A Right Royal Mess...

Lace me with a few beers and get me started on the subject of HR and it won't be ling before I'm boring you senseless with my lament at the demise of the HR Generalist. Or more accurately the demise of the classic TU infested environments that maggie almost single handedly killed off back in the 80's that were the breeding ground for many of the senior generalists plying their trade today.

If there was one thing that those environments taught you it was humility and an apreciation of your fellow man, no matter what their status. And let me tell you nothing knocks the arrogance out of a rookie HR professional than going three rounds with a Trade Union Convenor.

These are the thoughts that spring to mind when I consider the current predicament of the Royal Mail and their troublesome internal relations. You could be forgiven for thinking we were back in the early 80's given the current stand off.  It certainly feels like a long time since 'the management' and 'the workers' were so polarised in their positions.

Now, speaking as someone who spent their formative years sparring with the unions this is quite interesting. But it is also quite sad.  After all, it's the year 2009. And Its not as if the Royal Mail is still being run by a bunch of dinosaurs. No.  At its helm are what some would say are a crop of the finest leaders money can buy including Alan Leighton (recently departed) and Adam Crozier. Yet, despite all this expertise and a book or two between them on what constitutes excellence in leadership it appears that no one in the leadership team is capable of leading this organisation!

Instead there is lot of chest pounding going on and to be frank I expect better. It's basic stuff, as anyone with an ounce of industrial relations experience and common sense will tell you. It's going nowhere and I lay the blame firmly at  managements door.  Oddly enough, since Tony McCarthy's departure the top HR seat has been vacant with no sign of a credible replacement.  Surely Adam and his team are missing a trick here?  Although a source tells me the top team, for reasons better known to themselves, don't actually want a replacement.

I say be careful. I think there would be a lot of value right now in spending some of that remuneration pot on an HR with a few grey hairs.  I thought I could win a war of attrition once but after many months and some significant collateral damage I realsed that the way forward no matter what you may think is collaboration. Not confrontation.

Unless of course you are Maggie, whom Adam certainly is not!

Talent Management: the Emperors (not so) new clothes?

Now that the economy threatens to change the employment landscape for what looks like a long time to come, and Talent Management has shifted from the top of every CEO’s priority list to number 7, strategically placed behind paperclips, isn’t it time we challenged the whole notion of selecting and managing talent?

I personally believe that there is no shortage of talent out there.  Indeed, there never was, we just did a lousy job of locating and nurturing it.

It would be easy to kick our friends at McKinsey for starting the talent shortage scare but whilst they were a little guilty of fanning the ‘good people are scarce’ misnomer with their original War for Talent paper, they also made a number of other significant comments and observations which unfortunately were largely ignored.  More importantly perhaps than a shortage, they proposed that in order to get hold of, and keep, ‘good’ people – or talent – organisations were going to have to try harder.  It would no longer be enough just to say what a great company you were, or knock up a glossy employer brand to hide behind.

Instead, they wagered, you would have to really get your offer right, which included creating great opportunities for employees, committing to their longer term development and also creating compelling reward strategies. This was actually quite an astute observation given its time, 1998.

Up until 2001, the notion of a company’s greatness was rarely challenged overtly by employees or potential employees. It was also the early days of the internet and the power of ‘connectedness’ driven by web 2.0 and social media tools had yet also to give employees the voice they have today to challenge organisations and their ‘employment proposition’. Indeed it wasn’t acceptable to do so.

But then along came the meltdown of some of the corporate giants including WorldCom, Arthur Andersen and of course Enron. Such a blatant abuse of power and position, the shocking tales of corporate greed/fraud and the astonishingly poor people practices (mass redundancy announcements by text for example) left a very bitter taste in the mouths of employees and crucially, those that make up generation Y. The balance had shifted.

For me this whole sorry tale really challenged what the definition of ‘talent’ was, where we looked for it and how we developed it. Here we had organisations that had streamlined and finely tuned their talent pools along the industry standard accepted norms. And yet it was the very same talent pool that went on to bring them to their knees.

Attending a conference on Talent Management we heard BT (an organisation of 140,000+ people) outlining their strategy for managing their ‘talent pool’ which amounted to only 1500 people (or 1% of the workforce) across the ‘top layers’ of the business.

