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Tag: HR

Yesterday I pondered on pull advertising, here . .

Published May 30, 2008 by Jo Jordan

Via Twitter, thanks to Daryl Tay in Singapore, a simple account of social media suitable for novitiates.  Pull advertising is shown at the end.

All that is missing is an aggregation site to save us the search – run by the vanilla factory of course!

 

UPDATE: We expect the push methods of the 20th century by replaced by pull methods of Toyota.  We only send work when someone signals they want it!

Daryl linked to a good little video the illustrates how much business has changed.

THE RECOVERY:  If you are planning ahead to the recovery, this video is a good place to start.

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I want chips

Published May 29, 2008 by Jo Jordan

A Skribt request on Scott McArthur‘s blog throws an interesting challenge: let’s talk about the basics of HR.

I gave that a bit of thought in a wander around the block. And I thought of three things.

Big and small firms

1. The basics of HR in big and small firms seem, on first glance, to be quite different.

Paper work and consulting

2. If the owner of a small-enterprise, asks us for help, say in appointing their first employee, our minds probably leap to ideas about writing the employment contract, for example. I think the leap to paperwork underpins the essential credibility problem of HR.

Yes, the business person is probably in a hurry. And yes, the paperwork and government regulations appear to be the most important issue. We are failing our client, though, to deliver what is after all for us a form-filling exercise.

The issue facing the small business is not paperwork, though it is good to get that right. The issue facing the business person is change. Yesterday, the business accommodated the aspirations of one person. Tomorrow, the business will accommodate a second person’s hope and dreams, expectations and life chances. The minute a second person walks in the door, that business is changed irrevocably.

Are the interests and motivation of the second person a nuisance? Should we try to contain their energies and motivations with contracts and rules and processes, or whatever else?

OR, should we treat the second person as an asset? Should we engage the business person in a discussion that reveals opportunities the business person had not previously thought of? We may need consulting skills to have this conversation, but have it we should.

Admin and managing many conversations

3. Is the HR task any different in a large firm? I don’t think so. Not when I think of HR as leading change.

It is just that in a large firm, we have the aspirations of so many people to consider and formal procedures are useful. That is all recruitment, selection, job evaluation, etc. do for us: manage conversations in a way that our diverse aspirations add surprising business value.

The challenge though is to engage a business manager in a hurry.

Thanks to the anonymous person on Scott’s blog. Does this help anyone else?

UPDATE: I can confirm.  The difference between HRM in small firms and big firms is that in small firms you have to work as fast as everyone else. In big firms, we learn to be slow and unwieldly.

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Do you think HR could ever be elegant?

Published May 28, 2008 by Jo Jordan

Elegance and HR?

Mmm, that sounds like asking me to cook a souffle.

Today, two things happened today.  First, someone on LinkedIn asked why policy and procedures are important in HR.  As he had asked twice before, I took him to be a student who was trying to figure out how to structure an essay and decided to help him out on what is after all an not well articulated topic.

Then, I had dealings with an HR Department, and I despaire.  I had to put my CV through them on their form.   This form is well over 10 pages long and with all the additional information they want, it could well stretch to 20 pages.  It was in Word, not a wiki, so very difficult to manage, and eventually, approaching exhaustion, I printed it out.  I have an HP printer (another sad story) and the pages tend to shoot up all over the office.  Guess what, they weren’t numbered!!  Deary me – what is it with HR?

So, what did I say to the ‘student’?  I suggested his question is what policy and procedures do we need?

Documents I expect to see in a well-run HR office

1. Strategy (a detailed file with a short synopsis for circulation)

  • The nature of our industry
    • How demand for labor arises in the firm and what moderates demand – technology, short term volatility, etc.
    • The supply of labor in our industry (occupational structures & training)
  • Our firm’s competitive position
    • Current and desired
    • Our firm’s strategy for reaching its desired position
  • HR strategy
    • Desired internal labor market strategy and corresponding relationship with the external labor market
    • Specific features that result: training, supervision style, etc.
    • Include leadership and consultation style that we need and why (see 4)

2. The soft behaviors essential to be competitive in our business (detailed trail of the research and analysis and short engaging persuasive summary for distribution)

  • Talk to all stakeholders about their tacit knowledge
  • Drill down to the link between the behavior they espouse and the link to competitiveness in this industry
  • Tell people what behaviors are required in what situations and why

3. The policy and procedures manual

  • The purpose of a policy and procedures manual is to reduce administration.
  • Is it clear to anyone at a glance what they have to do?
    • Test all p&p with the most impatient and the most analytical.
    • Anything debatable does not belong here.
  • Some people have a gift for simplicity and elegance.  Ask them to review the P&P.

4. Methods of adjudication

  • An organization is an arena of conflict and bargaining.  Ultimately the test of HR is the quality of its refereeing.
  • Define the decision making processes in the organization and processes of consultation required for each decision.
  • Ensure that everyone is able to argue a position vigorously and robustly without recrimination, and that everyone affected by a decision has an equal opportunity to do so.
  • Ultimately the added margin that our people bring to the firm comes from these moments.  Because they can be contentious, we need to manage them well.

5. Review of HR Strategy, Policy and Procedures (a schedule and last year’s file)

  • When is HR Strategy reviewed and in conjunction with what other review processes?
  • When is HR implementation reviewed and how?
  • How can any  member of the organization prompt a review?

Keep it thorough but simple

Forms that are over 10 pages long without page numbers just don’t meet the simplicity principle.  Sorry!

