employees

Read less, talk more

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Everyone I know has written a book. My social media feeds and email inbox are all full of friends, colleagues and contacts exalting their new publications. Whether it is recruitment and resourcing, learning or the latest stream – HR Disruption/Transformation/Reinvention – they’ve all got the answer to the questions you never knew you had.

And I can tell you right now, you don’t need to read them.

I’m not suggesting that reading per se is bad and I’m certainly not saying that there aren’t brilliant leadership, management and business books out there. I’m suggesting that there are a disproportionate number of titles to the needs of leaders, managers and businesses.  And I’m suggesting you’d be better off talking to your employees and colleagues, rather than reading the latest HR trope.

There are a couple of key questions you need to ask yourself based on whether the author is a practitioner or academic:

When did you do this? What were the results you experienced?

When did you research this? How was this been evidenced and peer reviewed?

Look at the vast majority of the profiles of these “authors” and you’ll see a list of the times they’ve spoken about the topic and the articles they’ve written, they’ll rarely talk about actually having done anything.

Compare this with your employees who spend all day doing the work that you’re trying to change/improve/increase. They’re in your organisation every day experiencing the environment and the culture that you are the guardian of. They’re able to give you better quality feedback on pretty much every single aspect of your organisation than a faceless hack.

So next time you’re tempted to put your hand in your pocket for the latest “must read” from some obscure publishing house, ask yourself whether your curiosity and desire to learn couldn’t be better directed towards the people all around you. They’ll certainly have better qualified answers, and you’ll save yourself money at the same time.

 

 

 

 

Lead change with care

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I’ve written before about toxic cultures, but I was struck by the story that I read over the weekend about the legal case being brought against former executives of France Telecom. I’m no expert on the case in hand, but the story sets out a culture of harassment  through constant change and disruption as efficiency savings were sought.

There’s a huge spectrum ranging from the extreme cases detailed in this story through to the ordinary change of organisational life and we need to be careful not to conflate the two, but there are reminders in the extreme that can help us in our everyday practice. We can all argue that, “it’s not like that here”, but it never hurts us to check and be sure.

The first check point is when we stop seeing employees as human beings. You can pick this up through the language that is used in organisations, the way that senior leaders talk about people as a collective. Most organisational change will have a human impact, but when we fail to genuinely recognise that, problems are not far away.

When change becomes a thing in itself, you’re facing a second check point. Organisations that become focused on change, but without realising why. The impact on people throughout is disorientation and confusion, neither of which are good for mental wellbeing. Most people can go through significant change and transition when they understand the why, but struggle when they feel constantly done to.

Finally, when leadership teams lose touch with their teams you’ve reached the third checkpoint. As a leader you can only make good decisions if you are well-informed. One of the most important sets of data is the feedback from the people who work in the organisation itself. I’m not talking about the annual survey alone, but about the informal feedback that tells you how things really are.

Put simply, leaders have an overarching responsibility for every single employee in their organisation. That doesn’t mean we should avoid tough choices or decisions, it doesn’t me would should be change adverse, but it does mean that we need to care. Hopefully none of us will ever experience the extremity of the France Telecom situation, however, each day as we go about our work, we should always check in and make sure we are staying true to our responsibility to our people.

The myth of entitlement

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Throughout the entirety of my career, I’ve repeatedly come face to face with two of the most common myths within the workplace;

  1. Organisations somehow owe something to employees
  2. Employees somehow owe something to organisations

As if there is some unwritten obligation to be fulfilled.

There isn’t. This is the myth of entitlement.

Organisations are collaborations that exist to serve others. There is not a single one, private, public or third sector that exists to serve the needs of its employees. Not one.

And likewise there is not a single employee that exists to serve the needs of its employer.

This misapprehension is reflected in our professional practice and driven by our inability to understand the basic economic transaction that exists within the workplace.

Organisational purpose is delivered by labour and labour is rewarded for that delivery.

But before I’m accused of taking some neanderthal backward step to the dark ages of lords and masters, let’s also be clear about a few other things.

  • Employees have choices. Most organisations have doors and people are free to come and go as they choose.
  • Employers have choices. Employment is not guaranteed and organisations are free to hire and fire as they choose.

The relationship that brings employee and employer together is one to organise labour to deliver collectively for a defined purpose. And that purpose is the economic driver and the one and only reason that both exist.

Far from being backward, realisation and acceptance of this is the key to understanding and building an adult relationship within the workplace. It is central to building a healthy and sustainable organisational culture that understands the balance and trade offs that exists.

Yes so often it is missing and instead replaced with an over inflated expectation of our worth and our value, both as an employer and employee.

Strong healthy employment relationships are psychologically the same as any other relationship. They require balance. And they require an acceptance that if that balance is broken, if the needs are not being fulfilled, either party has the freedom to act.

Essential HR marketing

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Last week I wrote about the consumerisation of HR, the fact that we need to be obsessive about simplicity and “end user experience”. HR is essentially a series of products that we are trying to sell in to the various other parts of the business. Too often though, we overlook this and instead try to mandate, which has the impact of both disempowering us and annoying everyone else.

Which is really not cool.

We were looking at a particular HR intervention recently and sought feedback from line managers and employees across the globe on how we should go about it. Regardless of whether people came from Europe, Asia or the US, their answers could broadly be summarised as,

Keep it simple
Explain why things need to change
Explain what’s in it for me

Which is about as concise a summary of how to take a product to market as you’ll ever get. I’ve written before about the questions that we can use when evaluating what we do and whether it is value adding activity or HR nonsense. But it seems to me that these additional employee questions beautifully compliment that design framework when it comes to marketing our products and services.

Have we kept things as simple as possible? Is the design user friendly? Is it sexy and nice to look at, to touch and to hold? Does it have more tick boxes than a social security form or have we thought more cleverly about design? Have we chosen our language to engage and relate rather than to alienate and patronise?

What is the compelling message? Can we clearly articulate why we are doing something and the business or social imperative? Can we win hearts and minds and consistently and coherently explain the changes that we are making? Is the narrative the same everywhere or are there different complimentary messages for different groups?

What is the individual win? What will each employee group get from this intervention? How will employees benefit? What will managers get that is helpful and different? Will the leadership team be benefitting in a different way? If you sat down for thirty minutes with any single employee, could you (and every member of your team) clearly articulate the “win” for for them and each and every other employee?

Successful product design is hard. It requires thought and focus. It requires innovation and experimentation and it requires courage. But thinking about the end user, thinking about their experience and thinking about what they want is more likely going to make it successful than thinking about what you as a HR professional or team need. And ultimately more likely to get you success.

We shouldn’t be afraid of marketing, we shouldn’t be afraid of selling. We should always be out to win hearts and minds and gain commitment and “buy in”, rather than to seek mandates and enforcement. But at the end of the day, it’s a hell of a lot easier to sell in a well designed product than a lazy, thoughtless piece of work.

Which is why it is always worth spending the extra time thinking about the design and what it means to your people.