HR

Nobody wants to be engaged

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I once said that “nothing says past it” more than Human Capital Management.

I was wrong.

Don’t worry, I haven’t suddenly become a HCM groupie.

Far from it…..

I was wrong because NOTHING says past it more than the term “Employee Engagement”.

I recently tweeted that “every time I hear this term another part of me dies“…so you can imagine what writing about it does to me.

But sometimes I just can’t help myself. We all have our crosses to bear.

I have a confession. Never…..absolutely NEVER in my life have I woken up and thought….”I wish I was more engaged”. Moreover, I can guarantee that there is not a single employee within your organisation that has either.

Engagement doesn’t exist. Engagement is the sort of term a consultant would create. And then claim it was measurable and sell it at massively inflated amounts to a profession that was insecure and desperate to find some data to prove that they were both relevant and commercial.

I have no idea where they would find a profession like that. Do you?

Please. Let’s stop.

Let’s grow up.

Let’s be human.

For generations people worked for the same companies. They worked there because the organisations valued them, they treated them well, they gave them security, they gave them incentives to stay. But, they NEVER TALKED ABOUT ENGAGEMENT.

Engagement doesn’t replace a decent pension scheme, engagement doesn’t pay the mortgage on your house, engagement doesn’t provide job security.

Engagement is a term that we create to apologise for using people to generate profit.

We need to stop focussing on vacuous self-created concepts that are completely alien to the vast majority of human beings. We need to start talking about the things that matter to people. Real people.

Call me uncool, call me old-fashioned. Call me naïve.

I’m ok with that.

You aim for engaged employees…..I’ll do what’s right for my people and treat them like valued grown ups.

I think they deserve that.

The poor performer, is you.

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How many times have you heard a HR person tell you, “You can’t reward poor performance”?

You can’t reward poor performance. Of course……

But the thing is, it isn’t their poor performance. It’s yours.

Who recruited the person?

Who promoted the person?

Who trained the person?

Who rewarded the person?

As convenient as it is to say that individual poor performance just “happens”. It doesn’t. Organisations make poor performers. You make poor performers.

If HR is accountable for organisation performance, it is also accountable for individual performance.

Getting rid of poor performers is a quick and convenient way of papering over your organisational incompetence.

Papering over your incompetence.

You can’t reward poor performance? Too right.

How confident are you, that you’re earning what YOU deserve?

Vive la différence

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I’m often pleased to be reminded just how easy it is to work in the profession we lovingly call HR. It is rare that a month goes past without another profession stepping forth to attempt to articulate why they should be the people who HR report in to.

Finance, Marketing, Operations all have their moment. And funnily enough it is precisely because so many functions can see an overlap that HR shouldn’t report in to any of them.

Imagine the look on the CFO’s face when you talked about the costs of the employer branding campaign that projects the spirit of the EVP to the external market. Why bother right? Surely we can just chuck some ads on some websites?

The Marketing Director glazing over as we explain the need for benchmarking our broad banded salary scales to ensure that the overall compensation and benefits package remains competitive with our stated median position.  Crack the champagne…..who’s counting?

And of course the Operations Director would be more than sympathetic to the need to develop a longer term OD strategy to ensure the successful transformation of the business. As long as it can be delivered in….say the next twenty minutes?

As a profession we are different to the others, hence the reason we exist, but we are also have significant similarities. Hence the reason that so many areas think they can add their expertise. Which of course they can. Which, in turn, is of course the point.

Organisations are increasingly multi dimensional and complex. Successful organisations work with multi disciplinary teams that are focused on solutions and delivery, not on hierarchy and reporting. And successful HR people know that they should draw on the expertise of the various other departments that exist within the organisation.

But their uniqueness comes in being able to knit together the varying elements to deliver a successful organisation for all stakeholders, management, employees and shareholders.

Arguing that, to improve, HR should sit in Finance to be more commercial, Marketing to be more creative or Operations to be more…..operational is akin to arguing that you get a better service by making the waiters report to the chefs or improve the ground ability of the air force by making them report to the infantry.

The real agenda is recruiting and developing the right HR people, with the right mindset and the right ethos. But of course, that’s a whole other blog. And right now I need to go and have my regular chat with the CFO. He’s a lovely chap, and would be the first to tell you, that he wouldn’t want my job in a million years.

Just a middle class white guy

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I have a confession to make. A thing that has been weighing on my mind for a while now, lying in the deep recesses of my consciousness, troubling me. There is something that I want to get off my chest, something that I want to share, that I feel I need to share.

I’m a white middle class male and I may not actually deserve what I have achieved.

“Achieved” to successfully bring about or reach (a desired objective or result) by effort, skill, or courage….so that’s a joke in itself. What if it wasn’t through my effort, skill or courage. What if it was though the lottery of demographics, socio economics and genetics?

I’m not suggesting that anyone ever said, “lets give him the job because he’s a white male” or thought, “I should listen to him because he is a middle class, middle aged dude and he is bound to say something sensible”.

But what if it just happens….because of the way we are, the way we are brought up, the norms we are expected to adhere to?

I was sat in Berlin a few weeks ago, working as an assessor on an international development centre. Because it was a development centre and because, in HR, we have no imagination, there was a group exercise. When we came to the wash up and validation session, there was a debate about the scoring. My sense was that some of the candidates had been scored less highly than others because they’d said less. But they hadn’t contributed less. And they were disproportionately female.

One of the people I was observing had nodded, reaffirmed, encouraged, listened and supported. She didn’t say that much, but she had played an important role. Others suggested that as she hadn’t said anything, she couldn’t be rated highly for her contribution. These were skilled and experienced HR professionals.

And that is just one simple example.

I’ve learnt how to behave from my experience, I know how to position myself in a room, to hold myself to…..encourage, consider, control, direct. I can get my views heard and considered, not necessarily because I make sense, but because they make sense because they are coming from someone behaving in a way that makes us think that they must.

Does this help at interview? Sure. Does it help when you go for promotions? Of course. Does it mean that others have anything less to offer. Not at all.

I’m not sure I have any answers, I’m not sure I have even formulated the questions. The great thing about having a blog is that I don’t have to. This isn’t a text book, you’re not paying, I’m not Ulrich.

But it seems to me that the world of work is still heavily prejudiced towards certain ways of being, certain behaviours, certain mannerisms that are predominantly associated with the middle class, white guy like me. Which means that I might not be here because of what I do, but because of who I am.

And maybe, so are you.