People Not Paperclips: Putting the human back into Human Resources

By Kath Howard

The primary target audience are HR leaders who are seeking to solve their most intractable issues of increasing organisational performance and employee engagement. They are aware of the power of incorporating perspectives such as OD and psychology to achieve this, but they aren’t experts in the field.

Secondary audiences include the following:

·      Membership organisations in the UK, such as the ILM, CIPD, and BPS.

·      UK Business Schools and Executive Education Departments, such as Roffey Park.

Management consultants who will have an interest in applying the concepts in the book within their client organisations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Practical Inspiration Publishing
• Release date: Feb 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781788601320

Kath Howard

Kath Howard is a Change Agent, HR Leader, Occupational Psychologist, Facilitator, Coach and Organisation Development Consultant who believes the way HR is working isn’t working. She founded HeartSparks, an OD and HR consultancy, with the purpose of bringing greater humanity into the workplace. With a background in employee engagement and talent development, her unique combination of insights from Occupational Psychology and Organisation Development allows her to bring about holistic, sustainable change for a wide range of clients including major brands and government departments.

Book preview

Introduction

Who took the human out of Human Resources?

When did HR professionals decide that the key route to credibility was to be ‘business-focused’ and to follow a mantra where profits are placed above people? Why have so many leaders and HR professionals alike spent so long on business cases, ignoring the need for a ‘person case’? The reality is that so few people-focused issues or opportunities can be reduced to a set of tangible ‘results’ outlined on a spreadsheet. Regardless of whether there is a strong scientific or financial argument for doing something, we might still take a course of action from the moral standpoint that it is the right thing to do.

We are living longer than ever in the Western world and will be working for more years than past generations as a result. The world of work and the jobs available to people have both changed wildly with the advent of the internet, and we’re fast adapting to new ways of working in HR. Research from psychologists such as Barry Schwartz¹ suggests that people are seeking meaning from their work and careers, and that experiencing this meaning is one of the most important factors for job satisfaction. How people create meaning will depend, amongst other factors, on their motivations and personal context, but having a level of autonomy and an opportunity to develop and grow will support them in achieving meaning through their work. The informal environment at work has always played a large part in employee motivation and performance – what was once coined people’s need for ‘affiliation’. What I sometimes marvel at is how often these very basic motivation theories from decades ago are ignored, or at best re-hashed into the latest HR intervention.

We have known for decades that people aren’t motivated by money, we know that people perform best in cohesive groups with shared goals, and that performance will depend on an individual’s skills and motivation, balanced with the opportunity and support provided by the job role. However, we continue to offer pay as a reward, we monitor and control performance and we put people in work environments where they can barely survive, let alone thrive. The alternative would require a complete overhaul of practices, of doing things differently in HR, and seeking actual evidence for why we might embed a particular norm or practice in the organisation. For example, research by Alison Hirst from Angela Ruskin University² suggests that hotdesking (the practice of being asked to sit anywhere at work, rather than having a designated desk) is linked to higher workplace stress for ‘hot-deskers’ than control groups. Now, I haven’t stringently reviewed this research, but it would question why we continue to see open-plan offices with ‘agile’ people jumping around hot-desks as progressive. At the very least, it should make us ask the question. This is what behavioural science can do for HR: the research itself is like the icing on the cake, but what is underpinning it; the foundations of curiosity, of asking the right question, and of applying this evidence to how we practise our work are like fairy dust for the HR profession. We don’t do this because it’s so much easier to pay for the latest fad, and so much more interesting to try out the latest tool or survey on the market. It’s also so much easier to continue ‘as is’.

Our burning platform for change

But there’s a burning platform for change. People are becoming savvy to the fact there is another way, and old HR practices just won’t cut the mustard any longer. In the 1980s, teams cropped up called ‘Human Capital’ and it was all the rage to consider people as ‘assets’ and to spout about people being our ‘strongest asset’. Let’s not pretend it was all hugs, tea and sympathy at work before that, though. The industrial revolution marked the start of people working to time on a large scale, and great interest in people productivity. The divide between rich and poor, at least in the UK, was nothing to be proud of even back then. Though we started talking about people as assets decades later, what is clear is that people were still a commodity to be used to bring a profit to the organisation. What we are talking about here are human beings. The way we recruit someone into an organisation, the experience they have at work, and the stories and experience they take home to share with family and friends, is all part of their life. Organisations are a key part of the fabric of society and our human existence, and there is an enormous, somewhat daunting, opportunity here to do something differently. People want to work for organisations where they can find meaning in their work – if they are performing manual work, there are still massive opportunities for this work to be meaningful through social connection, the outcome of their work and their contribution to what the organisation achieves.

I spent the first few years of my career being told that I was ‘too nice to be in HR’. They were picking up on the fact that I have a genuine and deeply felt care for people and their experience at work, and to be fair on occasion the heart on my sleeve did become emblazoned across my face and throughout my emails. However, the reason I first jumped ship from a generalist HR role was not because I was ‘too nice’, it was because I had a deep dislike for policy, process and rule books, aka HR manuals. I love a plan and parameters, but as a rule I only follow rules that I value, though luckily, I also value being a good citizen and staying out of jail. I like to understand how policies and process make a difference, and ultimately how they support whatever the organisation exists to achieve. I have studied human behaviour for as long as I can remember. I loved reading as a child because I loved getting under the skin of the character’s emotional reactions, and the human dynamics unfurling on the page. I loved writing because it enabled me to create my own personalities on a page. And then I found psychology. I am a bona fide geek, and proud of it. I love science, I love the study of human behaviour and, moreover, I love the impact that applying this knowledge can have on people, relationships and work. And then I found Organisation Development (OD) almost by accident. Apparently, I was one of those people ‘doing OD’ who had absolutely no idea. I was busy learning about systems theory and change, and the wonders of organisational norms or ways of working, and I stumbled upon a field of practice that sought to improve organisational performance through applying learning from behavioural science. Whilst I devoured as many workshops and readings by the ‘greats’ in OD that I could, with particular devotion to Ed Schein and Mee-Yan Cheung-Judge amongst others, it left me feeling adrift from Human Resources and unsure how I could bridge that gap.

