Tag Archives: business strategy

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”.

Come on In, The Water’s Lovely!

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Yesterday I attended the Social HR Conference run by the CIPD in Manchester. There were lots of great learning points but one thing that struck me repeatedly were the reasons put forward by (often frustrated) HR people as to why their companies wouldn’t embrace “social media”, as they are often the reasons some of my clients also state. So I thought I’d challenge a few.

“People will do stupid things on it and we’ll end up sacking them”

Yes, some employees do stupid things sometimes – they always have done and always will do. Some of them will do it on a social media forum. But if someone doing something daft on social media leads to a disciplinary problem, then, to quote Pets At Home HR Director Ryan Cheyne, you have a problem with an employee – not with social media.

“People will just waste time on it”

Some people waste time at work no matter what. They might take overlong fag or tea breaks, wander around telling jokes to colleagues or discussing last night’s Eastenders. Again, if someone isn’t achieving their work targets, tackle it as a performance problem like any other. But…

…the time you think they are wasting might be being spent finding out the answer to a problem quickly and cheaply, getting some useful ideas on good practice from their contacts, or even finding out some information or knowledge on a competitor or a new opportunity.

“It might be ok for professionals and techies, but we employ manual workers/truck drivers/cleaners”

And you think that your manual workers don’t have Smartphones or Facebook accounts? Even if they don’t use them in work it doesn’t mean they can’t or don’t have them. Some companies adopt technology earlier than others but in the end we all do. One interesting learning point for me yesterday was that there is a huge online community of people who discuss knitting and crochet, and (while I accept this is a total stereotype) you wouldn’t normally associate people with those hobbies with the cutting edge of technology

“People might get a bad impression of the company”

People have always moaned about their employer and things they don’t like. But if you’re perceived as a poor employer, word always gets round. Social media just gets it round faster. And with the onset of sites like Glassdoor, it’s going to happen whether you “forbid” it or not.

Look at Friends Reunited and Myspace – they were just passing fads

Individual sites may come and go (there are some suggestions that Facebook may soon fall out of favour, while the end of LinkedIn has been prophesied regularly) but the means of communicating via internet or mobile technology will be around for a long while.

What’s its ROI?

As Mervyn Dinnen pointed out at yesterday’s conference, this is the “killer” argument used by those who just don’t want to do something. After all, how many companies measure the ROI of talking (and listening) to their employees, making new business connections or of providing mobile phones?

For a small organisation, the benefits of using social media more seem overwhelming – a cheap and easy way to promote your business and services, a chance to get immediate customer and employee feedback and an opportunity to “punch above your weight” against bigger competitors. In the same way that we now expect a company to have a website and an email address, there’ll be an expectation from your employees and customers in the future that you’re in social in some way. Thinking it will go away or ignoring it is not the right strategy.

Rome, Death or Umbrage

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Humorous novelist Barbara Pym, a High Anglican Christian, once remarked that most people left her church for one of three reasons: Rome, death or umbrage. Her comment’s also true for the reasons most people leave a business.

Rome (i.e. the Catholic church) was in many respects the “competition”. If your staff are leaving to go to a competitor, what is it that they offer that you don’t? Is it more money; better working conditions; more career opportunities? Or is it that they operate in a way that is more in tune with the individual’s values? Whatever it is that makes your competitors a more attractive proposition than you is something that you need to understand and address if you can.

Although death is still thankfully a fairly rare occurrence in work, the abolition of the default retirement age means that you don’t necessarily know when an employee might decide to leave. But although you may not know the day or the  hour, you can be certain that they won’t be with you for ever. Are you planning what you will do when loyal staff retire? I recently worked with a company who had recognised that 3 long-serving senior managers were intending to retire in the next 2 years. When they assessed the consequences of this, they realised that it had “knock on” implications for employees all the way down to shop floor level.