Many companies take this approach but is it not perhaps a little arrogant, at the very least short sighted, to narrow down your ‘talent pool’ to the very top slice of the organisation? As someone who spent their early HR career in a unionised shop floor environment, I saw firsthand how talent resided in many places, not just at the top or in the professional ranks.  Indeed, Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss once opened a CIPD leadership discussion with this gem: 

“I do a lot of cooking and in my experience, it’s the scum that rises to the top”!

Perhaps it’s time to challenge our notion of what constitutes talent, where we look for it and how we subsequently nurture and develop it. Perhaps it’s time to be more flexible and open minded to find the winners of the future and stop following convention in selecting talent. Perhaps it’s time we stopped for a moment and considered how crazy it is to think that of our working population of some 28m only 1% of these individuals are classified as people with high potential.

Social media ROI... aren't we missing the point?

Boy, social media sure seems to have got people talking!  On the one hand you have Marketers going all a quiver over it, treating it like some divine new marketing tool and claiming it's the new CRM, (even giving it a suitable acronym - SCRM!) whilst at the same time obsessing over the ROI.

And then you have HR departments stuck with an awful dichotomy - is it a needless distraction for employees costing us £ in lost productivity? A shady place where poisoned conversations take place about their employer? Or is it 'the' new source of talent, the latest place to go fishing to find the workforce of the future, to belt out the 'employer of choice' message?

If you work in either function and you are struggling with social media in this way then I would say you are probably not really 'getting' social media in the first place.

Social media just 'is'.

Here's how I can best describe it:

Imagine you are standing outside a building that has blacked out glass windows. You know there are people inside but you have no idea how many or who they are. Inside there are, say, 100 people, each sitting on their own in little offices. Some of these people are your customers. Some of them are your friends. Some of them are your employees and some of them are people you have never met.

Most of these people are aware there are others in the building but have no idea how many.  Some come out from time to time, occasionally meet and talk to others, realise they may actually know someone in one of the other offices but mostly they stay on their offices.

Now, try to imagine that at the flick of a switch the glass becomes clear and the internal walls disappear, allowing all the occupants inside to mix and mingle freely, to chat, to see who's there and who's who.

The clearing of the glass? Social media. The removal of the Walls?; Social media. The resulting conversations? Social media.

Now ask yourself this question - "where am I?"

If you 'get' social media you are inside the building, engaging in conversation, sharing experiences, making notes, exchanging ideas, having a giggle along the way maybe, in both an structured and unstructured way.

If you don't get it, you are probably sitting in the corner or making your way quietly out of the building without engaging anyone.  Or maybe standing on a chair shouting inappropriate messages over the heads of those around you.  Or worse still - standing outside looking in, wondering what "those people" are saying about you.

Social media is a stream of conciousness, a babble of conversations and a sense of 'connectedness' that used to take place between close friends, family members and employees face to face, by phone or email. The Internet and a whole bunch of tools (social networks etc) have just made these conversations visible, actionable, connectible.

Powerful.

And you don't need a social media 'guru' to help you understand this. As they say "beware a consultant wearing a watch!" All you need to do is get involved, being honest, genuine and open in the process.

Your employees using Facebook? Then you need to start communicating with them on it too. Customers talking about your products in Twitter? Then get on there and tweet them back.

Want to get social media? Simple - jump in and join the conversation.

Social Reputation Management – An acronym waiting to happen

Back in the early summer of 2005 I penned an article entitled “Smart Consumer...  Smarter Employee” which attempted to capture impact of the internet on the ability of customers to share brand experiences and the effect this may have if this emerging (at the time) trend migrated into the employee/potential employee group.  Here is a snippet:

"What has been missed is the emergence of the ‘smart employee’. With Enron, Tyco, Worldcom and now Rover in our back pocket, the attitude of the employee is changing. They no longer believe the bullshit. They are becoming more and more cynical. And most important of all, they are sharing this cynicism online, with millions of other like minded people. The emergence of the smart employee has taken longer than that of the consumer, and has yet to have any major impact but the signs are all there that it will.

