In Memoriam Gem

This week has been marked by three distinct events, each one a tragedy.  On Tuesday, following a massive 8.3 magnitude earthquake, a 4m high tsunami hit Samoa, American Samoa and Tonga killing at least 120 people to date.  This was followed by another massive 7.3 magnitude earthquake, this time on the island of Sumatra, Indonesia.  It is feared that over 1000 people could be dead as a result, with many more people left homeless and without food and water.  Both of these events are immense tragedies impacting upon countless numbers of families who have lost loved ones or who await news of those still missing.  The third event was the news I received this morning of the sudden death of a former colleague, Gem.  Of each of these three events, it is the third that has had the most impact on me.

When I was promoted to the role of HR Director in my last company, we embarked on a program of change both to enable the success of the company with better aligned services and solutions, as well as to change the focus in the HR team so that we managed and operated the function as a business.  One of the components without which the whole HR model would have failed was the enhanced capability and services of the 1st Line HR Helpdesk in India.  It was called Connect HR.  Gem was the team leader for the helpdesk.  Unfailingly polite without being obsequious, he was a thorough and dedicated professional, as well as a capable leader.  In a helpdesk environment where it is not unusual to have higher than 100% turnover of staff in a year, I can only recall one person leaving the team in 2 years. 

As you can imagine when large amounts of change are being made, both in the Company as well as in the HR model and processes, the helpdesk assumes a key critical role that allows the transactional to be managed remotely, so freeing up the time of the local HR team members to focus on making those changes a success.  The Connect HR team under Gem became such an intrinsic part of the model that they began to be used not just for the standard transactional requirements but also for project support work.  Nothing was too much trouble for Gem or the team.  He, and they, exemplified the phrase "customer service". 

I am proud to have worked with Gem and my regret is that I did not know him better.  Those who did, speak of a man with a great sense of humour, a man who would always say that it was "under control", even though it may not have been at that time but inevitably would be and a man who believed in the quality of service.  Gem was 33 years old and was taken too soon.  Many others have lost their lives this week and they too have been taken before their time.  I feel their loss but yet I did not know them.  I did know Gem.  He will be sorely missed, not only by his family and friends, but also all those who worked with him.

All the best,

Jim

Passion is Everything

“His moustache, sleek with pomade, quivered with enthusiasm as he rhapsodised over the menu; foie gras, lobster mousse, beef en croûte, salads dressed in virgin oil, hand-picked cheeses, deserts of a miraculous lightness, digestifs. It was a gastronomic aria which he performed at each table, kissing the tips of his fingers so often that he must have blistered his lips.”  Peter Mayle; “A Year in Provence”.

One of the positives (I am concentrating on those at the moment) of being made redundant is having time to spend on things you truly enjoy, and for me, Cooking is right up there on the enjoyment list.  As I write this post, home made pastry is resting in the fridge before being rolled up and making the case for my first attempt at home made cornish pasties. 

A while ago, I had lunch with an old friend. A fairly ordinary lunch, on the face of it. He had the barramundi and I, the moules marinière. We drank sparkling water, sadly it was a week-day lunch, (how I miss the 90’s and their long, leisurely, ever so slightly boozy lunches!) and we caught up on our respective news items since we had last met. He had been on holiday and I had been to work. As I said, on the face of it, fairly ordinary. However one thing took it from the ordinary to the extraordinary. The conversation centred around one thing pretty much throughout the whole meal; food. Now talking about food over a meal is, I would hazard a guess, fairly commonplace. What elevated this conversation for me was not my own witty repartée (because there was none) but rather the way that Rod described his holiday to me. Most holiday recitals are full of anecdotes of beaches, scenery, architecture, people, clubs, drunken moments, poor or great hotels and so forth.

Here the talk was of the food tasted, the way it was served, how it was cooked, the chefs who made it. The restuarants and scenery were covered in the descriptions but almost as adjuncts to the main course; the food. Of these the descriptions were rich, full of flavours. The final straw that made me want to jump on the next flight out to Umbria and start my own gastronomic tour, was his description of a wild mushroom, sage, saffron and marsala medley served in a translucent bowl made entirely out of parmesan cheese. They liked it so much that the chef took them back into the kitchen and showed them how to make it! How cool is that?!

