Tag Archives: engagement

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?

 

Are our workplaces designed to fail?

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I’m a big fan of economist Tim Harford, and recently read his book “The Logic of Life”.  In one chapter he deals with an economic idea which offers an explanation of the reasons both for high executive pay and office politics – Tournament Theory.

The argument – supported by some statistical evidence – runs like this. Modern workplaces reward relative performance, not absolute performance. Good performers are defined, not by specific targets, but by being better than other performers. So work becomes a series of endless tournaments between ostensible colleagues – if one wins, another loses. And with victory comes reward.

Now just like in the current World Cup, victory can be obtained in various ways.  You can go all out to achieve success, putting in lots of discretionary effort – the equivalent of playing free-flowing, attacking football. But there are equally successful strategies that will win you the match without necessarily benefiting your employer. You can be risk averse, blocking anything new and sticking to the tried and trusted, stifling your more innovative opponent – the work equivalent of “parking the bus“. Or you can go out of your way to discredit, disrupt and stab your colleague in the back – the equivalent of trying to kick your opponent off the park. Your tactics are determined by doing not what is best for the organisation but what will work for you –  and just like the group stages of the World Cup will be decided not just by who your current opponent is but also what your other  colleagues are up to.

In this model, the prize for getting to the next level  has to be sufficient to make it worth competing at all. So if you earn £20000 pa, the prospect of a promotion to a salary of £25000 is a big jump. At £70000, an increase to £75000 will have far less effect but an increase to £90000 may well incentivise you. Chief Exec salaries of say £500000 aren’t designed to reward the individual in the role, but to act as an incentive to Directors below them who may be earning a “mere” £300000.

Of course, it’s easy to spot problems with this theory from an HR perspective. For example, it makes no allowance for intrinsic motivation, despite increasing scientific support for this playing a major part in the way individuals behave in the workplace.

But what the theory does do is to explain why many of our HR initiatives fail. If our organisation structure and pay and benefits system is set up to reward relative performance, it will inevitably encourage people to behave in the way that tournament theory predicts. No amount of family friendly policies, team building exercises, empowerment or innovative recruitment strategies will change this if we have designed systems that work against what we are trying to achieve. So while OD and “compensation & benefits” are seen as the less ‘sexy’ end of HR, maybe they are the ones we should be paying more attention to if we really want to change the world of work.

 

Is HR Barking Up The Wrong Tree?

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Originally posted November 2012

A lot of my voluntary sector clients are currently grappling with the concept of “personalisation” (horrid word) – a model where  individuals receiving social care have control over how and when that care is received – in other words, rather than the provider having one “model” of how care is delivered, it is tailored to individual needs and requirements. To be successful of course, it requires the individuals to have full access to information and be able to make informed decisions as a consequence.

In a sense, this is no different to the idea that you make an informed choice about the car you want and tailor it to your own personal needs: from the fundamental – the style and size – to the less significant – colour and extras. Businesses that offer cars in the way Henry Ford did (one standard model in the same colour) will not succeed in the modern age.

So why do HR people spend so much time agonising about “employee engagement” and ways in which it can be increased? The idea that we can do “management things” and thereby create smiling happy workers who are committed to the company and immersed in its success exists only in the Chigley Biscuit factory.

If we really want committed and productive staff perhaps what we need to do is “personalise” our approach – understand that every individual is different and that what motivates one person won’t work with another doing an identical job. If someone is capable of making informed decisions about their life care or a major purchase, they are equally capable of doing so in work.  Maybe it’s time to change the model from an assumption that we know best to recognising that our employees do, and building our businesses around that.