performance

HR: A 10 point agenda for change

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If you ever wanted proof of how dismally most people view the HR profession, then you need go no further than this piece from the Guardian online on Friday. What started as a question about working hours, turned in to a free for all regarding the standing of the HR profession. And by far the majority of comments were negative. Here are just some examples,

“…in my company, it’s often the victims of HR that have to stay late to fill in even more paper work, to generate the paperwork that HR needs to dispel the rumor that they have nothing to do all day but generate pointless paper work.”

“Everyone else in your building hates HR for the ludicrous and pointless self-assessments we’re put through each year.

“HR is the weak link in every company; an industry whose only purpose is to justify its own pointless existence. 

Get out while you still can, or face an entire career of being sniggered at behind your back by your co-workers.”

“We all hate our HR department, they send out pointless memos about equality and diversity, and reminders to complete your appraisal/quarterly review etc, just so it looks like their jobs are essential.”

“People in HR departments exist to preserve their pointless jobs by creating work for others to do !
Does anyone know anything worthwhile that HR has done ?”

“my experiences with Human Resources were neither humane nor resourceable. [sic]”

I could go on, but you get the gist. Everybody hates HR.

Now I could put up a stream of arguments that would point out the value of HR, indeed I and a few others did tentatively point this out, but in reality that is an utter waste of time and completely misses the point. It doesn’t matter what WE think, it matters what THEY think and if we are serious about our profession, then we need to take that in to account.

I admit that, in common with a number of other functions, we are in a situation where people don’t understand the value until they really need it and we are often associated with “bad things” that happen in companies. But that is the fact of the matter, we can’t get away from that. We cannot deny reality, we need to tackle it face on.

  1. We need to be resourceful in bringing the right mindset into the profession. We are not a policing function, we are not an administrative function, we are here to provide solutions and facilitate not provide problems and barriers. This mindset is more important that technical skills. If people don’t have it then don’t hire them.
  2. We need to de-clutter our processes and procedures. Enough of the forms, the polices, the bureaucracy. 90% of it isn’t needed and 100% of it is hated, resented and not understood by employees and managers alike.
  3. We need to stop saying “no”. Our language, our communication to the business needs to be positive, not negative. We need to be owners of good news. Deal with problems individually, not by memo. Stop sending out dumb emails, if it isn’t positive, don’t send it.
  4. We need to accept that you don’t get influence through control, you get influence through other people’s positive experience of you. Get influence through people wanting you involved not by telling them you have to be.
  5. We need to cut down the initiatives. Every time we look at something we should clearly be able to articulate why we are doing it and why our organization (not our HR department) wants it. If we can’t, we shouldn’t be doing it.
  6. We need to listen to our employees and our managers. We need to stop seeing them as being “the problem” and start seeing them as being the people that we are here to help. They are the reason we have jobs, so stop moaning about them and start listening.
  7. We need to stop focusing on alleged best practice and start focusing on “best fit” solutions. If our organizations only need a simple solution, then just give it to them. This isn’t about winning prizes at the CIPD awards, or standing up at conferences, this is about making your organization better.
  8. We need to be more human. We need to get out and talk, interact, spend time with people, we need to be empathetic and understanding, we need to feel. Sitting in the HR department bitching is not going to change anything.
  9. We need to stop focusing on cost and start focusing on value. These two things are not the same. Even if cost reduction is on the agenda, look at the value you can get from the budget, the resources. Cheaper and faster do not equate to better.
  10. We need to tell people who do not believe in this agenda that they have no place in the profession. They should find another career voluntarily or we should help them to find one involuntarily. There isn’t a choice to stay the same, there is only the choice to change.

Every single one of us has a responsibility for raising standards and calling others to account when they do not meet high enough standards. Those of us in leadership positions need to set the example. We need to be all over and we need to start now.

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.

Let it all out

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Some people will tell you that there is no place for emotion in the workplace. These are the same people that will tell you that everyone is equal, that fear is irrational and that there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

The workplace is full of people and people are full of emotions. These are the facts of life.