The key here, and evident throughout the meal, is passion. Passion can inspire poets to write sonnets, people to build pyramids and lovers to lose all reason. Cicero frowned upon it, “He only employs his passion who can make no use of his reason”; Benjamin Franklin tempered it, “If Passion drives you, let reason hold the reins”; and Marcus Aurelius set it free, “Waste no more time talking about great souls and how they should be. Become one yourself!”.

To be passionate is to be engaged and driven to affect the environment around you, whether it be at work, play or in love. Passion drives us all at various times and in various ways, after all we are all individual and therefore all unique. My own passion for writing and communicating has resulted in my writing these blogs. Your passions, whether in a team and as individuals, enable you and those you work with to achieve great things in HR and your daily lives.  Court it, fan it, live it!

And Finally...

As I head off to roll out my pastry for metamorphosis into a pasty (I hope!), I leave you with a quote on Passion from Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain;

"Sing like no one's listening, love like you've never been hurt, dance like nobody's watching, and live like its heaven on earth.”

All the best
 
Jim

Career Guidance for a Dinosaur Hunter

As I was growing up, whenever we used to visit my grandmother, my brother and I used to go for walks in the fields on the hills above the town and I would be fascinated by the fossils that we would find in the chalk and flints stirred up by a tractor plough. This fascination meant that I would tell anyone who asked me that I was going to be a Dinosaur Hunter when I grew up. As I got older, that dream faded but the desire to do something different never left me.

When I was fifteen years old, the school required us to take a career aptitude test that was supposed to determine what career we would be best suited to when we left acadaemia and moved into the real world.  I don't remember any of the questions but I do remember the eager anticipation with which I awaited the results.  I did not expect Archaeologist to come up as a possible future career but imagine my bitter disappointment as I learned that my destiny appeared to be to work as a sanitation engineer for the municipal Water Board, whilst my peers appeared pre-disposed to careers in high Finance and Politics.

I am pleased to report that, from that day to this, the Water Board has never seen me as anything other than a client of their highly efficient hydration and flushing services. 

So to the present, and, given my current unemployed status, I thought it would be useful to run myself through a career assessment test on-line and see whether there were any potential career changes that I should examine.  I found a very detailed test at CareerExplorer.net, a US website that appears to help students find out which career path they are most pre-disposed to.  The test was pretty standard in the types of questions but detailed in the numbers of questions asked.  Still, in the interests of research, I happily waded through the questions, answering as honestly as I could.

Half an hour and 485 questions later, I was rewarded with several reports.  The first, the basic Career Area Predicted Preferences (CAPP) report, told me that according to my profile, I would best be suited for a management position.  So, no real surprise there.  The second, the 305 Job CAPP report, showed the top 3 jobs on my personality profile as well as my suitability for 302 further jobs.  According to Career Explorer I have very definitely missed my calling and am best suited to be, in descending order, a Surveyor, Medical and Clinical Lab Technician and Inspector, Tester and Sampler.  The 3 jobs most for which I am most unsuitable are Funeral Director (don't like dead bodies), Librarian (don't like dead bodies) and Hotel Clerk (you guessed it, don't like dead bodies). 

So does this mean that the test was a bust?  Not really.  You see, anything that gets you thinking about your likes, dislikes and attitudes when it comes to your career has to be a good thing.  In case you are wondering, when it came down to HR manager, I was pleased to see that I scored as having a high predicted skill.  Too often people will stay in a job or career because it often appears to be too difficult to find a new one.  Be bold, take a check every now and again and see whether anything needs changing.  Remember change is possible.  Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to find out whether there is a Surveying firm in need of an HR Director or maybe even a Dinosaur Hunter.

And Finally...

I leave you with a quote from William Jennings Bryan to contemplate:

“Destiny is not a matter of chance. It is a matter of choice: it is not to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.”

