What happened to the people agenda?

While listening to the various talks and hearing from respective speakers at speakers at #HRD12, I’m left with an over-riding thought that will not prove popular. In the main, HR Directors and L&D Directors are not doing enough to move the people agenda beyond boxes being ticked, meeting compliance standards and getting better engagement scores. There are some very good leaders at that level who I respect a great deal. But when you have organisations like the CIPD asking these people to come and talk about their organisations, I’m looking to get some real nuggets of insight into how you’ve positively changed the business. Often, I’m left lacking and thinking what I’m doing is more than enough, and in some cases a lot better than the presented organisation.

This raises a few questions. By what standard are we saying the people agenda is of significant calibre that they should be presented at a conference? Some of the speakers requested to attend shouldn’t be the ones speaking. Send someone else from the organisation who has the charisma, know how and ability to present to a large group of people. Your title does not mean you have the fit or ability to speak. Although I bet someone in your team does.

For all the talk of engaging employees with new fangled technologies, how many senior leaders are actively using the tools available to them to do this engaging? Again, I only know a few who do, and the respect they have is bar none. Where’s all the resistance to usage coming from? What perceptions are they battling with? What barriers are they presenting themselves that they don’t want to take part in the conversation? Allowing your staff to use tools, and having an open approach to engagement is not the end game. You need to be in the thick of it.

One of the presentations I attended was about engaging Gen Y, and I was expecting to hear about how L&D methodologies have changed in their organisations to meet the changing ways of learning and attention being grabbed. I learned a lot about great recruitment strategies, but nothing about the delivery of learning. I learned more about how companies like Skill Pill can enable mobile based learning, and it’s another way to consider delivery. This tells me L&D is not doing enough to be innovative in the way we deliver learning, but also we’re not being challenged sufficiently to really push that boat. I take this personally. I love what I do, and think I deliver learning in ways that are varied and interesting, and I don’t think I’m doing good enough.

We’re in a constantly changing world and that brings with it a lot of opportunity and risk to try new things. So who should be the Chief Creative Officer when one doesn’t exist in your organisation? Who should be the Chief Listening Officer? Who’s being the Chief Story Teller? I would suggest these roles sit with these senior leaders from HR and L&D. We have the space and authority to fulfil those roles, it just seems we’re shy of being responsible for them.

I think there should be an HR Director / L&D Director summit where they discuss the people agenda and finally come up with what they think they’re trying to achieve.

Becoming a Learning Organisation

You know what doesn’t work in a conference session where you want to learn about stuff? Getting a plug about how excellent the company giving the case study is. I don’t really care, because I want to hear what you’re doing. I don’t want to see frameworks, or models that you’ve created internally, not without knowing I can replicate them, which I most likely can’t.

Cue Andy Holmes from Ernst and Young. There could have been so much shared about how they are a learning organisation. Instead it was about a progression plan and a career framework. Nothing about the actual things they do to make it a learning organisation. Just broad descriptions of how a robust Learning Management System is in place for staff to take on their own learning, and there is coaching in the organisation.

They have counsellors to help staff talk through learning and career goals.

Sorry, not a lot to share from this.

Then with a sudden burst of energy, Andy Doyle from ITV, took control of the room and started us on his story of what is happening in his organisation. As the Group HR Director, it was very interesting to hear him talk as you might expect a Producer or Creative Director to talk. he described how, for ITV, he doesn’t talk in HR Speak. He talks about things in everyday business language to his team and to his peers. A nice example of this was if he said “Let’s become a learning organisation!”, the response would come back “Not with you!”. They stopped focusing on frameworks, and instead focused on performance management being an important part of the way people are managed. L&D initiatives are done with large groups of about 90, to create a sense of occasion and using brilliant facilitators to make them useful events.

The senior leadership involvement is quite impressive too. They are involved in co-delivering training where they can which brings with it a great sense of engagement. The Exec team held a series of monthly open lunch sessions where staff could come along and talk with one Exec person at a dedicated lunch. This really needs to be one of the key activities for a learning organisation to happen. If the Executive teams and Senior Leadership Teams are not making the efforts to help it be successful, then it won’t be.

Engaging Generation Y in Workplace Learning

I’m at the CIPD annual HRD12 event. It’s the biggest formal conference event for learning and development professionals in the UK but is also a well known and attended event by international delegates.

The first session I’m at is Engaging Generation Y in Workplace Learning. Ian Anderton, UK Head of Learning and Development at KPMG, talked about how at KPMG they have 10000 employees in the UK and approximately 66% of the workforce are in Generation Y. The need for them to understand how to recruit for this group better and serve their development needs better was clear because of the high turnover in this group.

They have developed a very interactive and engaging online space to help with assessment centre preparation, recruitment, and an online area post-offer where they can connect with others. They make good use of Yammer, and creating internal opportunities to develop ideas and solutions for their clients which can be put forward for review. Apparently social media is open for employees to use.

It was certainly good to see that the recruitment activities are focused on attracting and helping to assess the right needs of the Gen Yers that join KPMG. However, what was lacking was hearing about how they’ve changed their L&D approach to cater for the new ways of learning that this generation seem to demand.

Next, Michelle Luxford, HR Director for Travelodge, gave us her insights into what her company has been able to do to engage the Gen Y group. The hotel group’s main problems were that they needed to be seen as an employer of choice for this young group, hospitality is not seen as a career destination, and that they needed to recruit 400 managers over the next four years.

