Go Beyond

© 2018 Neville Pritchard and Richard Scott. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse  03/21/2018

ISBN: 978-1-5462-9014-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-9015-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-9013-1 (e)

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Go Beyond—Determine Your Path towards Impact People Support

Your Workplace = Your World

CONTENTS

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1:   People Support Centre

Beyond fundamentals and strategy

Framing impact people support

Flow—Organisational Energy

Chapter 2:   Organisation Development

Recruitment Challenges

Keeping People Engaged

Tackling change—the challenges

Go beyond learning

Go beyond performance

Management and leadership impact

Chapter 3:   Policy and Operations

Beyond analytics

Chapter 4:   Beyond Reward

The challenge of perception—the link to fairness

Chapter 5:   Employee Relations

Conclusions

References and Sources of Inspiration

About the Authors

FOREWORD

This is the moment.

If you are a fellow people person, then this is your moment for going beyond.

By the words people person, I mean any professional concerned with human performance—and human potential—in organisations. Examples include professionals engaged in HR, Learning, Organisation Development, Talent Development, and more.

Pritchard and Scott note that the people profession is in revolution. Executives, scholars, professional societies, and others are pointing to the poor performance of our profession and questioning the very need for it—at least in its current form. The most common criticisms include its lack of business relevance and its inability to provide solutions to urgent business problems. Pritchard and Scott also note that the emerging business environment is offering our profession an unprecedented opportunity to provide real value—if it, and we, will go beyond.

The global economy and the unrelenting competition it enables has created a working environment that can be incredibly hard on people. This fast-moving, constantly changing, and unpredictable environment has become so complex that scholars are creating new terms to describe various pieces of it. Examples include permanent white water,¹ wicked problems,² adaptive challenges,³ and my personal favourite, VUCA—an acronym for volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.⁴

A key characteristic of the new environment is an increase in the volume and complexity of problems. In addition, we are seeing the emergence of a new type of problem that is both more complex and different from anything encountered before. These wicked problems are so different that nothing in our experience is relevant to their solution—and, in fact, they may have no solution. Small wonder that people in organisations can become overwhelmed and disengaged.

A few years ago, I was attending a professional conference at which the results of Gallup’s 2013 Global Workforce Study were being discussed. The speaker noted that only 13 per cent of people in 143 countries reported that they were engaged in their work—while some 24 per cent reported they were actively disengaged. From the back of the room, someone said in a loud voice, Imagine the impact of this on global productivity. In response, I heard myself say, Imagine the impact on the quality of work life of millions. Millions. This brings me back to our profession and to the opportunity now facing it. Can we help people and organisations navigate in the new environment? Can we create and implement new programs that go beyond best-in-class thinking to help people and organisations achieve their potential? Can we go beyond analytics to insight?

In the pages that follow, Pritchard and Scott discuss the new environment, our profession, and offer suggestions for taking our profession to the next level. They note that old solutions and best practices are not enough. New thinking, fresh insight, and fast experimentation will be needed. They also assert that taking our profession to the next level will require more from us individually: our full energy, our best thinking, our highest performance, and our commitment. It will require going beyond.

—Walter McFarland

Co-author of Choosing Change; Board Chair Emeritus, ATD; and Global Lead, Human and Organisational Potential, North Highland

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Go Beyond has taken a while to complete, largely because of the moving landscape of organisational development and, Human Resources, and the people agenda in recent times. Throughout we have been indebted to the support from our research assistant Chloe Amies. As well as the research support, we have appreciated the encouragement, drafting, editing, and nudging she has given us. Go Beyond would still be in concept stage without her support. Throughout, she has, in turn, been encouraged and supported by People in Flow Operations Director Zoë Gardner. While in that role, Zoë also created the time to enable Neville to write. Canada will be lucky to have her working there now.

We are also grateful for the time, expertise, and support gained in the early stages from Peter Casebow and his team at Good Practice for their contributions in research and the Valued to Valuable paper developed by Neville and Peter in 2015 which formed the foundation for this book.