Applying learning from behavioural science to HR

In recent years, there have been efforts to apply the learnings from behavioural science into Human Resources, though I know from my days of carrying the title ‘Occupational Psychologist’ that the investment in employing people with deep subject matter expertise is still thin on the ground. Organisation Development is now a core capability for the HR profession, as proposed by the Chartered Institute for Personnel & Development, and there are a growing number of conferences and talks on the topic for HR professionals to benefit from. However, I think it would be fair to say that OD remains a somewhat elusive concept for many HR professionals. Whilst the larger organisations, and often corporations, invest heavily in OD, often with a core change management responsibility, smaller organisations and those more strapped for cash are likely to know little on the topic. And should they wish to venture into the world of OD, they would be faced with a manual or educational text. Unfortunately, this book isn’t going to completely bridge that gap. I’m not aiming to write a seminal text on Behavioural Science for HR professionals. There are people far better qualified than I to do the job. I do, however, want to give it a shot – I’d like to share the magic of OD and how it can be part of all we do in HR. This is with the purpose of showing how it can really be a central part of putting the human back into Human Resources.

OD has its roots in humanistic theories. Developed in the 1930s, it came from a central premise that organisations can only prosper through aligning the ways of working, capabilities and needs of their people with the vision of the organisation. It sought to show the importance of connections, and not of tinkering around with policies and processes that were out of sync with the overall needs and direction of the organisation. One of the key theories in OD is of systems theory, where the organisation is considered to be a system made up of key component parts, which interact with each other to produce an output, or outcome. Systems theory is an incredibly important concept in understanding why creating change in one aspect of the system will have an impact on the other components of the system, but that one change alone may not create the change or ‘systemic change’ the organisation was aiming for. OD is a field of practice in its own right, though it often sits within HR departments and is more recently viewed to be an ‘HR capability’. This has the potential to reduce OD to be a ‘skill’ demonstrated by a person, potentially someone who understands systemic change, and can design and front a change programme. However, an OD practitioner is so much more than this.

HR needs to throw out the rule book and get ‘human’

The field of Human Resources has got itself in a muddle over the last ten or so years. We’ve tried so hard to be seen as ‘business partners’ that we’ve almost forgotten our core role to support, develop and motivate the ‘humans’ in that business. In an effort to show our worth, we’ve designed new functions within HR with names such as ‘employee engagement’ and ‘employee experience’, all aiming to achieve innovative plans, and all pretty much drawing on the same psychological theories and practices we knew of at least 20 to 30 years ago. It’s become a re-marketing game, and whilst we’re busy focusing on who has managed to get the highest survey result this year, across the board it would appear that, globally, people have never been unhappier at work.

I conducted a small number of interviews (approximately 15) with HR Directors, consultants and leaders to support my research for this book. I started by talking to people about compassion at work, but it then became clear that people were seeing HR as detracting from a focus on compassion and care for people, rather than championing this. One leader, a leader who had worked at very senior levels within the military, noted that our focus on compassion can often be ‘codified’ at work. In HR, we support our line managers to understand what they can do, and what they can give, to an employee who requires support. We give X numbers of days of compassionate leave, but only if the person who died is a close member of the family. We might allow unpaid leave, but it’s at the ‘manager’s discretion’ and depends on how busy we all are. This he described as ‘codifying compassion’ – we are codifying or standardising how to demonstrate a human emotion, how to care for another human being with individual needs. This probably best sums up my current and very personal challenge with how Human Resources has been conducted in the past – lots of rules, procedures and processes under the auspice of ‘fairness’, which in real terms rarely feels fair to anyone. This person told me a story of a lady who worked for him who he built great trust with, and one of the core ways in which they built trust was him offering her compassion at a time when she needed it most – when one of her parents passed away.

And how do we bring the human back into Human Resources for companies on tight deadlines and tight margins, where every minute of a person’s time at work is calculated as a cost? If you haven’t read James Bloodworth’s Hired,³ then my goodness, please do. It’s fabulous to throw awards at the companies who take their staff away for weekend retreats, and who throw free breakfast and hot yoga on for their staff over lunch, but what about the real-life human beings who clock-on every morning, get told how many minutes they can take for a break each four to five hours, and face a disciplinary if they go a minute over? What about the employees who work for minimum wage, barely making ends meet, and who are treated as little more than a commodity? Surely if we’re going to celebrate ‘employee experience’ as an HR profession, we should shine some enormous beacon on these practices? How can that honestly be the only way to achieve organisational performance and growth? And, when does anyone have a lightbulb moment when they question whether the moral imperative should trump profit when you’re literally timing someone’s toilet break, so their personal productivity doesn’t lower? Now, admittedly, whilst I’ve worked across sectors, I’ve worked mainly in office environments, visiting pretty brilliant care centres, retail stores and professional services offices. I’ve seen varying work environments – from crumbling military accommodation, to spectacular stately homes used as offices, to the great heights of Canary Wharf and its endless escalators. I’ve also personally worked in a call centre though, and I lasted four days. I worked in a supermarket, where I lasted longer, and where we had to walk down onto the shop floor to a sign reading ‘You’re going on stage. Don’t forget to smile.’ We were usually too hungover to smile – I was 19 and worked in the café there to hang out with my friends, often eating ‘traffic-light jellies’ on the kitchen floor during breaks. I worked as a chambermaid, a silver service waitress, in endless temp