As a HR professional, there are times when you will see the extreme of emotions, the good, the bad and the downright ugly. You have to be ok with that and you have to react to that with skills that they will never teach you in school.

People laugh, people cry and sometimes, people shout.

Shouting is ok. Shouting is natural. Shouting is an expression of frustration, of need, of incompetence, of disappointment and desire. Shouting isn’t desireable, but it is acceptable.

As a HR professional you are going to get shouted at. Because you’re a safe place, not a soft place, for these emotions to be expressed, because you’re neutral and because you, alone from many others, will tolerate it.

And tolerate it, you must.

Remember, that when someone is shouting at you, they’re doing so because they are hurting. Remember that they don’t care about your process, or policy. Remember that they want to be treated as a human, because the hurt that they are feeling is the hurt that only a human can feel.

Keep calm, listen, keep your voice low, ask questions, seek to understand. Seek to help, remember that you are the person that can resolve the hurt.

That is the value that you can add. And it is the value that often individuals seek from their HR partner. The forms and processes can wait for another day. But the person in front of you can’t. They need you, they need your help, and they need it now.

So what are you waiting for?

Bacc-ward thinking

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Yesterday’s announcement about the proposed new English Baccalaureate Certificate (EBaccs) fell with a thud of doom across my heart. The familiar reprise of raising standards, ringing in my ears.  I’ve written about education before and I’ll keep doing so. For those of us in the world of work need to pay attention to the world of education with a keen eye. This is our supply chain and we should be as interested and as vocal about it as we can be about any other aspect of work.

The proposed replacement of the often criticised GCSE exams has been long coming, but where there was an opportunity to really consider reform of the pre 16 education system, instead we have remained focussed on an outdated and depressingly archaic view of performance and attainment firmly shifting the dial from education to teaching.

Those that complain that the current system is about monkeys being taught tricks have merely changed the tricks.

Two years ago I was visiting prospective secondary schools with my son. In one, highly regarded, rather grand establishment we were treated to the Headmaster strutting from side to side on the stage telling us how they intended to “turn your young men into leaders” and the value they placed on “academic attainment”. In another the Headmaster explained that they “don’t place targets on the grades they expect to get and position in league tables, but instead on ensuring that every child fulfils their potential”.

In this, we highlight the difference the former is teaching, the latter is educating. And as UK plc we need to be educating our children, not teaching them to tick boxes.

In the same way that you don’t drive a performance culture by changing the competency rating system, you don’t drive educational performance by changing the exam system. Much is broken within our education system, teachers and head teachers are demoralised to the point that recruiting head teachers is becoming harder and harder and existing heads are being asked to take on more than one school. OFSTED is once again positioning itself as the Pythonesque Spanish Inquisition and the funding of individual schools is becoming increasingly complex and yet fragile in equal measure.

Educational reform should be focussed on ensuring that EVERY child fulfils their potential, that there is an educational offering that is engaging and exciting whatever your aptitude and interest. Educational reform should be focussed on ensuring that the very best talents are drawn into the profession and that we are entrusting the future success of our children and of the country as a whole with the most able people. Educational reform should be focussed education, on developing independent learners, not on teaching the performance of tricks – however hard those tricks are.

The EBacc is not the future for progressive education in the UK. The EBacc is not new thinking, is not radical, nor – in the long run – will it be effective in raising educational standards in comparison to other countries. A radical rethink would have seen the consideration of aptitude and interest assessments at say 14 and formal exams only at 18 (the end of compulsory education), a focus on both tailored vocational and academic learning, on teachers terms and conditions and on the structure of educational establishments.

With a resonance of depressing familiarity to the HR profession, these proposals try to change the culture and performance by tinkering with the shiny controllables at the end of the process, not the really hard, thorny issues that sit in the slightly grey opaque middle but that really make a difference. We’ve missed the latest opportunity to really rethink education and we will be poorer as a country and as individual businesses for it.

PS. if you want to know, my son goes to the second school. And the thing the Headmaster went on to explain, was that their focus on individual learning and performance was the reason that they were top of the exam tables for the county…..well ahead of the other school.