All the best,

Jim

Nothing New under the Sun

"The secret is how to die.  Since the beginning of time, the secret had always been how to die.  The thirty-four year old initiate gazed down at the human skull cradled in his palms.  the skull was hollow, like a bowl, filled with bloodred wine. Drink it, he told himself,you have nothing to fear."

So begins the latest Dan Brown novel "The Lost Symbol". You will, no doubt, remember him from "The Da Vinci Code" that gave birth to a thousand conspiracy theories, copycat novels and negative reviews from Catholic and other Christian communities.  This time the protagonist, Robert Langdon, is now in a race to save his friend by uncovering the mysteries of the Freemasons and using his cryptological skills and knowledge to avert certain disaster.

Plot sound familiar? 

It should.  After all, that is pretty much how "Angels and Demons" and "The Da Vinci Code" play out.  OK, granted without the Freemasons, but substitute them for the Illuminati or the Knights Templar and you have pretty much the same thing.  Each of the three books opens with a symbol either carved, branded or tattooed on a body or body part.  From there, the protagonist must unravel a series of clues through deciphering ancient symbols, either written, carved or architected.  Finally, in the nick of time, disaster is averted (or will it?  I haven't finished the book yet!).  Dan Brown has found a formula and the formula quite patently works.  "The Da Vinci Code" alone has sold over 40 million copies worldwide since its publication and this latest novel would appear to be headed for similiar levels of interest.  In the first 24 hours of sales, over one million copies were sold in the US, UK and Canada alone.

I have no problem with an author using a good formula.  After all, there are many things that stand the test of time and repetition, whether in literature, business or HR.  Yesterday, I was sent a link to a blog (thanks, Matt) on the "25 most difficult questions you'll be asked on a job interview".  As I read through the questions and the article's suggested strategies, I thought that they all made eminent sense and were certainly applicable to anyone, like myself, looking a job or attending interviews during these times.  It wasn't until I reached the final paragraph of the blog
that I saw that the source date for the article was 5th January 1983!  I had not left school at that time and yet the questions posed and strategies suggested still hold as true for today's job market as for a quarter century previously.

The title for this post is actually part of a quote from the Bible; Ecclesiastes 1:9.  "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; There is nothing new under the sun".  Business and HR models appear, have their moment in the sun, then disappear, only to re-appear in the future, modified or caolaseced with other models but still recognisable.  simple and sound principles, though, have an enduring quality that seems to transcend time.

And Finally...

In tune with the conspiratorial nature of "The Lost Symbol", I leave you with a quote from Hamlet by William Shakespeare to ponder:

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosphy."

All the best

Jim

Brace Yourselves!

"French passengers on an Aer Lingus Dublin-Paris flight were thrown into panic when a faulty announcement told them the plane was about to make an emergency landing, the airline said.
An English-language announcement 20 minutes after leaving Dublin said the plane was heading into turbulence, asking passengers to return to their seats - but the pre-recorded French version said they were about to ditch." 

This article in the Sydney Morning Herald serves as a sharp reminder that, even when we communicate in a timely manner, if we do not check the message we can cause ever deepening confusion or in this case, fear of a crash.

The meaning of communication goes a lot deeper than most people often think about. Communication is about designing, sending, receiving, interpreting messages and providing feedback on these messages. A failure at any point in this chain is ineffective communication. This can be disastrous. There is the famous story of the British Army Commander who sent the message "Send reinforcements, we're going to advance." back to the Command Centre, through a long chain of subordinates. When the message finally reached the Command Centre, it had "mutated" to become "Send three and four-pence, we're going to a dance." Needless to say, the reinforcements never arrived. The message received by the target audience is what matters and if the message received is wrong, then we must change the message that is being sent.


In her articles on Communications and Change Management, Susan Heathfield says that "As the speed of change continues to increase, change management is a fundamental competency needed by managers, supervisors, Human Resources staff, and organization leaders." Effective communication will never be achieved through the use of a singular channel, such as e-mail. It can only really be achieved through a holistic integration of a variety of channels; face to face, town halls, use of 'connectors' within the employee population, management cascade, web pages and, yes, however much we dislike it, e-mail.

