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ОглавлениеIntroduction
Who took the human out of Human Resources?
When did HR professionals decide that the key route to credibility was to be ‘business-focused’ and to follow a mantra where profits are placed above people? Why have so many leaders and HR professionals alike spent so long on business cases, ignoring the need for a ‘person case’? The reality is that so few people-focused issues or opportunities can be reduced to a set of tangible ‘results’ outlined on a spreadsheet. Regardless of whether there is a strong scientific or financial argument for doing something, we might still take a course of action from the moral standpoint that it is the right thing to do.
We are living longer than ever in the Western world and will be working for more years than past generations as a result. The world of work and the jobs available to people have both changed wildly with the advent of the internet, and we’re fast adapting to new ways of working in HR. Research from psychologists such as Barry Schwartz1 suggests that people are seeking meaning from their work and careers, and that experiencing this meaning is one of the most important factors for job satisfaction. How people create meaning will depend, amongst other factors, on their motivations and personal context, but having a level of autonomy and an opportunity to develop and grow will support them in achieving meaning through their work. The informal environment at work has always played a large part in employee motivation and performance – what was once coined people’s need for ‘affiliation’. What I sometimes marvel at is how often these very basic motivation theories from decades ago are ignored, or at best re-hashed into the latest HR intervention.
We have known for decades that people aren’t motivated by money, we know that people perform best in cohesive groups with shared goals, and that performance will depend on an individual’s skills and motivation, balanced with the opportunity and support provided by the job role. However, we continue to offer pay as a reward, we monitor and control performance and we put people in work environments where they can barely survive, let alone thrive. The alternative would require a complete overhaul of practices, of doing things differently in HR, and seeking actual evidence for why we might embed a particular norm or practice in the organisation. For example, research by Alison Hirst from Angela Ruskin University2 suggests that hotdesking (the practice of being asked to sit anywhere at work, rather than having a designated desk) is linked to higher workplace stress for ‘hot-deskers’ than control groups. Now, I haven’t stringently reviewed this research, but it would question why we continue to see open-plan offices with ‘agile’ people jumping around hot-desks as progressive. At the very least, it should make us ask the question. This is what behavioural science can do for HR: the research itself is like the icing on the cake, but what is underpinning it; the foundations of curiosity, of asking the right question, and of applying this evidence to how we practise our work are like fairy dust for the HR profession. We don’t do this because it’s so much easier to pay for the latest fad, and so much more interesting to try out the latest tool or survey on the market. It’s also so much easier to continue ‘as is’.
Our burning platform for change
But there’s a burning platform for change. People are becoming savvy to the fact there is another way, and old HR practices just won’t cut the mustard any longer. In the 1980s, teams cropped up called ‘Human Capital’ and it was all the rage to consider people as ‘assets’ and to spout about people being our ‘strongest asset’. Let’s not pretend it was all hugs, tea and sympathy at work before that, though. The industrial revolution marked the start of people working to time on a large scale, and great interest in people productivity. The divide between rich and poor, at least in the UK, was nothing to be proud of even back then. Though we started talking about people as assets decades later, what is clear is that people were still a commodity to be used to bring a profit to the organisation. What we are talking about here are human beings. The way we recruit someone into an organisation, the experience they have at work, and the stories and experience they take home to share with family and friends, is all part of their life. Organisations are a key part of the fabric of society and our human existence, and there is an enormous, somewhat daunting, opportunity here to do something differently. People want to work for organisations where they can find meaning in their work – if they are performing manual work, there are still massive opportunities for this work to be meaningful through social connection, the outcome of their work and their contribution to what the organisation achieves.
I spent the first few years of my career being told that I was ‘too nice to be in HR’. They were picking up on the fact that I have a genuine and deeply felt care for people and their experience at work, and to be fair on occasion the heart on my sleeve did become emblazoned across my face and throughout my emails. However, the reason I first jumped ship from a generalist HR role was not because I was ‘too nice’, it was because I had a deep dislike for policy, process and rule books, aka HR manuals. I love a plan and parameters, but as a rule I only follow rules that I value, though luckily, I also value being a good citizen and staying out of jail. I like to understand how policies and process make a difference, and ultimately how they support whatever the organisation exists to achieve. I have studied human behaviour for as long as I can remember. I loved reading as a child because I loved getting under the skin of the character’s emotional reactions, and the human dynamics unfurling on the page. I loved writing because it enabled me to create my own personalities on a page. And then I found psychology. I am a bona fide geek, and proud of it. I love science, I love the study of human behaviour and, moreover, I love the impact that applying this knowledge can have on people, relationships and work. And then I found Organisation Development (OD) almost by accident. Apparently, I was one of those people ‘doing OD’ who had absolutely no idea. I was busy learning about systems theory and change, and the wonders of organisational norms or ways of working, and I stumbled upon a field of practice that sought to improve organisational performance through applying learning from behavioural science. Whilst I devoured as many workshops and readings by the ‘greats’ in OD that I could, with particular devotion to Ed Schein and Mee-Yan Cheung-Judge amongst others, it left me feeling adrift from Human Resources and unsure how I could bridge that gap.
