Food for thought?
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So my supposition is that if you are a parent you’ve been covered in food. In fact, if you’ve ever tried to feed a baby….you’ve been covered in food. As parents we all know the soul-destroying feeling. You’ve loving prepared a nutritious, balanced and totally wholesome puree for Junior. Because you care for him. You love him. You want him to grow up big and strong and be the best he can be. You’ve tasted it. A little on the bland side maybe, but then he is not in Vindaloo territory just yet. It is inoffensive, but healthy. You take a little spoonful, making sure it is not too hot, that it isn’t going to burn or upset Junior. Junior is hungry, he opens his mouth and you push the spoon inside doing a little upward movement to make sure the food comes off the spoon.
Then you wait……
The facial contortions start. The eyes screw up, the lips pucker. The grimace….and then PWAAAAHHH! The food flies. Over you, over the floor. Over the cat who was, for once, an innocent bystander. And the next time the spoon comes forth, the hands are up, the mouth is closed and you meet more resistance than General Petain. All in all they reckon it can take up to twenty presentations of a new flavour or food before a baby is willing to accept it.
So have I come over all mommy blogger? Well…not today no. The reason that I’m talking about this is a breakthrough that I’ve had at work. Since I joined I’ve been talking about the need to significantly alter the company culture, a need to adapt to survive. I know from past experience what will happen if we don’t. I’m trying to do something good for the company, something to help it to grow, to be strong and to be healthy. But for the last eighteen months, I have been wiping the metaphorical puree of cultural change from my face each time I presented it. Then last week, the mouth popped open, the food was swallowed and all of sudden the spoon was banging on the high chair with a demand for more.
I can remember going through the depths of despair with one of my kids who seemed intent on only eating one flavour of commercially made baby food and rejecting anything else we tried to offer, no matter how hard we worked. At the time my Dad asked me the question, “Have you ever seen a teenager that only eats baby food?” and of course the answer was clear.
It is Monday morning and I can guarantee at least half of you will be tackling a subject at work this week that has been rejected or kicked out for no other reason that it is strange and foreign. You know it is the right thing to do, so why can’t everyone else see that? Well, I guess the answer is the same as it was in my moment of the despair. Remember, perseverance is all and everyone even companies develop at slightly different speeds.
That is all
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I do not write a blog to make money.
I do not accept any advertising on my site.
I do not write to drive traffic.
I write about what I want, what I feel and what interests me.
I do not manipulate my comments so that half of them are either from me or my tweets.
I do not feel the need to.
Because I do not do this to make money.
I do not want to create a personal brand.
I have one already, it is called me.
If you think I swear to much. You can fuck right off. (sorry Mum! x)
I have poor grammar and spelling.
I am not a guru an expert or a motivational speaker.
You want motivation? “Get off your arse and do something”
I am not interested in reviewing or endorsing.
But if you genuinely need help, I’m there.
If you want to find me, I am in a business walking the walk and getting it both right and wrong.
I am not sat on my arse telling you how to do it. Having never done it.
I am strong and weak. I am brave and I am fallible.
And I need this, more than it needs me.
That is all.
No train, no gain
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Last week I wrote a post about potential changes in the world economy and labour market. The ideas were later built on by Rick at Flippchart Fairytales, Gareth Jones at Inside my Head and then Michael Carty as part of a broader review at XpertHR. Elsewhere there were also comments about doom mongering.
But these topics need a lot more debate. If HR is really step up to the plate then it needs to start tackle the big subjects, the ones outside of its immediate span of control. Sure if you want to sit in the corner talking about the next iteration of your performance review form and competency model, good luck to you. I think it is referred to as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. And stretching the metaphor beyond what is reasonable, would you say the person that shouted, “Iceberg!” was a doom monger?
So I was thinking how to unpack some of the themes in the original post and then yesterday I had an appointment with my physiotherapist. As she was pummeling my shoulder into oblivion we were talking about work the future and pensions. She was recounting to me a conversation she had with her father about how she was cashing in her savings and investing in professional development. Her father’s response had been one of caution, but as she explained to me, the competitive advantage and financial benefit should we reap through this was greater than the return that she was getting on her savings.