Organisations ambitions to be the ‘employer of choice’ and to have that killer ‘employee proposition’ will be tested on a global stage, in a theatre where they have absolutely no control. More worrying perhaps, is that the increasing budgets of £m’s spent on developing the corporate employment image could be rendered worthless over night by the smarter employee.

Today my wife consults a million people she does not know, but trusts implicitly, to determine her next purchase.  Tomorrow, she will consult the exact same people about her next job."

Click here to read the original.

When I wrote that piece, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn were only just emerging and a whole generation of social media tools were not even a twinkle in their founder’s eyes – Twitter included. Indeed ‘social media’ itself was a term that was generally unknown and the social media revolution had not gained any real momentum.   The ‘Power’ and ‘dialogue’ I was referring to at the time took place mainly in forums, specific sites within specialist interest groups or the message boards on stock pages.

Even without the ability to see the social media stuff coming, I did feel that this kind of dialogue would gain momentum nonetheless.  And of course it did.  Now that the revolution has really kicked in Brands, and increasingly their status as employers, are being assessed real time.  Coupled with the rather poor behaviour of some employers in recent years (layoffs by text, revelations of greed and fraud etc) employees and perhaps more importantly potential employees are becoming way more cynical.  What your peers on Twitter say about that company you are interviewing at is increasingly carrying more weight than the efforts of the employer branding or HR Team.

I was discussing this recently with someone I know at a PR agency.  They had developed a ‘new’ offering based around the threat of social media to your brand - I guess you could call it social reputation management (Or SRM! - you heard it here first folks!)  As nice as it sounded, I couldn’t help feel they had missed the point somewhat.  More often than not you don't manage your brand through social media; social media manages it for you.  Whether you like it or not. 

It doesn't mean you can't influence it at all, but the magic word here is authenticity.  Because if you are not authentic you will make thing ten times worse.   Facebook, MySpace and other similar places are littered with embarrassing and humiliating examples of brands trying, but failing miserably, to influence and manage their presence in social media channels.  And if you do mess up, no amount of PR investment will right things for you.  In fact, if you have to ‘manage’ your profile in the social media channel then you probably don’t ‘get it’ any way.  You have to be ‘in it’ to do that. 

Consumer and increasingly employee ‘connectedness’ is a force to be reckoned with.  As Erik Qualman, author of Socialnomics puts it “With social media its best to... listen first and sell second.  It’s the world’s largest focus group out there”

Would they cry for you..?

Flicking through my old notes recently I was reminded of having the good fortune to have Greg Dyke speak at one of our events back in 2005.  At the time he had recently released his book – Inside Story - and we were lucky enough to have him share his inspirational comments on leadership and his time at the BBC.  You may remember that Greg left the BBC controversially and his departure was followed by unprecedented scenes of 'mourning' by the employees.  Thousands turned out in protest with many reduced to tears, prompting the question for other CEO’s “Would they cry for you?”  In most cases, I'm pretty sure the response would be "probably not."

Listening to Greg speak, was not only inspirational but also emotional and frustrating.  Why?  Well emotional because Greg comes across as a very straight guy and what he says comes straight from the heart.  Despite a quite conservative presentation style compared to many on the speaker circuit, he captivates and you feel right there with him when he shares the experiences of life at the BBC, both good and bad.

Frustrating because, as he talks through those experiences and what he did about them, and also his key lessons on leadership you can't help but hear the voices in your head screaming “I know, I know!”  Of course, it’s all common sense, and Greg seems genuinely at a loss as to why more organisations/CEO/senior executives seem to miss the point when it comes to people and engagement.

When asked why he thought “more people don’t get it” his answer, which was preceded by a long silence, concluded that it was a mix of greed and ignorance.  Not a great write up at the time but who could have imagined that the greed and ignorance in question would go on, 4 years later, to have such a damaging effect on the world economy.

There's a guy who's ahead of his time...

Smart consumer...smarter employee.

THIS IS A REFERENCE POST - SEE ABOVE


Consider the life of the consumer over the last few decades. Purchasing decisions were, for many years, driven significantly by marketing spend and brand presence. ‘Customer experience’ was little more than an interesting statistic, if it was measured at all. And when it was, it was usually something done every one or two years.