Applying learning from behavioural science to HR
In recent years, there have been efforts to apply the learnings from behavioural science into Human Resources, though I know from my days of carrying the title ‘Occupational Psychologist’ that the investment in employing people with deep subject matter expertise is still thin on the ground. Organisation Development is now a core capability for the HR profession, as proposed by the Chartered Institute for Personnel & Development, and there are a growing number of conferences and talks on the topic for HR professionals to benefit from. However, I think it would be fair to say that OD remains a somewhat elusive concept for many HR professionals. Whilst the larger organisations, and often corporations, invest heavily in OD, often with a core change management responsibility, smaller organisations and those more strapped for cash are likely to know little on the topic. And should they wish to venture into the world of OD, they would be faced with a manual or educational text. Unfortunately, this book isn’t going to completely bridge that gap. I’m not aiming to write a seminal text on Behavioural Science for HR professionals. There are people far better qualified than I to do the job. I do, however, want to give it a shot – I’d like to share the magic of OD and how it can be part of all we do in HR. This is with the purpose of showing how it can really be a central part of putting the human back into Human Resources.
OD has its roots in humanistic theories. Developed in the 1930s, it came from a central premise that organisations can only prosper through aligning the ways of working, capabilities and needs of their people with the vision of the organisation. It sought to show the importance of connections, and not of tinkering around with policies and processes that were out of sync with the overall needs and direction of the organisation. One of the key theories in OD is of systems theory, where the organisation is considered to be a system made up of key component parts, which interact with each other to produce an output, or outcome. Systems theory is an incredibly important concept in understanding why creating change in one aspect of the system will have an impact on the other components of the system, but that one change alone may not create the change or ‘systemic change’ the organisation was aiming for. OD is a field of practice in its own right, though it often sits within HR departments and is more recently viewed to be an ‘HR capability’. This has the potential to reduce OD to be a ‘skill’ demonstrated by a person, potentially someone who understands systemic change, and can design and front a change programme. However, an OD practitioner is so much more than this.
HR needs to throw out the rule book and get ‘human’
The field of Human Resources has got itself in a muddle over the last ten or so years. We’ve tried so hard to be seen as ‘business partners’ that we’ve almost forgotten our core role to support, develop and motivate the ‘humans’ in that business. In an effort to show our worth, we’ve designed new functions within HR with names such as ‘employee engagement’ and ‘employee experience’, all aiming to achieve innovative plans, and all pretty much drawing on the same psychological theories and practices we knew of at least 20 to 30 years ago. It’s become a re-marketing game, and whilst we’re busy focusing on who has managed to get the highest survey result this year, across the board it would appear that, globally, people have never been unhappier at work.
I conducted a small number of interviews (approximately 15) with HR Directors, consultants and leaders to support my research for this book. I started by talking to people about compassion at work, but it then became clear that people were seeing HR as detracting from a focus on compassion and care for people, rather than championing this. One leader, a leader who had worked at very senior levels within the military, noted that our focus on compassion can often be ‘codified’ at work. In HR, we support our line managers to understand what they can do, and what they can give, to an employee who requires support. We give X numbers of days of compassionate leave, but only if the person who died is a close member of the family. We might allow unpaid leave, but it’s at the ‘manager’s discretion’ and depends on how busy we all are. This he described as ‘codifying compassion’ – we are codifying or standardising how to demonstrate a human emotion, how to care for another human being with individual needs. This probably best sums up my current and very personal challenge with how Human Resources has been conducted in the past – lots of rules, procedures and processes under the auspice of ‘fairness’, which in real terms rarely feels fair to anyone. This person told me a story of a lady who worked for him who he built great trust with, and one of the core ways in which they built trust was him offering her compassion at a time when she needed it most – when one of her parents passed away.