This seemed to me to epitomise one of the points that I made about development,
With the speed of development, who is going to train and skill or workforce? Universities? Colleges? Where the information they learn in the first year is our of date before the third year. When continuous learning and development really is critical to business success, who is going to pay? And what will they want in return?
A physio is a classic example of the sort of knowledge worker that I believe we will see more and more of within our economy. Mobile, normally self-employed, highly skilled and gaining advantage through those skills. They can choose to work when they want and as they need and follow demand. At the same time, of course, there is insecurity, high levels of personal investment and the need for constant continuous professional development. But then, couldn’t that apply to a number of other roles in the future? Even HR?
Ok, so I’m not saying that EVERYONE will be self-employed or employed on short-term contracts, there will be a core of directly employed workers. But even that will see a complete paradigm shift. If knowledge is key, if skills development is changing at a pace, then who will skill those workers and at what cost? Is the alternative to the freelance, portfolio career in essence a form of bonded labour?
These are the debates that the HR community needs to be starting, needs to lead. You may think this sounds extreme, but if you went back even thirty years and suggested that in the future large numbers of employees would be employed on fixed term contracts, that there would be “agency workers” and that pensions would almost be a thing of the past…..well, people would have probably laughed in your face too.
To run where the brave dare not go
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So it is another Monday morning. The one after the World Cup final, where a group of men got to fulfil their dream of participating in the biggest sporting event on earth. It makes me wonder how many of them had that dream as they kicked a can around the streets of their home town? And it makes me think back to my dreams as a child.
No we know for a fact that no-one wants to work in HR as a kid. Well, we know that any kid who says they do is taken away to a dark place and becomes just “one more statistic”. No, as kids our dreams are more carefree, more open and let us face it……….more bloody enjoyable.
Ellison over at Humane Resources has been talking a lot about her search for “The Job”. Now she is talking about her search for the perfect role in HR, but what about the perfect job in total? There are a lot of jobs that I am suitably qualified for, body double for Brad Pitt, chief taster for Berry Bros. not to mention leading goal scorer for England! But I don’t think I should limit myself to the achievable….I want to think big, to think like a kid.
And I keep coming back to it. The God’s honest truth is……… I’d like to be a farmer. Now before you start banging on about hard work, up, early, muck, low prices, blah blah blah……this is a free dream thingymajig. I could go telling Ellison a billion reasons why I would rather stab my eyeballs out with blunt crayons than go back into HR. But am I? Ok….don’t answer that…….I mean ….am I telling her that TODAY? No. And let’s face it, there is a lot in common between the downsides to farming and working in HR……
Sure it probably won’t happen, but it doesn’t hurt me now does it? Having a dream job is no bad thing in my opinion. If you have one, no matter how big and you feel like you want to share it. I’d like to hear. And I won’t mock. ‘Cos I’m good like that.
Future imperative
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How ready for change are you? I mean, really, for proper change…..for big change.
I’m writing this now on a PC that is connected by broadband. In the background I have Twitter running and Gmail open. I thought about what to write whilst on the train listening to my iPod and playing a virtual fishing game on my phone (I just know that you like that image).
Now think back to 10 years ago, the year 2000 the year that was “the future” for so many decades before. The year that had so many predictions laid at its door. Twitter didn’t exist. Gmail didn’t exist. WordPress didn’t exist. The iPod didn’t exist. Smart phones didn’t exist. And if you were on the internet at home, you were most likely dialling up.
But we know that, right?
The pace of change is increasing. And that will directly alter the world of work.
We’ve seen the increasing rise in globalisation. But what if fairly much anything could be done anywhere? With the speed and range of technology, with the widespread use of English language. Why do anything in the UK or US? What is the competitive advantage?
With the speed of development, who is going to train and skill or workforce? Universities? Colleges? Where the information they learn in the first year is our of date before the third year. When continuous learning and development really is critical to business success, who is going to pay? And what will they want in return?
When security of employment is completely eroded. When careers become portfolio careers. Not as a lifestyle choice, just as a lifestyle. Where long periods of unemployment follow periods of employment as labour markets move fluidly across the world. Where skills and knowledge are of an absolute premium and history means nothing. Where you can look almost anything up on the internet, within seconds, for free.
How will we react when natural resources become a competitive advantage? When energy is king and the countries with the natural resources become stronger and those without weaker. Where to stay ahead you need to go where the resources are, not expect them to come to you.
