Tag Archives: HR

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”!)

HR Officer Vacancy

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I’m currently recruiting a standalone HR Officer role for one of my clients –  the job advert is below:

BTTG is a world renowned organisation within the textile industry. We research, test, audit and provide professional advice to companies worldwide. We’ve grown significantly in recent years thanks to our high quality standards and professional staff, and to support this growth we are now looking to recruit our first in-house HR role.

You will be currently working in HR and have at least a Level 3 CIPD qualification, and be looking for a career move where you can help establish an HR function that contributes to the company’s development. You’ll have a strong current HR knowledge and be able to give credible support to managers, directors and staff across our various businesses. You will be highly organised, capable of working on your own initiative, IT literate and with a commitment to accuracy and high quality. You’ll set up and review our systems, ensuring that they not only fulfil legal requirements but also run in an effective and efficient way.  You’ll have worked with a diverse workforce and ideally will have experience of an international business. Currently we employ around 100 staff with 15% based overseas, and expect this to grow in coming years.

We offer a competitive salary of between £22-25000, together with other benefits, and the opportunity to develop your career. We actively encourage professional development and are willing to support you to obtain your Level 5 CIPD qualification.

For more information about our work, visit www.bttg.co.uk and www.shirleytech.co.uk.

Please send your CV to our external HR Adviser, Simon Jones: simon@ariadne-associates.co.uk.  You can also contact him for more information about the role

Closing Date: Tuesday 4 October 2016. This is a re-advertisement – previous applicants will be reconsidered automatically and do not need to reapply

BTTG is an Equal Opportunities Employer. No Agencies.

Caveat Recruiter

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Aspiring Conservative leader (and potential Prime Minister) Andrea Leadsom hit the headlines last week when she was accused of exaggerating her CV, suggesting that she had undertaken more senior roles than she in fact had.

It’s a problem that many businesses – large and small – face in recruitment. How reliable is the information contained in a candidate’s CV?

Most small businesses are unlikely to have the time, or resources, to undertake full background checks on potential candidates. And indeed it hardly creates trust between you and your potential employee if you feel you have to verify every aspect of a candidate’s career history. Having said that, a quick comparison with their LinkedIn profile might be useful!

Clearly, if you discover that a candidate has lied outright (claiming they have a qualification they don’t, or worked in a role or for a company they didn’t) you can withdraw a job offer or even dismiss after they have started.

But in most cases, it will be that a candidate has perhaps oversold their experience. What to do then?

It’s worth remembering that a CV is a marketing document. It is the person’s attempt to impress you as their potential new employer, so it’s understandable that they will want to put a positive spin on their achievements. After all, you don’t put in your brochure or website things like “our products are pretty good but battery life is better in our competitors” And it’s also a fact that individuals and their employers will often collude to make job titles sound more important and prestigious. “Senior HR Executive” implies there are more junior ones when in fact there may not be!

It’s a further reminder that recruitment should be a rigorous process Use interviews to test out the claims in detail. Everyone will accentuate the positive, but good questioning techniques (not this sort of nonsense) and effective listening will allow you to get a better picture of the candidate in front of you and what they actually have done. And you can then decide whether they have broadly the right skills and experience for the role or if you’ve been seduced by their marketing skill!

After all, we don’t complain about advertising unless it’s deliberately misleading; treat your candidates’ CVs in the same way.

 

Anger, Brexit and Moving Forward

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I was reluctant to write a post about last week’s EU referendum. Enough keyboard warriors have already given their reactions, opinions and solutions. But a couple of recent posts and comments from HR people have changed my mind.

First, let me state that, as a Remain voter, I’ve been through anger, disbelief, shock and all the other emotions that many others (like this, this and this) have also experienced.  It’s small consolation to live in a city which voted overwhelmingly to remain and where I’ve yet to meet anyone who’s anything other than horrified by the result and its implications for them and their children.

But what I will not do is get involved in a blame game. People who voted Leave did so for a variety of individual reasons – some will have had well thought out principled arguments, some were out and out racists, some had a rose-tinted and nostalgic view of England in the 1950s and some were just conned by the duplicitous snake-oil salesmen leading the Leave campaign.  To start trying to demonise the old, or working class people from the de-industrialised north, or those who live in rural areas, or those without a degree, for the way they voted is neither constructive not helpful. Indeed, the demonising of certain groups, particularly by politicians (and I don’t just mean UKIP) is the sort of tactic that has led us to the present situation.

We talk in HR a lot about “engagement” – an ill-defined concept which provokes a range of reactions from evangelism to cynicism. But I remember in one discussion a colleague saying “I can’t really describe what an engaged employee looks like – but I certainly know what a disengaged one is”. What we saw last week was the result of a disengaged population who wanted to kick back against something. As an old boss of mine used to say when discussing union negotiations, “when you’re in a lose/lose situation, do what you want to do”. And that’s what they appear to have done.

The UK seems to be in a collective Kubler-Ross curve at the moment. But the only way we will move forward to is get past the denial and anger stages and start to make the best of our new circumstances.  And maybe that means applying some of the ideas we use to try to improve employee engagement on a wider basis.