We would also like to thank those interviewed and all who completed questionnaires and surveys to inform us of current thinking and activity. There are too many to mention individually, but your contributions were welcome and much appreciated.

We also thank the team at HR in Flow Ltd and People in Flow Ltd, especially Jon, Simon, Calypso, Rae, Kelsey and Nigel for your support through the research, note making periods and read-throughs.

Finally, a thank-you to our networks at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, the Learning and Performance Institute, the Society for Human Resource Management and the Association for Talent Development, through which we met many who have helped to shape and inform this project. We highly recommend that professionals in this field join their respective local organisations and get involved. You need to see what is happening now and explore the possible if you are to conquer new fields and challenges.

Go Beyond contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

INTRODUCTION

There is a lot of speculation, research, views, and theory surrounding the future of Human Resources (HR). Considerations include whether it should be called something else, defining what is and what is not part of it, and what it might look like, and focus upon, in the future. Our research seeks to go beyond the view from those inside the world of HR. At this point, though, here are some simple questions on the current state of HR:

Why does HR—in whatever form and shape—exist now?

• Is it to defend or to contribute?

• Is it for the company or the individual staff member?

• Is it to tick boxes and comply, or to make a difference?

• Is it to deliver or to provide?

• Is it to manage or to enable?

• Is it training/recruitment or performance that needs to be measured?

• Should it take orders or provide consultative influence?

• Are managers and leaders beyond reach, or do they need support and advice?

• Is HR to be respected or to be ignored; to be tolerated or governed?

Are these dilemmas or questions enhanced by adding the word and in place of or alongside or?

Where do we need to go beyond, and how? We need to go beyond the job description and role profile in recruitment to ensure fit. We need to go beyond the catalogue of training to enable people to access learning as they need it in the form that helps most. We need to go beyond the monitoring of performance to the taking of responsibility for our part in an informed, integrated, collaborative, and coordinated approach to performance, going beyond the standard appraisal to find what works for us. We need to go beyond standard analytics. We need to go beyond management to involve all. We need to go beyond the standard processes and systems to make things work efficiently and effectively. We need to go beyond compliance and make an impact. We need to go beyond engagement to get a benchmark award and get into the detail on detachment, resilience, and motivation. We need to go beyond change to the transformation and then the continuous reinforcement of the working environment that best achieves for us. We need to go beyond physical well-being to include mental health.

The discussion that follows each of the questions above helps to define the existing organisation culture and its wrap-around values. Our research has provided deep insights into the various subcultures that exist in organisations and how they need to be framed within engagement, detachment, change readiness, experience, management, and departmental assessments.

Both authors are committed to ensuring that HR attains the status it deserves, or rather should earn, as a highly valuable resource within any organisation. As a result, we are concerned that HR professionals often do their specialisation an injustice by obscuring their message with jargon and specialised language which means nothing to a non-HR audience. Promising initiatives are smothered by terminology which merely confirms the belief of non-HR colleagues in their belief that HR specialists inhabit a parallel universe which has little or no connection with the real world.

All of us in HR must stop undermining ourselves by cloaking good ideas in our own jargon, stop playing into the hands of those who treat such HR-speak as a joke, and start speaking the same language as everyone else. The authors are therefore making every effort, in this book and elsewhere, to persuade HR colleagues to adopt language tailored to their audience to show that they are as grounded as anyone else in the work of their organisations, and to enable HR to acquire the status it deserves as a valuable business partner.

We also address the growing importance of HR analytics, the analysis and interpretation of people data to provide the basis for business decisions. In addition to enabling better-informed decision-making, this further contributes to the effort to elevate HR from its perceived fluffy and otherworldly nature, a view held by some colleagues outside HR, to a status equal with any other essential element of an organisation. In doing so, we will go beyond standard data and explore the sources of information that can make a significant difference.

What’s in a name?

