Category Archives: HR Thoughts

Comments or posts about contemporary HR discussion topics – probably of more interest to HR professionals

Strikes, Strictly and Brexit

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I heard an interesting theory put forward recently (by comedian Frank Skinner) that Strictly Come Dancing led to Brexit. In the 2008 series, journalist John Sergeant was possibly the most hopeless contestant to ever appear on the programme. However despite the  frequent condemnation of the dance judges, the public voted week after week to keep him in the show. Skinner suggested that it was perhaps the moment that people realised they could ignore “experts” and get the result they wanted through voting in sufficient numbers.

In common with every other area of business, HR professionals are currently grappling with the implications of Brexit. Much of the debate surrounds employment law (will it change or not, and if so how?), recruitment (what will be the rules on recruiting EU nationals, will they be required to have work permits), and skill shortages (will we still be able to employ existing EU staff, and if not how will we fill the skills gap?).

However, one overlooked area is that of Employee Relations. We’re currently seeing a wave of industrial disputes – railways, airline staff, Post Office workers, airport baggage handlers, Weetabix factory workers. While some suggest this is some wave of 1970s style union militancy, the fact is that the majority of these disputes are over ‘old-fashioned’ pay and conditions matters, and they are overwhelming supported by affected staff in secret ballots. Perhaps the Brexit vote has convinced ‘ordinary workers’ that they can change things by voting?

What it has also revealed is the poor approach of management in most of these situations. It may be arrogance – a belief that management proposals can always be implemented because the employer wants to, irrespective of the views of employees. Or it could be a refusal to believe that people will do something so ‘stupid’  – they won’t vote to strike and lose pay before Christmas (just like they won’t vote to leave the EU or for a dancer as poor as John Sergeant). Mostly however I suspect it’s a lack of competence – managers, including many in HR, just don’t know how to negotiate on a collective basis. It’s interesting that several of the disputes have been quickly solved when expert negotiators from ACAS have become involved.

So perhaps that’s another Brexit issue for HR people – the need to brush up on, or even gain in the first place, the knowledge and skills to manage employee relations. As someone who cut their HR teeth in this area, I’m looking forward to some full and frank discussions with trade union colleagues in the coming months and years!

Thinking Outside the Payroll

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What exactly are the “Human Resources” of an organisation? 

The easy answer is that they are the people who work for a business, charity or public body. But while in the past, for the overwhelming majority of organisations, this term was synonymous with “employee”, these days that’s frequently not the case. And I’m not just talking about trendy hi-tech firms either – the chances are that if you’ve ordered anything for delivery recently, whether online or from a store, it will have been delivered by a self-employed contractor, not an employee of the company. Nor is it uncommon in many organisations to have sub-contracted out ‘ancillary’ services to others (indeed, that’s how I make my living!!)

So why is that an issue for those of us who work in HR? Well, there are lots of reasons:

·         It won’t be enough to know about “employment law” – HR professionals will need to understand the full range of legal relationships that people can have with organisations, and be able to advise on them. The excuse that “x is a freelance, nothing to do with us” won’t wash in future

·         How will we hire and fire in the future? Some of the time-consuming processes that we use to recruit, or dismiss, are not only not necessary but don’t fit with those who are working in a non-traditional way. And given that recruiting consultants or freelancers has been a traditional responsibility of procurement departments or line managers, how do we get involved without creating a turf war?

·         If we have to recruit people differently, do we also need to start rethinking how we develop them? And indeed, exactly who do we need to consider developing?

·         We talk a lot in HR about behaving “ethically”. If we start to use labour as a resource to be taken up and dropped when necessary for our business, how does that square with behaving in an ethical manner?

·         Even if you don’t accept the ethical arguments, there are several clear business reasons why HR will need to change. The whole “psychological contract” between businesses and their workforces will change and our practices will need to as a consequence

·         Things that we devote a lot of time to currently – like the nebulous concept of “employee engagement” – may become pointless; if workers aren’t all employees then chasing after engagement becomes a meaningless exercise.

That’s not to say we need to throw out everything we do in HR. Nor am I suggesting traditional employees will disappear – they will still form the majority of the workforce for the foreseeable future (at least for the remainder of my working life anyway!). But what I am suggesting is that we need to rethink exactly how – and why – we do a lot of things if the profession is to remain relevant in 21st century organisations.

Doing the Deal

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Recently, I’ve been attempting to read “The Art of the Deal”, published in the 1980s by a New York businessman called Donald Trump (wonder whatever happened to him?).  While it doesn’t contain any dramatic new insights into deal-making, it shows that the author does understand that to be successful in business, it is necessary to negotiate.

When the book was published, most HR professionals would have seen this as a core skill. Negotiating with staff, whether via unions or not, was a day to day occurrence and something that was an integral part of the job. HR people understood that the interests of employers and staff were not always aligned and that there needed to be an element of give and take on both sides. Hardline confrontational tactics might be used on occasion, but normally only if a red-line had been crossed (or if there were some hidden agenda at play).

