Brand wagon
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Of all the misunderstood concepts in HR fuckville, Employer Branding has to hit the spot as nombre uno. I’ll admit that in my own career I’ve dallied with the concept and probably got the wrong end of the stick on more than one occasion (no sado masochistic innuendos intended) but that was almost a decade ago…..so why are HR people still getting it wrong now?
To illustrate a point, let me take you back to your teenage years….for some of us that is a longer journey than others, so if you’re struggling I suggest watching an episode of Glee for helpful hints (and not High School Musical!). You remember the anxiety, the lack of identity, the needing to conform, but wanting not to conform, to be one of the crowd but also to stand out. You remember the people who you wanted to like you and the people you wanted to like. The changes in image, the trends, the haircuts, the clothes…..
Now think back to how you feel about that time period now. Think how you feel if you look at photographs of yourself as a teenager. There is a sense of embarrassment no? Because now you know who you are. You are confident and assured and happy with your lot. You might not be the coolest, maybe not the fittest, you might have a few extra pounds, a lump here or there…..but you’re you right?
Now think about your organisation. You will never be Apple, you will never be Google or any other über brand that you choose to pick (just for the record, my organisation kicked their arses in a recent survey…which was a bit weird but also may suggest that they ain’t “all that”). But you can be happy and self-confident in who you are. Just like at school, you can’t make yourself cool….you either are or you’re not. You can’t make yourself in with the in-crowd, if you’re a geek then be proud.
Whilst I am sure there are a lot of good consultancies out there, there are also a lot of charlatans. Similar to the endless TV programmes telling you to eat yourself thin, or make your hair fat, or your clothes slim or your teeth wide – or whatever crap they are currently espousing. There are also a lot of suppliers thinking that they have the silver bullet to improving your brand. Wanna know a secret? They don’t. But they do have the answer to how they are going to pay their next bills.
Put simply, in most cases your brand isn’t a problem. Because it is the essence of who you are and if you want to change that, you need a hell of a lot more time and investment and probably an imperative driven from a crisis situation. You might want the organisational equivalent of a hair cut, to go the gym a little, to buy a few new clothes….but that is just evolving who you are and you don’t need someone else to tell you that.
Put simply, there are a lot of people out there that look like you, feel like you and want to work for you. And there are a lot of people who try to make a living out of telling you that isn’t the case. Just like in your personal life, be content, be happy and most importantly be yourself. The rest will then come naturally.
Hire purpose
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I realise that I’ve been going off on a tangent over the last week or so and not been posting so regularly. The election has occupied a lot of my time and energy. It’s over now, I’m not going to mention it for a while…..at least I hope not, because I really don’t want to talk about it….Anyway, on the positive side, it meant that I had some time to think about more traditional topics for posts….I feel I need to do some hard HR yards to make up for my lack of focus…..I consider it my punishment….
I know that a lot of you people out there, who I interact with online are in the recruitment business. I’m also aware that there has been ongoing debate about the relationship between HR and recruiters. To be honest, I struggle with this one……it seems a somewhat fatuous argument and driven by the typical kind of yawny bollocks that is all-pervading in our world.
I’m a generalist by inclination, but I’ve also run an in-house resourcing team. I’ve worked on employer branding projects, I’ve executed mass recruitment campaigns and I’ve run niche recruitment campaigns. I’ve dealt with many many people from the recruitment world and many from the generalist world. To be honest there are total twats in both camps…….and very few geniuses.
I think recruiters are sometimes guilty of taking themselves too seriously. I have another post coming later this week about that, but lets face it…the hiring process has been around for time immemorial. Sure you can tweak it a bit, a little nip and tuck here….a little suction there….but at the end of the day the base process is what it is. HR generalists on the other hand can go around looking down on recruiters with a sense of snobbery which is ill thought through and based in prejudice and ignorance (although I would say, NOT helped by some firms recruiting Consultants who shall we say are a little….ummm…..bubbly?).
I don’t like recruiting, it really isn’t my cup of tea. If you take a ridiculously short attention span and cross it with a prevalence to not suffer fools gladly….well you don’t have your ideal recruiter, but I understand the role that they do and the need they fulfill. There are certain things in life that just need to happen. I don’t like cleaning toilets either……which is why I have a cleaner, simply because shit jobs need to be done. But I’m sure recruiters feel that way about disciplinaries or organisational design.
Once again I think we are straying into the territory of boring self-centred arguments that mean nothing to the outside world and just help to demonstrate our neuroses for all and sundry. The voice of reason….moi?