I really like the solution they came up with. They created a management apprenticeship scheme called JuMP – Junior Management Apprenticeship Programme. The idea here is giving them on the job experience, gaining externally accredited qualifications, off site development and project work, and support and delivery of materials from senior managers and the CEO. They recruited through online job boards and also used social media well.

Importantly, for me, this seems to be the bang on way to help our one million unemployed get on the right road to gainful employment. These apprentices will complete the scheme in a few years and end up managing a hotel on their own. That is seriously impressive, and is the kind of solution we should be thinking of in a wider context.

I’m left a bit wanting in how mobile technology can be used to facilitate their learning and development, how internal social networks can offer more than a collaboration space, and how actual L&D initiatives need to adapt and develop internal new ways of delivering which meet their needs.

Don’t believe the hype, teams are awesome

Yesterday I read an interesting piece about how ineffective teams can be. It was interesting because I don’t think there was a proper appreciation of what teamwork enables, achieves and why it either does or not work.

The article claims very little research has been done about the actual effectiveness of teams. Work carried out by Dr Belbin and his colleagues some 40 years ago shows this not to be the case. We have long known how to help teams be effective – the problem has been only some are tasked with actually building and developing effective teams. When you have a start up company growing and adding numbers to their headcount, their priority for effective teams only becomes a priority when someone introduces the need for it. We can say the same is true of big businesses. There may be a need for effective teams but no one knows what this looks like until a facilitator is brought in (internal or external).

The psychological benefits of teamwork are well documented too. Things such as having a social network that you can interact with. Building relationships with people who share similar goals to you. Sharing discussions, thoughts and feelings with a group who can listen and respond. A sense of belonging to something and having motivation to do good work. Recent research in positive psychology shows that working in a team can raise the overall sense of wellbeing a person experiences.

In an organisation, teamwork is the key way engagement happens. Certain factors like good communication channels need to be in place. An inclusive mindset is vital, and respecting differences comes as a core part of this. A team leader helps to give the group a vision and purpose for being. The way learning is shared and feedback given is important to continually develop and improve what the team does and how they do it.

In a different organisational context, teams need to have the authority and responsibility to do what they’re asked to without hinderance or barriers from senior management. The effectiveness of a team can only be realised if they’re actually allowed to achieve their objectives. Teams are very good at creating the culture you desire. They create self defining behaviours. By doing this, they reflect the wider organisation’s culture, as well as the mini culture they create themselves.

Collaboration happens best when the right people are put in the right team and given a clear direction on what they are meant to achieve. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, very few individuals have the ability/knowledge/vision to be able to achieve great things. In all other instances, collaborative efforts will achieve company goals and objectives.

Teams don’t fail because they are teams. They don’t fail because of single factors. There’s often a number of considerations that put together will either help or hinder the success of a team. What we can do is take the time to understand what are we doing to help these teams be a success. Be it a team you lead, a project team you are managing, or a disparate group tasked with working on an initiative, there will be someone who has the experience of what it means to make your team a success. Seek them out and use their knowledge.

Making lives easier

We’re a demanding bunch us humans. There’s few things these days people are happy with in their day to day interactions. There’s  just too much expectation to have a good experience delivered to you, and if it’s not woe be told and Twitter is awash with bad experience and hashtags are created for the new campaign.

Yet, there are times when it can be easy to delight those around us, especially in the workplace. To my mind, it is befuddling (new word) to think we are so risk averse that we can’t make working lives easier. There is red tape surrounding pretty much every aspect of working life these days, and in some cases it’s just unnecessary hullabaloo. Oh we can’t let people have freedom, they’ll go wild with that power and the company will cease to exist!

So it pleases me to see that there are those I interact with at work who just make things happen when they can. And it’s often requests that we wouldn’t think could make a difference but they really do. Can you step in and deliver a presentation? Is there a room available? Can I book to go on this course? Can I come in a bit later tomorrow? Can I get a new seat?

And what makes these interactions pleasant is that the person making them happen just does it. No ifs or buts, or i’s to dot and t’s to cross, or policies and procedures to follow, just a solution that works for everyone. And that’s a powerful thing. People’s lives are complicated enough without having to worry about approval processes.

This is where I’m meant to give you a call to action. To ask you where you can make this happen. To ask where you’ve experienced this. To ask if you can make that difference for someone today. Well, I know I can make that difference, and I’m going to.

What is it about culture?

Others before me have said, and more learned folk after me will say this – organisational culture cannot be controlled or managed. We forget that a workplace has us in it. We exist and bring to work a form of ourselves that has to fit in with everyone else. This is inherently a minefield of personality, opinions and people. And it will have both positive and negative impacts on everything around us.

Did I expect to change some fundamental beliefs I held from being in the workplace? No, I really didn’t, but I did. Not because it was enforced through an organisational design programme or effective learning and development, but because of those I interacted with. With such a focus on efficiency and meeting targets we forget to focus on those who are actually there.

Could you benefit from changing the way you think about topics at work? Yes, and the more conversations we have the better we will work together. Be you a believer in collaboration or not, it is the key way we measure and think about success. Your colleagues and peers give you a benchmark to measure yourself against. That’s a lot to bear in mind when thinking about that engagement survey.

We have such a pre-occupation with measuring and engaging and listening that we forget the basics of life at work. People like to be successful. We like to talk with others. We enjoy solving problems and helping others. We are social beings and seek out opportunities to connect willingly and actively.