These days, negotiation skills are very much a lost art. “Employee Relations” means, to many HR people, the ‘nuisance’ of dealing with an individual grievance or a disciplinary matter. If workers aren’t completely sold on the company’s mission, it’s due to a failure of our employee engagement initiatives and we need to redouble our efforts to get our happiness scores up.

The problem of course is that when a serious dispute occurs, HR professionals have no idea how to deal with it. Managers at Southern Rail decided that the best way to resolve their dispute was to troll their staff on social media in an attempt to bulldoze their position through. After a prolonged period of deadlock, the junior doctors dispute was only resolved when the arbitration service ACAS helped both parties to negotiate a deal (unfortunately, attitudes had become so entrenched by that point that the deal was later rejected, despite being recommended by the union).

So here are my “Negotiation 101” tips for any HR practitioner – before you even start a negotiation.

·         Understand that the other party has different objectives to you. What may seem a ‘logical’ argument to you may cut no ice with them

·         Be clear about what items in the negotiation are tradeable and what are not (your ideal, realistic and fall-back positions). You can’t have your cake and eat it!

·         Anticipate what the other party may want, and the arguments they may use – and then develop counter-proposals

·         Aim for a win-win – something which allows the other party show they have gained something for concessions they may have to make.

And when you get there, listen. Half the skill of a negotiation is understanding when the other party might be willing to discuss a tradeable item.

It may be a little more time-consuming than the current approach of what “management says goes” but it will be far more effective. Just ask Donald…

Time to Drop Discipline?

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In HR, we love to update our terms. After all, we even renamed ourselves “Human Resources” because “Personnel” sounded a bit old fashioned. And the names of things we do is forever changing – we don’t recruit, we acquire talent; we don’t induct new employees, we onboard them; we don’t train them, we develop them; and while we once did appraisals we now do performance reviews.

Now some of these are actually sensible and reflect a different mindset for the modern workplace – others are however just an attempt to sound hip and trendy. But one term persists – and to my mind it is the one that should have been cast into the dustbin of HR history many years ago.

I refer of course to Discipline –  a word that the Oxford Dictionary defines as “the practice of training people to obey rules or a code of behaviour, using punishment to correct disobedience”. Surely no word harks back more to the outdated command and control management style that goes back to FW Taylor and the pre-war years? So why do we – and indeed other professionals in the area such as ACAS – persist with the term?

It may be because the same term is used in the US, since the UK tends to follow American terminology about a decade later. Or it may be that we’re all closet Taylorists, believing that staff will attempt to get away with anything without a good dose of corrective sanctions. Or even because it allows HR people to get involved in something that sounds quasi-judicial and stop line managers from getting it “wrong”.

I’m intrigued to know – why do we still use Discipline? And what term should we replace it with? (A final warning for anyone who suggests “Inappropriate Employee Behaviour Modification Procedure”!)

Culture eats “Banning things” for Breakfast

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Today, the Women and Equalities Committee of the House of Commons has published a report outlining the urgent need to reform the law on pregnancy discrimination, including the need for a “German style system” (a phrase which as unfortunate echoes of the “Australian style points system” on immigration) to make it harder to make women redundant during pregnancy or maternity leave.

The report is laudable in its aims and timely in its publication but (a little like Karl Marx) it draws the wrong conclusions from its analysis. It’s reported major conclusion is the lazy politician’s “We don’t like something – let’s ban it”.

UK employment law is absolutely explicit on the issue of pregnancy. It is automatically unfair to dismiss a female employee if the reason is because she is pregnant, has given birth recently, is breastfeeding or is on maternity leave. Women have an absolute right to return either to their own job or one of the same status, terms and conditions after a period of maternity leave. And in a redundancy situation, women on maternity go to the top of the queue in terms of redeployment (probably the only situation where employers not only can, but must, positively discriminate).

Where the system does let women down is that, if an employer does flout or ignore the law, the Employment Tribunal system has been priced beyond reach for most women (in fact most employees of either sex) to seek redress – allowing bad employers to continue to behave in this way. To be fair, this is something that the report does recognise. Reforming the tribunal fees system so that employees could access justice would be a quick and easy win (and also benefit good employers as I suggested here).

Much, much more important than that though, is a need for a change in business culture. Instead of seeing pregnant women as a “problem” we should take at a positive approach to the situation. We talk a lot in HR about things like retaining talented employees, flexible working and workforce development. It’s time we started putting some of that into practice. And if we want to encourage women back into the workforce, we need to be positive about making sure that fathers are involved in childcare, utilising things like the already existing Shared Parental Leave rules. And while we shouldn’t fail to recognise that – especially in a small business – losing a key employee for up to a year can cause problems, it’s not as if babies are a new thing or that we don’t get plenty of warning (and hence time to plan).

Culture change does take time – and businesses can’t solve all society’s issues. But HR can start the process of creating a different business mindset. And until the mindset is changed, changes in the law will not have the desired effect.