And how do we bring the human back into Human Resources for companies on tight deadlines and tight margins, where every minute of a person’s time at work is calculated as a cost? If you haven’t read James Bloodworth’s Hired,3 then my goodness, please do. It’s fabulous to throw awards at the companies who take their staff away for weekend retreats, and who throw free breakfast and hot yoga on for their staff over lunch, but what about the real-life human beings who clock-on every morning, get told how many minutes they can take for a break each four to five hours, and face a disciplinary if they go a minute over? What about the employees who work for minimum wage, barely making ends meet, and who are treated as little more than a commodity? Surely if we’re going to celebrate ‘employee experience’ as an HR profession, we should shine some enormous beacon on these practices? How can that honestly be the only way to achieve organisational performance and growth? And, when does anyone have a lightbulb moment when they question whether the moral imperative should trump profit when you’re literally timing someone’s toilet break, so their personal productivity doesn’t lower? Now, admittedly, whilst I’ve worked across sectors, I’ve worked mainly in office environments, visiting pretty brilliant care centres, retail stores and professional services offices. I’ve seen varying work environments – from crumbling military accommodation, to spectacular stately homes used as offices, to the great heights of Canary Wharf and its endless escalators. I’ve also personally worked in a call centre though, and I lasted four days. I worked in a supermarket, where I lasted longer, and where we had to walk down onto the shop floor to a sign reading ‘You’re going on stage. Don’t forget to smile.’ We were usually too hungover to smile – I was 19 and worked in the café there to hang out with my friends, often eating ‘traffic-light jellies’ on the kitchen floor during breaks. I worked as a chambermaid, a silver service waitress, in endless temp jobs in factories and warehouses, and my own highlight – processing photos in ‘Snappy Snaps’. In none of these many jobs did I have any inkling of an HR department, beyond the fact that someone paid me, and I received a payslip. My first real experience of an HR department was when I lost my first graduate job as a corporate tax consultant before it even started and ended up applying for an HR graduate scheme for a law firm. It was a brilliant scheme, working with some excellent HR folk, but my own early beginnings in HR were quite adrift from anything I’d personally experienced as an employee. So what? I wonder how far HR has come to matter to everyone, to all businesses, and to be progressive in all businesses. Or whether it remains the remit of the companies with the big bucks, or where they are just fortunate to have a very forward-thinking executive team and/or HR Leader. There are call centres, care centres and small businesses with simply stunning HR practices. And then there are large-scale corporations hiring thousands of people that treat them akin to paperclips.
Turning the tides together
My purpose in writing this book is not to take a dig at capitalism. That would be somewhat rich, as I spent my early career working for large global corporates, though riches sadly never fell into my lap. However, I do think there is an opportunity for all to use this book to learn more about how behavioural science, and specifically OD, can support our practice as HR professionals, and to bring the human back into HR. And I do think there is an even bigger opportunity for us to do the right thing – to challenge where we see or know this isn’t the case within our profession, and to use our collective voice to bring change. Yes, let’s make sure we’ve got our own house in order first, fair enough. But let’s work together as an HR and OD professional to bring societal change where people are treated like people, and not paperclips.
There can be a tendency within HR to lean on short-term interventions. This is perhaps born out of an economic and business context where ‘busyness’ is celebrated, and everything needed to be done yesterday. The ‘time is money’ mantra has done us no favours there and suggests that expediency should take favour over quality of outcome. Within HR, far more often than not, these interventions are both sensible and very well-intended. For example, well-being programmes. I am a huge advocate of supporting people’s mental health, both positive well-being and raising awareness of mental health issues. However, evidence suggests that these well-being programmes have limited impact on employee engagement or indeed on workplace productivity. This doesn’t matter greatly if the investment has been made on moral and ‘human’ grounds, but sadly we often hear organisations suggesting the enormous return on investment in monetary terms of their well-being programmes. Whilst it might be true that employee absence is costing the economy £x billion per annum, it is also somewhat far-fetched that a programme of well-being workshops, and getting employees to exercise more and eat healthily, is going to be the panacea that gets them out of bed and whistling as they work. And this is where OD comes in. What systemic change needs to be brought about to create a shift in employee absence? And what burning question, what well-thought out hypothesis are we trying to test here? This is where HR falls down repeatedly – whilst we talk about building OD capability, a central part of HR training does not focus on the curiosity of thought, the analytical thinking, the hypothesis building and research skills that would support people to hone their craft in the field.