Dangers of the Conservatives
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OK so I get that this is a predominantly “work-based” blog, but its my blog and I can write about what the hell I like. And tomorrow is kind of an important day……it’s the long awaited election day.
This will be the fifth General Election that I have been able to cast my vote and in all of them I have done so, primarily because I believe it is my duty. There are a hell of a lot of places where there is no real democracy and say what you like about the UK system, it ain’t that bad. So first of all, those of you that can vote, please do so.
Secondly, I want to talk about the Conservative party and David Cameron. This man and this party are dangerous. If in 24 or 36 or 48 hours we find him preparing to enter Number 10, the British people will have made a monumental mistake. I know people feel the need for change, but change in itself is not a reason to put this country at risk. Harsh? I don’t think so.
1) The Conservatives pledge to implement immediate spending cuts will place the country in significant risk of a double dip recession. You may not like Brown, but he has consistently and rightly argued that reducing spending whilst the economy is in such a precarious state is madness. We are not out of the woods yet and we need to keep this fragile economy secure.
2) The Conservatives are about the rich and the wealthy. Increasing the inheritance tax threshold to £2m (£1m and £1m tranfer to spouse), does that sound like something that will help you? Is this something that you think resonates when spending cuts on essential services are taking place? Giving to the richest 3,000 whilst punishing the vulnerable.
3) The Conservatives want to introduce directly elected Police Commissioners…..just hold that thought. So I could become a Police Commissioner? Really? My relevant experience is……. But what happens when the local bully boy, the local lunatic….the BNP get elected. Do we want our Police to be governed by powerful individual war lords? Accountable to and serving whom exactly?
4) The Conservatives promise a free vote on the repeal of the hunting ban. The ban that was democratically passed through parliament. The ban that has seen an end to the jolly hockey sticks brigade donning red jackets and tearing up the countryside with dogs in the pursuit of an innocent beast yet at the same time promising elsewhere they will be “vigilant in the welfare of animals”…..
5) The Conservatives promise to reduce the number of MPs by 10%. These will not be Conservative MPs. Boundaries will be redrawn to shore up the Conservative MPs and to weaken “opposition” MPs in a process called gerrymandering. They have done it before, they will do it again to make sure that they stay in power – for their benefit, not for yours.
This is a party that aligns itself with far right parties in the European parliament that consistently vote against Lesbian Gay and Bisexual rights, that supports a candidate who allegedly prayed to remove the “demons” from homosexuals. This is not a party of tolerance or social justice, whatever they may say.
The right-wing press and Cameron will tell you that a hung parliament is a bad thing. Don’t be scared by this nonsense. Don’t be fooled by the last-minute strong-arm tactics to try to re-establish their supremacy. This is the party that is against voting reform, that is against reform of the House of Lords that is against reform of the Westminster voting system.
This is not a party of change and progress, this is a party of the elite and the establishment.
Whatever you do, please vote. Just, for the love of God, don’t vote for them.
Presenting a problem
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On Friday last week I had the “pleasure” of attending a presentation from the HR team of a large public sector organisation to a couple of hundred line managers. You won’t be surprised to know that I was incognito. However, it proved really useful seeing another HR director in action and I learnt the following top tips which I’m pleased to share with you.
1. Starting off by screeching “listen I have a loud voice but I can’t compete with you lot chattering away” is a great ice breaker.
2. It’s ok to refer to manual jobs as, “those things” because they don’t require the “same level of skill” as professional jobs.
3. When people have left their day jobs and travelled to hear you, a great motivational tip is to keep on referring to how busy you are and how you need to finish on time, because you have important things to do.
4. When one of your team stands up to give part of the presentation, you are demonstrating your close relationship by telling them, in front of everyone, to “sit down” because, “they won’t hear you over the air conditioning”.
5. If you get a tricky question from the audience, a good way to handle it is to declare that you are, “not going to answer that” and turn your back on the person who asked the question.
That is not including her telling this group of professionals that they, “couldn’t be trusted” to know certain information.
And we wonder why everyone hates HR……
A sense of being
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I’ve been thinking about what it takes to get a sense of belonging, something that I’ve struggled with both personally and professionally for a long time. In a personal sense I guess it relates to a feeling of being home. I’ve never really felt that I’m home……even when I’m home….if you follow my thinking. There are roads or places from the past that have a nostalgic value, but never a real sense of identity.
