Category Archives: HR Thoughts

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

Be Careful What You Wish For

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One of the big fears for the owners and managers of small businesses is that at some point an employee will take them to an Employment Tribunal. Even if they win the case, the time, cost and stress to the owner is high. And even if the employee’s claim is apparently trivial or patently false, the thought of having your employment practices crawled over by a judge is understandably unpleasant. Matters aren’t helped by tabloid tales of companies being hit for huge compensation awards.

So the introduction of tribunal fees in 2013, which has seen a fall in tribunal claims of between 60-70%, has to be good news for small companies. Now at last businesses can get on with running effectively without fear of a discontented ex-employee making a claim against them.

Except…the pendulum may have swung too far. Most small businesses I encounter (and in my line of work that’s a lot) want to be “good” employers, they want to do things legally and properly and aren’t looking to make life as unpleasant as possible for the staff they employ. If they do something “wrong” it’s usually a genuine mistake rather than a deliberate attempt to defraud their employees.

The problem though is that when individuals can’t enforce their rights, it leaves the door open for the unscrupulous employer to ignore the law, safe in the knowledge that no-one will do anything about it. Honest, law abiding businesses that want to do things correctly are the ones that suffer, as this sad tale from the newspapers this weekend shows. The fact that the business owner is a Tory MP adds a little irony but the key point is that here is a responsible person trying to do the best for his business and employees, but is undercut by those operating at the margins – or even outside – the law.

Think about it this way. If you own a car, you pay your car insurance (no doubt moaning, as I do, about the cost of it). You do because it’s the law to have insurance. Yet if there’s no method of enforcement, why should you bother? Hundreds of thousands are estimated to be driving without insurance, taking the chance that they won’t get caught. And if they are – usually if they are involved in an accident – it’s the honest driver who bears the cost through increased premiums. If the premium becomes unaffordable you either give up your car or you drive uninsured too.

I’m not arguing that tribunal fees should be abolished completely (there’s no reason why the taxpayer should bear all the cost when they don’t in any other area of the law), but that the system needs to be rebalanced – for the benefit of decent employers as well as employees.

Talking to Ourselves

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As should be clear from my previous posts (like this), I’m not only a fan of social media and the benefits it can bring, but believe it has informed and improved my own HR practice. And there’s a great group of HR professionals – specifically but not exclusively on Twitter – who are not only challenging and stimulating thinking but in many cases successfully implementing these new ideas. (They’re a fun bunch of people too!)

But (and you knew there was a ‘but’ coming, didn’t you?) there is an element of preaching to the converted. I don’t need to convince them that there’s a better way to do HR, nor they me. Where we are still not engaging effectively enough is with the CEOs and Finance Directors, let alone the people who fund and invest in companies. There are too few entrepreneurs like Daniel Tenner or voluntary sector leaders like Pamela Ball who “get” the importance of doing good people stuff.

That’s why I was disappointed at the negative reaction on social media to the report published today by the CIPD and various partners on Valuing Your Talent (and I was guilty of some of the initial negativity). Yes, it does include the appalling phrase “Human Capital Metrics” – which I hope disappears without trace in the immediate future – but it was a chance to influence the broader debate and push people issues to the forefront of business.

And its proposals were hardly radical – the key recommendations were that companies should:

  • Quantify their labour and turnover costs
  • Analyse their recruitment costs
  • Analyse their training and development investment
  • Measure Employee Engagement

The first three are what HR departments should be doing anyway and while the fourth is contentious (in that no-one can agree what “employee engagement” is and if/how you can measure it) it’s not illogical. In fact it reflects more on our broader business management in the UK if this isn’t be done currently.

There’s a time for numbers and there’s a time when they aren’t appropriate in HR. Dismissing metrics out of hand isn’t a way forward.

My main point though is that the HR professionals who understand the need to do good stuff need to be out there engaging with the wider business community – on social media and elsewhere. The debates we have about how to make things better should be with the likes of TV’s Dragons, the MDs of bigger companies and other business leaders, not just among ourselves.

Custom and Practice is no Yolk

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“It’s Custom and Practice” is a phrase that I used to hear a lot when negotiating with trade unions. And even though today far fewer workplaces are unionised, virtually every one has its own customs and practices. It could be the company gives people a day off pre-Christmas; it could be that the company always gives enhanced redundancy terms; it could be that staff can swap shifts between themselves without reference to managers. Whatever it is, it’s almost certainly not written down as part of the organisation’s policies and procedures.