Are you ready for change? Because you need to be and I can tell you for certain, your company isn’t.
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So I’ve got a cold. It isn’t the flu and it isn’t the end of the world. But it is annoying.
I came down with it last Tuesday night and had a really bad sleep. On Wednesday I only had a couple of meetings, so I worked at home, cleared down the email inbox, did a bit of reading, things that I seldom have time to do. Other than that I’ve been in work.
I have a two-hour commute each way, on a train and a tube. I meet people at work on an hourly basis. I’m coughing and spluttering. I will have passed my germs on to at least one other person during that time. FACT.
So have I been irresponsible? Should I have stayed at home? And how do you know when it is ok to go back into work or not? Is the need to be at work and alleviate the pressure on your co-workers greater than the need to not contaminate them?
Men at Work
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Last week I exchanged a few messages with @LizMorris and @melanieshearn about work life balance from a father’s point of view. I promised I would expand on my thoughts, however, I struggled to form a whole series of feelings and intuitive beliefs into any truly cohesive argument. That is until I read Will Hutton’s article in the Observer about boys and work this weekend and it struck me how the two things are intrinsically linked.
The Observer article highlights the increase in male graduate unemployment versus female graduate unemployment, the figures are alarming 17.2% versus 11.2%. Interestingly when I told my 8-year-old daughter about this, she said, “well that makes sense, they don’t work as hard at school”(!) Clearly there is some truth there. Men have always over performed in the workplace compared with their relative educational performance (although male educational performance tends to be at extremes whereas females tend to be clustered more in the middle). Anyway, that is a whole other argument.
Will Hutton (who I admire) goes on to proffer a number of arguments to try to explain the poor performance of the male gender. Key to this he argues is the motivation of these young men. Or lack of motivation. He argues that “if you don’t try, you can’t fail” and that “face-saving” is hugely important to men. I’m just not so sure about this. As someone trying to find work in the mid 90s, I was the recipient of hundreds of rejection letters. I can’t say that was very motivating, nor was it particularly good for my self belief. But I kept on. Why? Because I was brought up to believe that hard work brought rewards. And therefore I was going to work damned hard goddamnit.
But I think this is where the two topics start to come together. Hutton states,
The middle-class boy who diligently works his way up in a company or starts a business is a dupe; far better to try to make tens of millions in the City with zero risk – or not do anything.
I think there is something else at play here. I think these beliefs are driven by the experiences of their fathers. People like me and the people around me. If you are a boy seeing your father come home disheartened from work each day then really are you motivated to go and jump on the same conveyor belt? I think not. So what has happened to the males of Generation X?
Well they have ended up getting neither one thing nor the other. We worked hard and many of us went into corporate careers like we were told to do. We saw the impacts of the recession in the early 90s so we worked even harder to make sure that we were the winners, the successes. We moved, we lived away, we stayed late in the office, we gave our life and souls and we got……..shafted. We saw the pension schemes that we joined closed. We saw the benefits of employment shrunk, organisational structures flattened and the resultant inability to progress without losing our job security by leaving to join other companies.
Meantime we were asked to do more at home. We were supposed to be the perfect father, the perfect husband and the perfect employee. The generation of men that went before us didn’t really understand, in their minds the male was still the breadwinner, the protector, the hunter gatherer. But we were raised by a generation of women that told us that we could not expect our wives to look after us and that we needed to be able to stand on our own two feet. We married a generation of women that were raised by a generation of women that told them they didn’t have to look after their husbands that they were equal.
Apart from we weren’t. Because whilst our partners reduced their hours, started their own businesses, downsized and went in search of meaningful work that they enjoyed – with the financial support of their spouses and the legislative support of successive governments. We were left at the corporate coal face. Demotivated, disengaged and downright unhappy.
Is it any wonder then that the attitude of young males and females are so different to work. As a young female, you look around and see examples of women being able to have fulfilling careers and time and home with their families. You see women doing work that they enjoy. As a young male you see men struggling to balance work and home. To be everything to everyone.