And finally umbrage – a falling out with a boss or colleagues. Barbara Pym thought this the most common reason, and it’s one of the HR cliches that “people join organisations but leave managers”.  Like most cliches however it probably contains a element of truth. Work is a relationship and if we don’t get on with the people we work with, then we’ll generally look elsewhere for a pleasanter atmosphere.  If your staff are leaving, it may be for reasons that seem trivial to you but are important to them (for example when a football manager banned chips from the canteen) Minor gripes and moans can – if left unchecked – become toxic and employees will vote with their feet, so creating a positive culture isn’t some “airy fairy” HR idea but sound business sense.

Do you know why staff leave your business? And what are you going to do about it?

 

Risky Business

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HR has a reputation for being “risk-averse”.  It’s a reputation the profession often deserves, with  “no” frequently being the standard response to a managerial request, usually followed by 57 reasons why it can’t be done. (If you doubt this, take a look at some of the HR debates on LinkedIn, where it sometimes seems there’s a competition to be most negative about an idea).

But since any business (whether for profit or not) operates on a degree of risk or uncertainty, why is it that HR can’t operate in the same way? We talk a lot about “learning from failure” but frequently don’t practice what we preach.

Of course, no-one is suggesting that HR people should act like the banks in the run up to the financial crisis, taking foolhardy and dangerous chances that are unlikely to come off. But a calculated approach to risk recognises that there are times when doing something different is the right option.

So, how do you know when and how to take a risk? Sometimes, it’s simply the benefit of experience, but if you want to start taking a more calculated approach then one way is to test out your idea using the Palchinsky Principles, developed by a Russian Engineer and popularised by Tim Harford in his book “Adapt”.

In a nutshell, these are:

  • Actively seek out new ideas and ways of doing things (and expect that some of them will fail)
  • Try them out on a scale where failure is survivable
  • Get feedback and learn from your mistakes.

In many respects there’s nothing radical about the first and the third. But it’s the second one that can help turn you from risk-averse to a calculated risk taker. Use pilot projects, try things on a small scale at first, or make changes that can easily be unravelled if they don’t achieve the desired results. Ask yourself, in the manner of Dr Pepper: “what’s the worst that could happen?” – but don’t use this as an excuse not to do something, rather as a way of gauging how to test it.

 

One Way or Another

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I went to see Blondie this week, and about 3 songs in Debbie Harry said the words that send a chill through most concert-goers’ hearts: “We’ve got a new album out, and we’re going to do some songs from it”. It’s not surprising that after 35 years the band don’t just want to play “Atomic” and “Heart of Glass” all the time, but that’s what the audience want. It set me thinking that it demonstrates one of the fundamental work dilemmas – as managers we want our employees to be creative, innovative and adaptable, yet in many cases our customers are quite happy with the existing product and don’t want change.

So what’s the solution? It seems to me that there are three approaches

Firstly, there is the Scott Walker approach. He famously walked away from being one of the biggest stars of the 60s and now produces music that satisfies him creatively but which provokes some extreme reactions. Essentially it’s about abandoning the mass market and instead do something where the employees are fully satisfied. Lots of customers may be lost but those that remain are loyal and “buy into” the exclusivity.

Secondly, there is the Dexys Midnight Runners approach. They still perform their old songs but in a different style to their heyday (here’s their biggest hit) and market carefully (their last tour was billed very explicitly and repeatedly as “performing their new album, followed by some old hits”). This is a much more evolutionary approach – it keeps the employees creatively satisfied but also keeps the customers happy.

Finally, there’s the Squeeze approach. This is to reform periodically to play the Greatest Hits, and then with the income generated the two main songwriters are able to develop their own music (often separately). In this case, it’s about protecting the core brand while diversifying into (hopefully profitable) other markets.

What it all means of course is that the way that we run and manage the people in our organisations depends very much on what our business strategy is. From an HR perspective, it shows why it’s essential that we know and understand business objectives while from the management side it demonstrates why involving your staff is integral to business success.

Oh, and the new Blondie songs? They’re ok, but I wish they’d played “Sunday Girl“