In those days we were slaves to the brands. Sure, we could share localised experience and opinions with our family and colleagues but the impact this would have on the success of the brand was minimal, unless it was something really outstanding. More important was the ‘share of mind’ gained through press, TV and other forms of marketing.

Then along came the threat of the internet. At first there was a mixture of hysteria on the one hand with thinkers predicting the death of the ‘bricks and mortar’ businesses and the collapse of the High Street as everyone moved to buying online. On the other hand you had indifference, with the non believers saying it was unsafe, lacked security and that it would be a fad that would pass.

Of course, neither of these extremes came to pass. But the really interesting thing is that when you look behind this you find that something much more fundamental happened that many failed to anticipate.  Look a little deeper at the dialogue from all parties at the time and it primary revolved around the impact on the ‘process’ or ‘mechanics’ of the customer/supplier relationship – the physical distribution of the goods, the way people pay, the physical impact on their shopping habits – all the tangible stuff. Consequently many organisations simply embraced the changes, creating new distribution and sales channels to exploit the online phenomenon. They also started to switch marketing budget to online, thinking that they would be able to influence the consumer online in the same way they had done through the more traditional channels.  Indeed, many saw the online channel as another great opportunity to immerse the customer in the brand.

What many spectacularly failed to foresee was the intangible; that the internet brought the consumers together, in vast numbers, in a way that was just not possible before. And they talked. Millions of people who had never had an inclination to talk to others outside of their own personal network were now talking to each other about literally anything of common interest; including their experiences of products and services.

Fast forward to today. My wife was never really convinced by online buying and the internet. Then along came eBay! Now, unless there is a good reason, we, or should I say she, sources everything we need online. Not only that, when sourcing anything there is only one place she goes to look for information to determine the ultimate purchase decision – her online network. 15 years ago, it was the marketing muscle of the corporation that determined spending habits and consumer choice. Not any more. For my wife it’s the people in her trusted network who share their knowledge and ‘experiences’ of products and services who guide her decisions. Does she know any of these people? Not one of them. Does she trust them? Hell yes!

Fundamentally, at the time the internet emerged, people and organisations become so fixated with the tangible impact of the internet and or the impact on the bottom line, they failed to see the intangible threat of their customers having access to each other and the impact and influence they could have as a result.

So what parallels are there to be drawn in the world of the employee and the current struggle organisations face in finding ‘good people’? Well strip away the top layer of product and service and there is no difference at all. At the time the internet emerged, similar dialogue was going on in relation to the impact of the internet on recruitment, which in itself had suddenly become a ‘strategic’ issue. Some said the executive search and selection market and other third parties would be wiped out as a result of the internet; organisations would use the power of the internet to reach out directly to candidates in a way that was not possible before. Similar stories circulated about press advertising. I remember being told so many times that trade magazines and the likes of the Sunday Times employment sections would disappear within two years.

Of course, as with the consumer market, this didn’t happen. Yes, the landscape has changed dramatically and continues to do so. But again, the interesting thing is that all the dialogue at the time centred around the mechanics and process – the medium used for advertising, the mechanism used for filtering, selecting and hiring, the mechanism used for managing applications and so on.

What has been missed is the emergence of the ‘smart employee’. With Enron, Tyco, Worldcom and now Rover in our back pocket, the attitude of the employee is changing. They no longer believe the bullshit. They are becoming more and more cynical. And most important of all, they are sharing this cynicism online, with millions of other like minded people. The emergence of the smart employee has taken longer than that of the consumer, and has yet to have any major impact but the signs are all there that it will.

Organisations ambitions to be the ‘employer of choice’ and to have that killer ‘employee proposition’ will be tested on a global stage, in a theatre where they have absolutely no control. More worrying perhaps, is that the increasing budgets of £m’s spent on developing the corporate employment image could be rendered worthless over night by the smarter employee.

Today my wife consults a million people she does not know, but trusts implicitly, to determine her next purchase. Tomorrow, she will consult the exact same people about her next job. If organisations don’t start to get with it they could find themselves playing to an empty auditorium.