Organisations engaged in making employees redundant often describe themselves as shedding jobs. Not getting rid of people, you notice, but dispensing with posts, as if this were a purely paper exercise, and not something which will affect the lives of real people. Dehumanising people in this way is simply a pretty clumsy way of trying to obscure the reality of an unpleasant situation, and is exactly the opposite of the clarity we are seeking.

The title Human Resources came about in an attempt to show that an organisation’s people are essential business resources in the same way as its vehicles or IT. Unfortunately, a move which was aimed at showing people as special has backfired to some extent, in that the resources element of the title has become more prominent than the human part.

Some people claim that the title doesn’t matter, that the words aren’t important. We disagree. Strongly, as it happens. If you have ever heard, as we certainly have, the sarcastic tone used by some people to pronounce the title HR, or seen them use their hands to mark out irritating imaginary quotation marks around the words human resources, then you would feel, as we do, that the language really does matter. No one seems to sneer or roll their eyes when referring to Sales or Marketing, because their titles simply describe what those departments do. Our specialisation, on the other hand, has saddled itself with a title which plays into the hands of those who write the function off as full of jargon and little else. Anything which allows people to make a joke out of the very name of our specialisation can only serve to undermine us professionally.

Let’s not lose sight of the fact that a function title is primarily for external use, as it were. Those who work in a function know perfectly well what it does, but the title needs to be clear to those outside that area of an organisation. Those of us who have never worked in production, sales, or marketing nevertheless have a pretty shrewd idea of what goes on in those departments, because the words on the door give us a good clue. Does the title human resources do the same?

Let’s stop provoking sarcasm and chuckles at our own expense and come up with a function title which simply says what we do. Whoever starts this debate is sure to attract criticism in bucketloads, but let’s grasp the nettle and go beyond slavish current practice for a moment and suggest the term People Support. You need to be what you are for your company. For example, alternatives could include people impact and contribution, people improvement and development, people and performance, and people support and development. Whatever the title of the department, it should reflect its intended role and contribution. For this book, we are going to include these ideas under the heading of people support, with the intention of providing greater impact from supporting our people. We don’t make stuff, sell it, or tell potential customers how good it is. We look after the people in our organisation, for the benefit of the organisation. We recruit them, train them to continue to perform or respond to new challenges as needed, ensure their safety in the workplace, safeguard their and the organisation’s legal rights, and deal with all the problems which can crop up along the way. We support them, in fact, so why not tell the world exactly that? Why not have a title which is a straightforward description of what we do? We also have a sneaking suspicion that most employees, whatever organisation they work for, would prefer to be described as people, rather than a resource.

The linking of organisation development and employee relations activity, and the complexity involved in aligning them for the benefit of all involved in achieving organisation results, is critical in defining current structures and priorities. Because of this, it is also relevant in the exploration of the future of work and future needs from HR—essentially, people support.

One component currently under-managed by the people professionals within organisations is that of management impact on all people measures. In discussion with one employee relations outsource company, it emerged that they take over 3,000 support calls per day, 70 per cent of which are related to grievances and discipline. The simple cost of the time involved in such volumes of negative impact activity flags a need for greater powers of action within people support to address the causal factors. This includes the need for seriously considered individual and departmental 360 reviews, the deeper analysis of results, and the committed management of the issues identified. The manager or executive badge does not exonerate anyone from responsibility for people performance. We will explore the manager balance sheet, something HR and people support functions need to drive to ensure responsibility is taken.

HR must go beyond itself now to meet future challenges, and not simply by being agile or commercial or inclusive; it is the internal ability to go beyond with impact people support, including the use of genuinely insightful support, that will make a difference.

The expertise in people support, development, and optimisation is not constrained now, and will not be constrained in the future, by a departmental name or the focus of internal staff within that function. It is the taking of responsibility for the culture within, for enabling consistent and situational application of values by and with management, and for the provision of expertise rather than simple service, that will map the future of work and HR.

CHAPTER 1

PEOPLE SUPPORT CENTRE

Beyond fundamentals and strategy

Why do