I look around me and I see more and more men trying to make a change. Trying to retrain, relocate, revitalise their lives and their families. But it isn’t easy, you are taking quite a considerable risk in most cases, not just with your life but with the lives of your family. And whilst ironically we have less reason to stay with our employers – security of employment is less certain, long-term benefits and pensions eroded etc. At the same time the current financial climate means that it is only the brave that are taking that step. The rest of us remain corporate hostages.
If you were a young man looking at their male role models in the world of work, would you be rushing off to get involved? Or would you sit on the sidelines as long as you possibly could, surviving on the bank of Mum and Dad? I think I know which one I would choose.
Chase your passion, not your pension
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In discussion with a colleague from another country yesterday we strayed into the ground of demographics and the impact this was having on our respective labour markets. I know what you’re thinking. Is he really going to write about demographics? Well no…….and yes. Stay with me on this one?
The age for receiving a state pension is to increase to 66. The average life expectancy in the UK for someone born in 2008 is projected to be 79.9 years. Which doesn’t sound to shabby and fits with the headlines about living longer etc. But hang on for a second. What are we missing here? Well that life expectancy won’t play out until 2088….at which point our current crop of two-year olds will be pondering pushing up the daisies. If you go back to someone born in 1960, then the average figure falls to 71.1 years. Which means 5 years of pension for all those years of National Insurance contributions and years of hard work…sounds like a good deal right?
And on top of that they are talking about increasing the pension age further to 70….
But before you young pups get cocky, if you were born in 1980, your average life expectancy is only 73.7 years, which means when you finally get to pull a state pension in 2050 (should the pension age increase to 70) you will only have an average 3 and a half years to enjoy bunions and varicose veins before you are worm fodder. And only then if they haven’t increased the retirement age yet even further.
Because people don’t want to retire right? They want to keep on working. We hear it all the time. Well no, those that are in their late 50s and 60s probably don’t, because they are sitting on a nice final salary pension. And it doesn’t feel so bad when you have a choice but when you have to work until you are three years away from rigor mortis….doesn’t sound so compelling anymore now does it?
I know, I know. We are all going to make our fortunes and those nice little private pensions we have are going to out-perform the market and we will be sitting in the sun laughing in our 50s…..you think? But what about the average working class man born in 1960. You leave school to work at 16. You work until you are 70 and retire. You’ll have spent about 76% of your life in work and of the remaining 24% over 93% of that “free” time was spent as a child.
Gives you something to look forward to, no? Or maybe it is time to reassess…….
Which side are you on boys?
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More regular that Halley’s Comet comes England’s elimination from the World Cup and once again there will be much discussion and hand wringing about the reasons behind it and finger-pointing all round. No doubt another manager will be sacked and a huge compensation package paid and we start all over again. With debates about how relaxed or strict the regime should be, whether a beer is allowed or not and how many nights with the WAGs is justifiable.
All of this seems to me to overlook the main issue which is startlingly similar to one that I face at work. They are not a team. When Jamie Carragher said that he valued playing for his club more than his country there was an outcry. When asked the question “World Cup or Champions League?” on a kids TV show, Wayne Rooney answered “Champions League”. But are they just not being honest?
I was sitting with a board member the other day and I asked him a simple question, “who is your team?” He started to talk about the people who report into him and the areas that he is responsible for. He didn’t talk about his fellow board members. I tested it out on another board member and again the same thing happened. The simple truth is that their affiliation, their loyalty and their focus is placed in one team and not another – in this case it is Company vs Group in the football it is Club vs Country.
Add to this the fact that we reward and recognise for the Company performance and what do you expect? I’m no expert on football financials, but I can’t help thinking that the bonus a player would receive from reaching the Champions League final would far outweigh the money they would get for a World Cup final. Not to mention the sponsorship deals and the fact that it comes around each year so you get another bite at the cherry.
Although it is easier for me to start to change things and to try to realign the senior team, I’m facing many of the same battles. The culture is ingrained, there is a reluctance to change and the organisation and establishment is brittle and immobile. On the positive side, I have control over the entirety, whereas there is no one overarching body looking after both clubs and country for football.
We could change the CEO (now there’s a thought!) time and time again, we could tease and cajole and try to conjure up a slightly stronger team ethos, but unless we tackle the way that people are organised and rewarded we will be rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic.
If you want change, you need to address the underlying culture. Either that, or our players are just shit…….
My Hell is Other People 