Effective, timely and relevant communications are the backbone of any successful project or change initiative, whether IT, HR or any other Business function.  The best project plan in the world with the most effective implementation capability will fail if the communications plan is not well thought through and appropriate to the targeted audience(s).  The challenge for HR is to both guide, influence and, in some cases, direct the communications aspects of change for internal messaging within the company, especially as it impacts both staff and is a key element in the company's Employee Value Proposition.

And Finally...

I leave you with a quote from George Bernard Shaw, playwright and essayist.  A man who should know a thing or two about communication given that he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. 

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”

All the best,

Jim

After Dark

"Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take."

I don't know where my memory of that prayer is from.  Whether it was one that I was taught as a child or had heard and remembered from some other time, I do not know.  However it was these lines that came to mind as I struggled to get to sleep last night.  My thoughts were all over the place; no doubt the result of too much over-stimulation from watching the latest version of Loose Change 9/11 on the History Channel.  As I lay there, eyes wide open, waiting for some feeling of sleep to overcome me, I thought back onto the documentary and it prompted me to start thinking about fears and phobias.

We are all prey to fears, some perfectly rational, others irrational.  After all, we live in an age of anxiety.  You have only to turn on the news to see yet another random act of violence or misfortune.  Much of the rise in anxiety is related to people feeling their connections with others are less stable--there's been an increase in divorce (although it would appear the GFC may have helped reduce that trend), fewer people are getting married and they're less engaged in their communities. Surveys show that while many peoples lives are improving in every material way, their expectations for happiness are also rising and they feel less satisfied. Well publicised acts of terrorism and natural disasters such as the Boxing Day Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina have also increased these stress levels.  However less well publicised, and on a more personal level, are the phobias that afflict huge numbers of people everyday.

I, for example, have a fear of spiders (arachnophobia) and it matters not which type of spider.  I know that this fear is irrational unless, of course, you are talking about funnel webs, black widows or tarantulas!  Other well known phobias include claustrophobia (fear of enclosed spaces) and agoraphobia (fear of open spaces).  Phobias such as those above have been around for many hundreds of years.  However, our modern life is also creating new phobias.  Take this one; Nomophobia;  A fear of being without your mobile phone. 

Fears range from cataclysmic (meteor impact destroying civilisation) to individual (arachnophobia), however it is possible to manage them.  Lester B Pearson, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for helping to resolve the Suez Canal Crisis in 1957, said "misunderstanding arising from ignorance breeds fear, and fear remains the greatest enemy of peace."  So, to reduce our fears, we need to educate ourselves.  According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, I have more chance of dying from heart disease, cancer or car accident than I do of ever being involved in a terrorist attack or spider bite.  According to the University of Adelaide, there have been no confirmed deaths by spider bite since 1979. 

Fear drives our behaviours, emotions and reactions.  By learning to understand and in so doing, govern them, we reduce their impact.  So too with change.  Fear of Change (Trophobia) is well catalogued and common.  Through effective communications reducing lack of knowledge about the change and minimising the ignorance, we in HR can help our employees cope more effectively with that change.  Knowledge then becomes not so much about power and more about freedom from fear. 

And Finally...

I leave you with a quote from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, given in his first Inaugural Speech as President;

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself— nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."

All the best

Jim

Laugh? I could have cried...

Two headlines caught my eye this morning, both of them for very different reasons.  The first headline was "Pudding renamed Spotted Richard".  It concerned the Flintshire County council canteen in the UK that renamed the traditional Spotted Dick pudding because customers were making crude innuendoes and jokes at mealtimes when the pudding was served.  For those of you who haven't heard of Spotted Dick, it is a traditional steamed suet pudding made with dried fruit like currants and is thought to have originated in the mid-19th century.  Spotted refers to the dried fruit (which resemble spots) and Dick may be a contraction/corruption of the word pudding (from the last syllable) or possibly a corruption of the word, dough. 