Maybe it’s me or maybe it is the nomadic lifestyles that we lead these days. I was born in one part of the UK, grew up in another, went to University in yet another. Then I lived in another country for a while where I met my wife before moving back to the UK, living in two further places before finally ending up where we are now. Probably not the perfect recipe for identifying with a locale. Maybe it’s about the community in which I live, although other people seem to feel very at home there. Maybe it’s something else.
And the same thing exists in my work. I’m incredibly loyal to the companies that I work for as people who know me would testify. But I’ve never really joined an organisation and felt that I was in the place that I wanted to be for the long-term. Maybe that is a thing of the past? Work is more disparate these days too, we have portfolio careers. Maybe I ended up in the wrong career and should be doing something else (as an aside, I am totally in awe of people who change their careers because they are unhappy).
Maybe everyone feels a little like this, we are all trying to find something, someone or some place that we can identify with. Maybe I’m just never satisfied with my lot. Maybe I’m making something of nothing. More questions than answers. But then if I had the answers, I guess I wouldn’t be asking the questions….
This is all about profit
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ALERT: WHAT FOLLOWS IS A SERIOUS POST
Back on 1 April 1999, Britain saw the introduction of the National Minimum Wage. From then on all adults were to be paid at least £3.60 an hour and workers under the age of 22 no less than £3 an hour. Doesn’t sound a lot right?
But at the election and following that time, the business federations, including the British Chambers of Commerce were up in arms. They said that the introduction of a minimum wage would cost jobs. They argued that most small businesses were paying well over the minimum wage anyway. This was crap.
At the time I worked for a company which was part of the FTSE 100. We were employing people for as little as 96p per hour in some places. Overnight, they saw their earnings rise nearly four fold. We didn’t lay people off; we just took less profit as did our clients. These people were already doing the work of two – how could you have any less? The people who clean your offices, that wash your plates, that make your coffee, that clean your streets. The people you don’t see.
I was also at that self-same organisation when the Working Time Directive was introduced, meaning for the very first time in their lives, some of these workers were entitled to paid annual leave. The Tory party at that time and David Cameron were both against these pieces of legislation which they claimed would cost jobs. David Cameron voted against the introduction of the National Minimum Wage. You can see a list of other Tories that did so here.
Why do I mention this?
Yesterday morning, I heard a representative from the British Chamber of Commerce on the radio talking about a survey of their members and touching on the Government’s proposed increase to the National Insurance rates. Spookily reminiscent of David Cameron, he referred to it as a, “Tax on Jobs”. The same old arguments are being rolled out that were rolled out 10 years ago despite unemployment falling to some of the lowest post war levels AFTER the introduction of the minimum wage.
Let’s be really clear. These measures don’t cost jobs, they cost profits. And that is what they are really complaining about. Regardless of who wins the election there will be job losses – mainly in the Public Sector. They won’t be caused by increases in National Insurance but the fact that government expenditure is exceeding income and the National Debt is growing. In order to deal with that you either have to cut costs or raise taxes.
Every time you hear the phrase “Tax on jobs”, remember this isn’t about protecting your employment, this isn’t about your rights, this isn’t about standing up for the ordinary person. This is about protecting their own interests.
Tax on jobs? My arse. This is all about profit.
Off the rails
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Some of you will know that I spend an inordinate amount of my time on trains. because of this and because it’s Monday and I’m cranky. I give you my top 5 no-nos for train travel.
1) Do not touch my leg with your leg. Gentlemen, you are not that well hung. Your legs do not need to be at a right angle. Keep them away from me…..ok?
2) Do not eat a banana. Do you know how much those things stink? And especially the skins once you’ve opened them? Banana = bad.
3) Do not listen to shit music. You should know that I am the judge and jury on this one. Harsh? Live with it. And iPod headphones are rubbish. I can hear everything. If you are listening to SuBo, we will need to have words.
4) Do not speak on the phone if you cannot enunciate properly. If I want to hear grunting I can speak to my children. Plus, you don’t need to tell them you are “on the train”, they know……you keep cutting out every 30 seconds.
5) Do not take your shoes off. This is not a flight, you will not get DVT. Keep ’em on. There is no need for it, ever.
Thank you. The End.
The People’s Post
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The wonderful Corporate Daycare (who is much under read in my humble opinion) has been writing recently about the process of resigning from a job and the associated guilt and emotion. It’s not something that I’ve had to do a lot in my life, but I know that in most cases it has always left me feeling pretty grim. There is little attraction to the process unless of course you totally hate the company are feeling belligerent or looking for revenge….but in most cases that isn’t the case…..