I have worked in a place which had a standard contract for all employees (couple of blanks to fill in).  We had one form to fill in each year (it did require 6 copies oddly).  Our annual report went via the department/division/organization report.

As a general rule the organization ran on five principles:

a) Put your proposal in writing before we discuss it.

b) Confine yourself to one side including the routing (we ask A to make a decision for onward submission to B to . . .).

c) Brief everyone prior to the meeting. At the meeting we will discuss the proposal together and decide whether to back you or not.

d) If you cannot speak succinctly to your paper at the meeting and answer questions crisply, we will ask to withdraw your proposal.  By all means, come back when you have your thoughts together.

e) No decision is ever, ever made retrospectively.

What a simple life.  Other organizations may need another list of principles to match their organization.  But they can be simple. Indeed they should be simple and they will be simple if you have done the background work on what you do and why!

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Who moved my mouse?

Published May 6, 2008 by Jo Jordan

Who Moved My Cheese?Image via Wikipedia

I am looking for my mouse

Clay Shirky at Web2.0 Expo tells the story of a 4 year old who gets bored looking at a DVD and crawls around the back of the screen: “I am looking for my mouse”. This is the story of child brought into a technological age where we expect to participate in whatever we do. “Looking for the mouse” is the mark of a generation who expects to take initiative.

Who moved my cheese?

Just ten years’ ago, we were delighted by another story, an allegory, Who moved my cheese? This story is about a generation who does not expect to take initiative.  Indeed, it resists taking the initiative.  It wants to ‘put the clock back’.

We spend a lot of time crying, “we want the cheese to come back.”  Or, words to that effect.  We celebrate the past rather than the emerging future.

The positive message of this allegory is that once we can move beyond fear, we are free to move on, and find fresher, more interesting, more enjoyable cheese.

My advice is “follow that mouse!”

I live a double life as I have said before. In my one life, I work with Zimbabweans who are frozen in terror about the changes going on in their country. Their fears are real, and justified. So too, is their desire to go back to a time when cheese was there for the taking. Their liberation will ultimately come when they stop protesting the unfairness of it all and start to explore their future.

In my other life, I work with HR professionals who are also frozen in terror.  In the case of HR, there is a little cheese left, but not much. The world has moved on to work patterns where there are new demands and new generation who says “I am looking for the mouse”?

For Zimbabweans and HR professionals, I am looking for my mouse has a sadder meaning The mice have already detected the dwindling cheese supply and have left.

My advice is “follow that mouse”!

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How good is your HR map?

Published April 6, 2008 by Jo Jordan

The schematic design of Zone 1 of the tube map. Locations of stations are not geographically accurateImage from Wikipedia

I have a question to ask my colleagues in HR – if we were to sketch out “what” we are managing, what would we draw?  And what principles might we use?

To kick this off, I googled the maps of London.

1 The London A to Z

In 1935, Phyllis Pearsall began working on the London A to Z that we know so well.  She walked 3000 miles of the 23000 streets of London waking up at 5am everyday and working an 18 hour day.

2 The underground map

Harry Beck drew the map of “the tube”  in 1933, oddly before Phyllis Pearsall started work on the A to Z.   As anyone knows who has used the Beck map to estimate the walk between two stations, it is not geographically accurate.  It is brilliant though because it shows “how to get from one station to another, and where to change trains.”

3 The underground by time

And I found this attempt to redraw the underground map to show how much time it takes to travel from station to station.

If we were drawing a map of what we manage, what would we want to show?

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Are leaders made by followers?

Published February 7, 2008 by Jo Jordan

The first time I encountered this idea, around 25 years ago now, I found it an assault to my classical training as a psychologist.  Over time though, I have come to understand that the question of whether leaders are born or made is the wrong question.  The right question is a sociological and anthropological question:  what role does “leadership” play in organizing society and what are the different ways we use the concept?

At an organizational level, I have become convinced that leadership resides in the followers.  There are times when someone is in the right place at the right time and it all comes together.

The process begins with the people talking to each other in a bounded space, such as an organization.  These people talking together look for a leader, not to tell them what to do, but to represent who and what they want as a kind of shorthand to themselves and to the world.

The day a leader stops being representative of their collective wishes, either because s/he has stopped listening or because s/he no longer is what they want, then the relationship all falls apart and force needs to be used to maintain the position of “leadership”.

I suppose another sociological/anthropological question is the circumstances in which we allow leaders to run away with power and to use force against us.

It has long been agreed in the democratic English speaking world that the essence of good government is replacing leaders in an orderly way.  I wish we could see the same as the standard in business organizations.  The use of force against employees is a sign that something has gone wrong.  Alarm bells should go off.  And HR should be on the scene in a flash trying to understand why the leader believes so little in his or her people that s/he feels the need to bully them.

Young managers often don’t trust their subordinates.  A skill that is rarely talked about is the skill of believing in one’s people and seeing their strengths.

I would love to collaborate with someone on this.   It could make a great 2.0 app.

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How important is this employee to your business and how good is your follow-through?

Published November 19, 2007 by Jo Jordan

There is a program about restaurants and casinos on Radio 4 at the minute.  It seems chefs in casinos are given every resource and facility to provide better food and service than their competitors.

I wonder how many industries could make the same claim?

 

May 2017:  How many businesses seriously consult their in-house experts about what they can do to advance the collective goal?  How many businesses are running a strategic-game at all?

To rephrase this in terms of contemporary work & organizational psychology research, how many jobs are the most pressing concerns felt by employees to be their specific contribution to the strategic effort?

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