The second headline was "Kyle's big mouth in nasty relapse".  On his radio show, Sandilands and Jackie O were talking about who should be the next face of the diet company, Jenny Craig.  Sandilands commented on Magda Szubanski, who has recently lost 25 kilograms using Jenny Craig, saying "You put her in a concentration camp and you watch the weight fall off … like she could be skinny".  Sandilands has a penchant for the shocking, recently going off air for two weeks after a segment in which a 14 year old girl was hooked up to a lie detector and, when grilled about her sexual history, emotionally revealed that she had been raped when she was 12. His most recent comment has been met with disgust, both from Szubanski as well as from the Jewish Community.

So there you are; two very different headlines.  One, a tale of political correctness spiralling comically out of control; the other, a tale where control over a would-be comic would be politically correct.  Both of them potential public relations blows.  However only one where HR will be playing a major part.  I empathise entirely with the HR Director at Austereo who has to help balance the commercial need for ratings with the need to ensure that ethical standards are maintained.  Having said that, it does not remove the need for a thorough investigation of the incident against whatever Code of Ethics / Business Standards exists within Austereo and action taken accordingly.

In this inter-connected world, tales of employees potentially bringing their "company into disrepute" are many, for example the Fake Steven Conroy, and each one serves to highlight that there is a need for HR to continuously review policies for relevance.  If we want to operate HR as a business we ignore the basics, like policy and process review, at our peril.  We have to have strong and practical foundations on which to build value add solutions and services otherwise we will not succeed.

And Finally...

I leave you with a quote from the great sage, Un Known, to ponder:

"A man one on one is your equal and is himself, that same man within a group aims to be the king or the clown"

All the best,

Jim

Fancy That Bunny!

On my way back from a meeting in North Sydney yesterday, I passed a car that had instead of the normal alphanumeric number plate, a single word; BUNNY.  This in itself is not necessarily unusual.  After all, in the car park downstairs, I have seen MYDARL and PWNAG, although the latter one I have yet to decipher, except to think it may have some reference to the owner's views of his/her partner!  What did set me thinking was, as I passed the car, I saw that the driver was a middle-aged, balding man.  Given my assumption that not very many middle-aged men would voluntarily drive in a car called Bunny, I was sufficiently startled to slow down and give the car another viewing.  It was only on the second pass that I noticed the small logo in the rear view mirror that showed that this was the car of a very keen fan of the South Sydney Rabbitohs. 

It would appear that there is some debate about the origin of the word "Fan".  According to Wikipedia and also to the Online Etymology Dictionary, it can be traced to "fancy", which was a 19th century term from England that referred mainly to followers of boxing. The word emerged as an Americanism around 1889. It can also be traced to a shortened version of the word "fanatic", and the word did first become popular in reference to an enthusiastic follower of a baseball team. Curiously enough, Fanatic itself introduced into English around 1525, means "insane person", which sadly could be the term used to describe Matthew Chapman.  Chapman was the fan who shot and killed John Lennon in 1980, claiming that he was only doing what the voices in his head told him to do.

"So where is he going with this line of reasoning?", I hear you ask.  Well, it is this.  Almost all of the HR practitioners with whom I have worked exhibited high levels of professional devotion and diligence to their work, often to the extent of regularly working extremely long hours.  The key difference between those who were professionally diligent and those who were totally engaged was in the alignment of the individual either with the HR mission or the Corporate aims. They were "fans" of the way things were.  Not necessarily to the point of having the Company name as their number plate or tattooed on their forearms.  But to the extent that they continuously displayed high levels of discretionary effort.  They were fully committed to the cause.

One of the key strategies that needs to be being reviewed now by HR and Business Leaders is how to rebuild the Employee Value Proposition.  One of the impacts of the recent GFC has been and will continue to be, unless addressed, a reduction in the discretionary effort and commitment from employees who have seen such change and turmoil within their businesses.  Those businesses who have had significant and numerous changes and lay-offs of staff will be most impacted.  We have seen a reduction in organisational stability and trust; individual development and training has been cut back, often to nil or web based only and social office networks have been eroded by redundancies.

