Originally posted November 2013

What do these business issues have in common?

A poor recruitment process leads to the appointment of a bank chairman who knows the price of cocaine better than the assets of his bank.

The government announces that hospitals must publish staffing ratios and recruit more if needed to ensure safe levels.

There is widespread condemnation at Executive pay-offs in the BBC.

The organisational “culture” is blamed for the ways in which newspapers behaved in adopting illegal practices to get stories,

Industrial relations “brinkmanship” leads to the threat of a major industry being closed.

A report talks about how businesses waste the skills and knowledge of older workers.

The simple answer is that they all reflect HR issues within a company. Not Finance. Not Marketing. Not Quality Control. Not Business Processes. But HR.

Despite the odd article prophesying the death of HR, the CIPD have recognised this sea-change within business and its Chief Executive Peter Cheese recently told its annual conference that “we can help shape the business agenda of the next decade and beyond”

But the real challenge is what is the HR profession going to do about it?  Are we simply going to luxuriate in the knowledge that we were right all along? Personally, I don’t want to look back in 5 years’ time at a business world where nothing much has changed, where the bean counters rule and HR people spend their time moaning that no-one takes them seriously. So what are we going to do to seize the moment?

Originally posted October 2013

A few months ago I was asked to speak to Psychology students at Liverpool John Moores University about HR as a career option. An understanding of Psychology is often seen as one of the key knowledge areas for HR since it gives us a good insight into individual behaviour and personality. But after a debate last week on Twitter it seems that to be an effective HR professional you also need a good knowledge of

• Law – the legal framework surrounding the employment relationship, whatever country you live in, is essential for setting down the basic ground rules.
• Sociology – as we focus on individuals and their behaviour, we often forget we also need an understanding of wider power relationships and organisational structures. And then of course sociology’s close cousin
• Social Anthropology – to help us understand the importance of culture, ritual and narratives (for example, why it is often harder to change tea breaks than undertake a major redundancy exercise)
• Economics – an understanding of how labour markets work, skill shortages and wage rates, helping us to plan recruitment. While Behavioural Economics helps to explain why a performance bonus may often have the opposite effect to that intended.
• Statistics – if 10% of employees return a staff survey, how confident can we be that the answers reflect the workforce as a whole? And when we talk about “average” wages what do we really mean?
• History – if we’re embarking on change, do we understand why things are the way they currently are? And are the factors that created that still around?

Of course, I’m talking a good basic understanding, not degree level knowledge of each subject. But two questions spring to mind – is there any other business area that requires such a breadth of knowledge? And are there any other areas that HR professionals need to understand?

Originally posted January 2013

A common assignment question given to first year medical students is “Can Suicide ever be rational?” When a young friend of mine told me that he had this assignment to do some years ago, I suggested he read up on Durkheim’s study on the reasons for suicide.

When I met up with him again a few weeks later, he told me that he’d looked at Durkheim, but hadn’t included it because “he wasn’t a medic”.

Unfortunately, this sort of silo mentality isn’t limited to medicine and academia – there’s a tendency across all sectors to dismiss thinking that ‘wasn’t invented here’.  HR textbooks make few if any references to Behavioural Economics, while behavioural economists I’ve read talk about work behaviour without any apparent knowledge of the many studies done by psychologists and management theorists, in some cases dating back over the last 80-90 years.

That’s why it was so refreshing to read this blog, where the HR author uses her anthropological background to illustrate a point about organisational culture. It’s also why I suggested in my last blog that fiction can be a source of management thinking.  Stepping outside the artificially imposed boundaries of any discipline can help us give a new perspective on many issues.

When we talk about “talent development” and “engagement”, how many of us look at the whole individual? Bill may only be an average accounts clerk, but he speaks fluent Spanish and has a good knowledge of military history, while Sally in Sales is an accomplished musician and volunteers for a local charity. How can we make use of these skills in the workplace? We may not be able to, but are you even asking the question?