Tag Archives: professional standards

Why I won’t be using AI anytime soon

Why I won’t be using AI anytime soon

Posted on by • Posted in Work Related Posts • Tagged , , , • Leave a comment

Every time I log on these days, I’m bombarded with articles about Artificial Intelligence (AI) – whether it is how it is the most wonderful labour saving thing ever (I’d send an avatar to a meeting too if I had the option!)  – to the apocalyptic, with some predicting, Terminator style, in AI wiping out humanity.

While I don’t fall into either category, I’m certainly a sceptic about its uses, particularly some of the most common AI bots that are available (ChatGPT/Meta/Gemini/Grok/Glamdring/Wall-E/Co-Pilot etc). Here’s why:

  • They get things wrong:

If you ask Gemini who Sarah O’Connor is, it will tell you she’s a truck driver who was interviewed for the Financial Times.  In fact she’s a highly regarded FT journalist. While Chat GPT informed me that drug dealer Howard Mark’s autobiography was called “Thy Damnation Slumbereth Not” and even explained to me how he’d arrived at that title. It’s not called that at all.

  • It makes stuff up:

Gemini created a totally fictitious act of parliament (“The Civil Justice Act 2004”). And a barrister nearly got themselves into very hot water with a judge for citing fictitious AI generated case law in court.

  • It can’t do certain things (but pretends it can)

This video from people professional Julie Drybrough, when she asked ChatGPT to help create a presentation for her reveals it be like an over-confident intern  – claiming it can do the job and constantly saying it was doing it, before finally admitting that it was unable to complete the task.

  • It doesn’t know what it doesn’t know

Large Language Learning Models (the basis of AI) has to learn from something. However, despite what we might think, not all human knowledge is on the internet. There are still plenty of books, films and novels that aren’t available and many museum and library archives are not yet digitised, or where access is limited. So, ask a question that it doesn’t know the answer to and it may be honest and admit it doesn’t know – but equally it may revert to point above and just make it up.

  • It comes with a lot of ethical and environmental concerns

Meta AI has been subject to a lot of criticism for using illegal copies of copyright works to train its AI (they are probably unlucky that they got caught since I can’t imagine that the other leading AI providers paid for their sources). If you don’t think that’s a problem, try walking out of Waterstone’s with a book you haven’t paid for, and use the defence of “I wasn’t stealing, I just wanted to read it to learn what it contained”

While the environmental consequences in terms of water use and electricity are only just becoming known – but one stat that stands out is that a Chat GPT query uses ten times the amount of electricity as a standard Google search.

And what does all this mean for managing  people in a business?

Firstly, relying on AI for information on employment law is risky to say the least. Like Wikipedia, it might be correct, but unless you know already you can’t be certain that it’s giving you the right information.

Secondly, AI can’t possibly know the information in a human head. For example, much of my understanding of HR issues comes from nearly 40 years of experience with a variety of industries and sectors. AI cannot possibly replicate what I learned from the Merseybus bus cleaning dispute in 1995 or the competitive tendering process for Leisure Centres in Runcorn in 1990. Or a TUPE transfer I managed between construction companies in 2004. Or how to deal with an employee charged with child abuse, or who one is terminally ill.

Finally, AI doesn’t understand culture. A solution that works in one company context may not be the most effective or appropriate in a different one, for lots of very valid reasons. AI might give you a range of solutions but can’t advise you on which one might be the best.

I’m sure that in 5 or 10 years, some of these issues with AI might be resolved. But until then, if you ask me to support your business with HR issues, you can be certain that you will be getting advice from an actual human, not a bot.

Just out of interest, I got Microsoft’s Co-Pilot AI (which is built into the latest versions of Word/PowerPoint/Excel etc) to rewrite this post for me. You can read what it came up with (minus the hyperlinks) here

bionic hand and human hand finger pointing
Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com

I know what I want & I know how to get it?

Posted on by • Posted in HR Thoughts • Tagged , , , , • Leave a comment

A common cry among HR people is that they are ignored or dismissed within their business. It’s something that in my 30 years in HR has never gone away, and forms a staple of many an HR conference. The “how do we get a seat at the table” discussion has outlasted almost every topic or fad that the profession has debated.

For me, one of the problems is that, while HR people moan to each other about not being taken ‘seriously’, we rarely ask our colleagues, who are after all our customers, what it is they want. But, after 18 years, working with a wide variety of organisations in widely diverging industries and sectors, I’ve come to the conclusion that what most want from HR is

·         To keep them legal – that means having a good knowledge of Employment Law and related regulation.

·         An understanding the business and its objectives, and the ability to devise solutions to problems that achieve this.

·         Good professional skills that no-one else in the business can provide – whether this is recruitment, employee development, handling a complex union negotiation, or an individual issue.

·         Someone who will remind them that they are dealing with other people. It’s very easy for managers to become focused on the task and forget that other human beings are involved. Pointing out the human consequences of a business decision isn’t being a “bleeding heart” – it allows better long-term decision making and planning.

·         Looking at ways things can be done, not reasons why they can’t

·         Someone who brings in expertise and knowledge from outside that can ‘add value’ to the business they are working for.

Now, I’ve never conducted a formal survey among the 125+ organisations I’ve worked with, and this view is purely based on my perceptions. So I’d welcome comments from businesses – and other HR people. Perhaps if we better understood what business wants, we might finally know how to earn the mythical seat at the table.

Thinking Outside the Payroll

Posted on by • Posted in HR Thoughts, Work Related Posts • Tagged , , , , , , • 1 Comment

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.

Time to Drop Discipline?

Posted on by • Posted in HR Thoughts, Work Related Posts • Tagged , , , , • Leave a comment

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”!)

Just how hard is it to treat people decently?

Posted on by • Posted in HR Thoughts, Work Related Posts • Tagged , , , , , • 4 Comments

Every so often the internet throws up some serendipitous issues. A discussion on Twitter about the recent case of the Vicar unable to make an unfair dismissal claim since he was deemed to be employed by God caused me to look at Rerum Novarum, the 1891 Encyclical by Pope Leo XIII, which said among other things that

  • Employees should be paid a “living wage”and receive stable working conditions
  • They should have proper rest breaks
  • Trade unions were on the whole a good thing
  • Even if they had the economic power to do so, employers shouldn’t exploit or treat their staff badly

At the same time, the latest post from blogger Maid in London, which details life as a hotel housekeeper, popped up in my timeline. I think it’s fair to say that her employer takes the opposite view to Pope Leo.

Some people do pretty awful jobs in unpleasant conditions. They clean hotel rooms, collect bins, make or assemble things in hot and noisy environments, work with dangerous equipment, or deal with people in difficult or crisis situations. Although it’s true that you can get job satisfaction from even the most mundane or demanding task, most in those roles don’t do it for the love of the job. And despite what some in social media suggest, these jobs aren’t all going to disappear in the next 5-10 years.

So why do we think that just because someone does a manual job, for low pay, that it’s somehow okay to treat them like dirt? While some HR people might get slightly orgasmic at the thought that the world of work is full of “cool” organisations like Google, where employees drink lattes while sliding down pool tables, others boast of their commercial prowess by looking at new and innovative ways to cut employee terms and conditions in pursuit of the “bottom line”, and a third group wander around ineffectually bemoaning the fact that line managers don’t listen to them or follow their carefully constructed processes. None of these groups seem to consider that just treating people with a little common decency might pay dividends both in terms of staff morale and productivity.

Let’s face it, if a celibate theologian from the Victorian era can “get it”, then twenty first century HR professionals should be able to.