

For the moment at least…..let’s see whether the mountains are truly conquered.

I’ll go back to my day job now…….

The CIPD Annual Conference starts on Tuesday 6th November in Manchester. You can follow developments on Twitter via the hash tag #CIPD12. I’ll also be giving my thoughts on it here and you can follow fellow members of the blog squad, such as Doug Shaw, Flora Marriott, Sukh Pabial, Perry Timms, Rob Jones, FlipChartRick and Mervyn Dinnen to name but a few. And of course, the CIPD….. on @CIPD!