A guide to navigating this book
This book is ordered into four key sections:
1. Section one: Shaping the future of HR
This section will introduce the concept that someone or something has taken the ‘human’ out of Human Resources, and I propose that we need to re-humanise the world of work and need to put that ‘human’ back in place within our HR functions. As an introduction to two key tenets of achieving this, I then take you on a whistle-stop tour of motivation theories and why free fruit and a table tennis table isn’t going to truly win your people over. The second key tenet of putting the ‘human’ back into Human Resources is via evidence-based practice, or actually testing a few well-thought-out hypotheses, as opposed to just trying on a few new fads that might be the next big thing in employee engagement. What you’ll find in practice is that, having shared quite a few stories and quite a bit of anecdotal ‘evidence’, I put forward an argument for doing it all properly and taking on board evidence-based practice in HR. If that doesn’t infuriate you enough to close the book, you’ll move onto Section two.
2. Section two: Creating a people-focused culture
The purpose of putting the ‘human’ back into Human Resources is to prevent people from being treated like paperclips in organisations across the globe. We’ll explore whether we can manage or can’t manage change, and how we can influence and shape organisational culture. The section will bring in thinking from the world of OD and behavioural science, and we will delve into systems thinking as a model and a mechanism for creating sustainable change and for creating cultures that care for their people. The final chapter of this section is devoted to a topic close to my heart, ‘compassion at work’. If we are to drive people-focused cultures and practices through all we achieve in HR, we need to have an awareness and understanding of what ‘compassion’ and ‘empathy’ look like in ways of working, behaviours and leadership practices.
3. Section three: Leading an HR service with heart
This is arguably the most practical section because it relates specifically to what you can do, and what you can develop and build in your own team. It’s easier to influence than building a case for systemic change, but no less important. We’ll consider how to rebrand your team, if needed, and I will be sharing ideas and tips for putting the ‘human’ back into your own HR professional practice and into our people processes and policies. We will focus on re-humanising the world of work through the seemingly small-scale stuff that actually has a large impact. For example, take the simple induction programme for a new starter. An induction experience lacking in personalised care and attention will be remembered by new starters and may have a lasting impact on how connected and loyal they are to the organisation.
4. Section four: Over to you
It is here that we draw together some of the key themes of the book, and I ask you to consider all that you can do to re-humanise your workplace and to support others to do the same. I am passionate that work is about treating people like ‘people not paperclips’, and that our current people processes, practices and ways of working serve to cause or at least to exacerbate this. This section is a call to action for you to actively shake up the system with me, to be a fellow change agent with a ‘people not paperclips’ plan.
Each of the sections outlined above will be broken down into a series of relevant chapters, which will share a mix of research, stories and sometimes just my own viewpoint. There will be a summary at the end of each chapter to support you in making the connection to what comes next. Each section can stand alone, so do dip in and out as needed. There will also be a toolkit at the end of each chapter or topic area, and this is to bring a more practical element into the book. It might just be a series of questions to reflect on having read the chapter or may be a set of proposed actions you could take to apply the research and thinking within your own organisation. Not all of these toolkits will feel relevant to you, but I would suggest you stay curious and try to give them a whirl.
I’ve already introduced myself and why I am writing this book; why now and why me. In terms of my style, you are likely to find it very informal. I am seeking to bring forward some big topics in an accessible and interesting way. Whilst this is a business book, I hope your experience of reading it will feel more like having a catch up over a coffee than listening to a speech in a business conference or lecture theatre. If nothing else, I’ve sought to retain my authentic voice throughout this book, which at times will slip into an informality. I’ve spent most of this book-writing process knee-deep in imposter syndrome, but I want to take this opportunity just to remind myself and you as a reader that any informality, storytelling or viewpoint-sharing should not be perceived as a lack of knowledge. It’s there, I promise you, but I chose to write a book that I hope you will be able to read on a commute to work, rather than assign to the dusty ‘textbook’ shelf. I’m a Chartered Occupational Psychologist, Senior HR Professional, a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel & Development and a Certified Executive Coach. However, the most important thing I bring to this book is my deep faith in humanity and the role that compassion can play in our experience of the workplace. We in HR can play a huge part in the future of work. We’re people, not paperclips.