Trying to change these things can be one of the hardest parts of employee relations – not because there are any particular legal difficulties but because people have an expectation of these practices. And the argument that “it’s not written down” simply does not wash. I had very little sympathy with Mondelez, the firm that owns Cadbury’s Chocolate, when the furore over the chocolate used in Creme Eggs broke last week. As consumers complained that the company was now using a cheap substitute rather than Cadbury’s signature Dairy Milk brand, the company spokesman pointed out that Creme Eggs weren’t marketed as “Dairy Milk Creme Eggs”. Factually of course, he’s correct –  the company have done nothing ‘wrong’ in changing the type of chocolate. But consumer egg-spectations (sorry) were that if they bought the product, they would get a particular type of chocolate, the same they had had for over 40 years.

It shows, yet again, that imposing change on people – even if you have a good reason for doing it – is likely to lead to a backlash. If you need to make changes within your business, don’t make the same mistake as Mondelez

I Fought The Law

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Every so often, and usually despite my better judgement, I’ll read or even get involved in a LinkedIn debate about an employment law topic. One a few weeks ago concerned the applicability of the TUPE regulations in a particular situation. What annoyed me about the debate – on this occasion – was that the first few responses, from apparently experienced and qualified HR professionals, were “ask a lawyer”, often with a subtext of “much too complicated and risky for the likes of us”.

Now I’ve nothing against Employment Lawyers (some of my best friends… etc), and their expertise is always useful. But I do find it worrying when HR people – who ought to understand the organisational and cultural context the law is being applied to – refuse to comment on a basic query and kick it upstairs to the legal profession.

So here’s a little quiz:

  1. If an individual makes an employment tribunal claim against your company, what are the processes and timescales for responding?
  2. If one of your managers asks for advice about whether a restructuring situation will result in redundancies, how do you respond?
  3. Could you advise a manager on what the protected characteristics are under the Equality Act?
  4. What is the process for a Shared Parental Leave request? And how does it differ from Additional Paternity Leave?
  5. What are the big changes being planned in Employment Law and where would you find more information?

If you’ve a CIPD qualification* and you can’t answer all of those with ease, then you really should be concerned (and if you’re one of my non-HR readers, if your HR manager or consultant can’t answer them you should be equally concerned). That’s not me being a smart-arse – those questions are based on the CIPD’s own learning outcomes for the Employment Law module in the Advanced Diploma. As an HR professional, you don’t need to know the ins and outs of the wonderfully named “Daddy’s Dance Hall” case or whether there are legitimate grounds for appeal in the recent Holiday Pay case – that is a job for the lawyers. But the basic tenets of employment law? You bet.

(* I understand some CIPD qualified people are specialists in certain areas – such as Compensation & Benefits – and don’t need a detailed knowledge of general employment law. But they still need to know how the law impacts on their own specialism)

If you’ve done 6 impossible things before Breakfast….

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At the age of almost 6, I remember being woken up in the middle of the night by my parents to come downstairs and watch, on a grainy black and white TV, the first steps of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon. I felt a similar sense of excitement and history being made last week as I watched the scenes from Mission Control as we (and they) waited to find out if the Philae probe had landed on Comet 67P.

In so many respects, the Rosetta mission exemplifies what we in HR would like to see happening in every workplace -albeit on a slightly smaller scale.

It had a clear and incredibly stretching objective (I’d love to have been at the meeting where someone said “I’ve got a good idea – let’s see if we can land something the size of a washing machine on a comet 400 million km away and moving at 34000km an hour. To make it really interesting, we’ll have to send our instructions to the rocket half an hour before we need it to do them, and we’ll then have to wait another half an hour for the answer”)

Allied to this clear purpose was team working and collaboration – the effort involved not only different nationalities but scientists of different disciplines, engineers, computer programmers and mathematicians. And suppliers (such as those who built parts of the lander) were just as involved as the scientists working directly. (One other nice thing was the diversity of those involved – there were almost as many women scientists and engineers involved as there were men).

There was learning from failure – not everything went exactly right (Philae’s now famous bounce on landing being a particular example) but everything that happened was used to gain greater knowledge and to plan for the future.

There were clear and consistent values throughout – virtually everyone interviewed talked of the desire to do something new and the potential benefits of the things they were hoping to discover.

And finally, while the technology and the science were clearly important – the mission was only achieved through committed and motivated people. The scenes at the point of landing were not of the lander itself, but of the team at Mission Control anxiously waiting to find out what had happened. The expressions on their faces in the final 20 minutes, which varied from tension, nervous laughter, nonchalance (one team member appeared to take a call on his mobile with less than 10 minutes to go) to complete joy as the signal came through, emphasised how essential the people were.

The day after the landing, a trending hashtag on Twitter was #WeCanLandOnACometButWeCant…If I were of a cynical mind, I’d conclude that tweet with “Build Better Workplaces”. But I’d like to believe, in the words of a certain US politician “Yes We Can”.