You stand there with the letter in your hand, convincing yourself that you have made the right decision. Licking your dry lips to keep them moist, your eyes slightly glazing over and that damned funny butterfly feeling is back in your stomach. You’re snoozy, a little discombobulated. You’ve been awake since early practicing, in your head, the words that you’re going to use. Listing alphabetical examples of onomatopoeia in an attempt to take your mind of it, a few comforting songs going back and forth in your head. You’ve got Julie Andrews on your side, you’re going to make this, “Supercalifragilisticexpiali……..” Don’t! They’re going to think you’re some pharmaceutical fuelled lunatic if you go in with sweaty palms, humming that. Pull yourself together man, what is the worse that can happen…..?
Eventually, you build up the courage and go and see your boss, walking confidently now, trying to find your inner swagger. “Can I have a few minutes please?”. Immediately they clock the envelope in your hand, they know. You know they know. And they know you know they know. Agony. They look at you with a slightly pensive, superior look. “Of course”. And the next 60 seconds go like a shot, you can’t remember what you really said, you can’t remember what they really said, but you do know you felt guilty as fuck and like you were doing something wrong.
But aaaarrrrgggghhhh!! Worse than the feelings of guilt, worse than anything else….they just accepted it. No counter offer, no opportunity to reconsider, no begging…..not even a sense of disappointment. All the original feeling of employer pulchritude have gone….they’ve been smashed, erased. You feel irritated and exasperated………besieged by a sense of injustice. Totally pissed off that your loyalty had been displaced like that. They don’t care about you…..you’re just a number….a bum on a seat. If you’d only known that, well hell….you start to chuckle…..relieved….as you realise, “You don’t need them and they don’t need you”. Life is bigger than that, life is more important than that.
This is work. That’s all.
Word up
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That’s it……were having a revolution….the people are taking control…..
All this social media nonsense is about the democratisation (ooh big word) of content right? So last night I was dicking about on Twitter and I asked people for the one word that described how they were feeling. I heard,
@MervynDinnen – Aaaaarrrrgggghhhh!!!! (did I spell that right?)
@LisaScales – Attraction (followed by the qualification “of the talent kind”)
@WendyJacob – Pharmaceuticals (followed by an attempted qualification….)
@J0N1 – Moist (….never quite got to the bottom of that one….)
@RhiannonBurton – Revenge (against whom I don’t know but I can only imagine they’re shaking in their boots)
@karenwise – Exasperated (probably at the crap that pours out of my beak….!)
@neil_jenkins – Displaced (which will hopefully get sorted now that the transport network is creaking to a start!)
I’m not about tomorrow (I have a secret undercover mission involving sex, drugs and dancing girls a Powerpoint presentation on the people objectives for 2010), so I thought, if you leave me your word on here or via Twitter (@theHRD) in turn I will include every single one of them (including the ones above) in a real post on a topic yet to be decided on Friday.
Deal?
PS – The words have to be real. And in English. Other than that…….game on!
Who do you trust?
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What does it really mean to trust and does trust have any place at work? I was involved in a discussion on this topic this morning and I have to say, sat unusually quiet through most of the conversation.
On one side was the premise that the last 18 month has seen employees trust in their organisations decline and that organisations need to work at ways in building that trust back up. On the other was a view that there are certain things in business that can’t be disclosed, that being open and honest is impossible and people should be grown up enough to accept that.
I’m not entirely sure I agree with either.
I think trust is an intimate emotion. Trust is when you expose yourself to someone at your most vulnerable and believe, hope that they will not abuse you (well unless you want them to that is…..!). Trust means you allow someone to do anything to you with the understanding that they will do no harm. Trust has a blind quality. Trust suggest a an imbalance of power.
I’m not sure any of those elements fit within a workplace. Instead I believe in a healthy scepticism
I’m sure there are some organisations out there that are truly happy clappy, where every decision is taken in the best interests of the employees and the business and every day ends with back slapping and mutual masturbation. Most aren’t like that.
Let’s face it employers need employees and employees need employers. There is mutual benefit to be achieved. It is a marriage of convenience. And as long as neither party is pushing the boundaries too far, we all rub along together nicely (no pun intended).
It’s not about treating people like children, but nor is it about pretending that we are all one big happy family. It’s about accepting that there is a need for reciprocity.
Personally I neither want to trust or distrust. Neutral suits me fine.
My Hell is Other People 