culture

Feedback….it’s a gift…..

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I once worked in an organisation that was big on feedback. It was hardcore. We had a manager join us from another company and when it came to the annual appraisal, she posed the work equivalent of, “does my bum look big in this?”. She asked,

“Is there anything that you think I need to know? That I could be doing better?”

BOOM!

Two weeks later, she was a shaking wreck on the floor. Admitting to me, “I didn’t actually want them to tell me!”.

And that’s the thing. We live in a feedback culture, but so much of the feedback is utterly pointless. I can’t order a product now without getting a request to rate the service, the packaging or the lumbar posture of the delivery person. But does any of this matter, does anyone care and does it make any difference?

I’m no role model here. I’m the guy that reacted to the feedback that I was “low in empathy” by responding, “Do I give a sh*t what they feel?”, but it strikes me that there are two types of reaction to feedback.

Active and inactive.

Yes, it’s as simple as that.

Either do something with it, or don’t bother asking. Don’t make the people sweat it over how to break it to you that you’re a closet Nazi, unless you’re willing to change your ways. Don’t make them lose sleep over how to tell you that you have personal space issues unless you’re willing to…..take a step back.

So before you go through the motion and commission that 360, before you ask those poor suckers that have to work with you what they feel, before you go through the motions…..ask yourself this:

What is the worst thing that I could hear that would really upset me? And would I be willing to accept and act on it, if I heard it said?

Feedback is important. Feedback is a gift. But it can also be the silent, smelly fart in the elevator.

Ask if you want to know. Don’t ask if you don’t.

But never just pretend you care.

The purpose of work

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Over the years I’ve read and heard a lot about meaning in work. Finding purpose in what you do and how happiness can be found in almost anything that we want.

I’ve never completely been convinced about these arguments. In the same way employee engagement wants to make me poke out my own eyes with a rusty nail, the whole premise seems contrived. Because not all work can have meaning and not everyone wants to find meaning in their work. What worries me more about these things is that the argument feels patronising and explores work through a middle class, middle-income, professional lens.

If you’re holding down four temporary, part-time jobs, the last thing on your mind is finding meaning in the organisational vision and strategy. You just don’t want to get shafted by your employer, see your hours reduced, get charged for your uniform or have any losses deducted from your wage. You want to have some level of guarantee that you know how much you’re going to be taking home so that you can pay the bills.

But this isn’t just an economic argument. Even in the seemingly more stable office environment, some people want to come in, be treated like an adult, be allowed to do the job that they are paid for and get that pay and go home. In the same way that for many organisations, employees are faceless and interchangeable, for many employees organisations are similarly homogeneous.

This doesn’t mean that the world of work has to be grey and boring and impersonal. Far from it. By recognising that some people don’t give a flying fig about your company purpose or meaning, you’re recognise that they are individuals in their own right. If they want to get pay from work and meaning from their stamp collection, or saving small baby seals from being clubbed to death, that’s their choice. And choice is individual, and recognising individuality is the first step to creating a healthy organisation.

Instead of trying to deploy some sort of weird, HR Jedi mind control tricks, we should focus instead on making sure that there is a fair deal for all employees within our organisations, allowing them to prosper and enjoy life in whatever (legal) ways they chose to do. To use a favourite phrase of mine, we are there to create the theatre that allows our employees to make the performances of their lives. But we need to recognise that for some of them, that performance will be nothing more than a job.

Because our role is not to help people find purpose in work, our job is to make work better. Finding meaning and happiness is personal choice.

The fallacy of commerciality

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I’ve written before about my unease with the term “commercial HR” and I was expressing this at an event last week, when I was asked a question along the following lines,

“That’s fine for you to say, but when we’re going for jobs, when we are at interview, all we hear is ‘commercial this, commercial that’ and that’s the reality of the profession. So what should we do?”

And of course this is a completely fair and reasonable question. It IS ok being in my position and making bold statements about the ins and the outs of HR.

But more so, it got me thinking about why we talk about “commerciality” and how we can effectively challenge it as a meaningless concept within the profession.

It strikes me that when leaders and managers talk about commercial HR they normally mean one of three things,

1)  I want you to understand the numbers and the financial performance of the organisation. (OK, so I get this, I really do. We need to understand the key performance measures of our organisation, whether they are financial or otherwise. We need to understand how our organisation is measuring it’s performance. But is this what people really want? Because it’s dead easy to achieve and I’m not sure in itself it adds any value whatsoever).

I think the reality is, that it boils down to one of two other other positions,

2)  I want you to stop saying no to “the business” and start doing what we need. Stop being so focussed on people and start being more focussed on profit. That under performer over there? Why do we have to spend three months managing their performance, just get rid of them. Why are you think of health and wellbeing problems? The problem we have is that those lazy bastards are taken a lunch break when they could easily work through it. I need HR to step up and sort these things out.

3)  I want you to stop doing stupid HR initiatives that no-one understands, to think more about the business and to land the initiatives that you do effectively. I want you to disrupt employees as little as you can, to help them to perform better and to drive the organisation, but without creating an infrastructure that is so complicated that only Alan Turing could work it out. I want you to be effective in dealing with issues that arise and to deliver the basics quickly and efficiently.

If it is 2, then this is not the sort of organisation that you want to work in, unless you think you are big and strong enough to change the organisational culture, that the CEO and the HRD are aligned in wanting to improve things. You might learn something in the short-term, but unless the powers that be are willing to change, you won’t be happy and you’ll become a worse practitioner from it.

If it is 3, then this is the biggest lesson that you’ll learn in your career. If you can focus on meeting these challenges, if you can become the sort of HR practitioner that is seen to add value through well designed and organisationally focussed interventions that are implemented to perfection.

The use of “commercial” in describing the HR that we want is lazy and lacking in precision. So my advice to anyone asked about this in interview, or a recruiter taking a brief is to ask the following questions in order:

–  What do you mean by commercial?
–  What would you expect to see me (them) do differently?
–  How would the business be better by me (them) acting that way?
–  How would you measure success?

And if they can’t answer this comfortably, you’ve got to ask yourself who has the credibility issue, who is lacking in commerciality and whether you’d want to work in that company in the first place.

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.