There are no easy actions to put in place. There are no guarantees of stability that can be made, however it is possible to begin to set and manage expectations so that sudden disconnects are not experienced by employees.  Communication channels must be strengthened and commitments, once made, must be followed through no matter how small.  Traditional training paradigms should be examined for future relevance and resilience.  The potential for peer-peer training and knowledge transfer as well as more flexible and self-managed programs should be reviewed. In all of this, HR has a major part to play, both in developing the strategies at an Executive level, as well as implementing the necessary solutions and services to drive success on the ground.

And Finally...

Talking about how deeply fans engage with their subject, I leave you with a quote from Alfred Hitchcock, when talking to the mother of a fan who would no longer wash in the shower after watching "Psycho":

"Then, Madam, I suggest you dry clean her."

All the best,

Jim

Joining the Links

The "War for Talent" is variously, depending upon whom you read or listen to, over; never started; in a ceasefire or still underway.  Whether you view it as a Cold War, Phony War or War still underway, the fact remains that recruiting (and retaining) the right talent into the Company will always be a critical requirement for HR.  Even more so when you consider that the working population in all major developed countries is actually going into decline over the next 10 - 20 years with the retirement of all the Baby Boomers. 

As any military person will tell you, wars are won and lost through the capability of the supply chain to keep the troops at the front supplied with munitions, rations, etc. Supply Chain Management (SCM) is the combination of art and science that goes into improving the way a company finds the raw components it needs to make a product or service and deliver it to customers. Here are the five basic components of SCM.

1.  Plan – This is the strategic portion of SCM. You need a strategy for managing all the resources that go toward meeting customer demand for your product or service. A big piece of planning is developing the indicators that drive the demand signals for your product line so that it is efficient, costs less and delivers high quality and value to the end customers.
2. Source – Choose the suppliers that will deliver the goods and services you need to create your product. Develop a set of pricing, delivery and payment processes with suppliers and create metrics for monitoring and improving the relationships. And put together processes for managing the inventory of goods and services you receive from suppliers, including receiving shipments, verifying them, transferring them to your manufacturing facilities and authorizing supplier payments.
3. Make – This is the manufacturing step. Schedule the activities necessary for production, testing, packaging and preparation for delivery. As the most metric-intensive portion of the supply chain, measure quality levels, production output and worker productivity.
4. Deliver – This is the part that many insiders refer to as logistics. Coordinate the receipt of orders from customers, develop a network of warehouses, pick carriers to get products to customers and set up an invoicing system to receive payments.
5. Return – The problem part of the supply chain. Create a network for receiving defective and excess products back from customers and supporting customers who have problems with delivered products.

So why am I delivering a lesson on the SCM basics? Simple really, the fundamental problem facing all service companies at this moment is people, and it is only going to get harder in the long run. Just as a supermarket needs to keep the right number of products on their shelves, it is just as critical for a company to get the right person in the right place at the right time with the right skills. We need to be thinking about Talent in the context of SCM. We need to be creating and enabling a Talent Supply Chain (TSC) that can meet the needs of the Business that we partner. We have to achieve R5 - the Right person with the Right skills in the Right place at the Right time for the Right cost.  So let’s take a look at the five basic components of TSC:

1. Plan – This is the strategic portion of TSC. Understanding the business strategy, pipeline of sales and the attendant people demand signals that need to be met to achieve the business goals. The criticality lies with identifying the people capabilities (skills/experience/knowledge) that meet the pipeline demand signals.
2. Source – Implement a sourcing function that will identify, attract and qualify a pool of candidates that are targeted to meet the forecasted (rather than immediate) needs that are identified through the pipeline demand signals. Choose a set of recruitment providers through a defined Preferred Suppliers List (PSL) that will complement the sourcing function. Refine the recruitment and on-boarding processes that will ensure a smooth transition from candidate to employee.
3. Recruit – This is the “production” step. Schedule the activities necessary for interviewing, testing, confirmation and preparation for on-boarding. As the most metric-intensive portion of the TSC, measure quality levels, production output and PSL productivity.
4. Deliver – This is the on-boarding step where many companies and HR functions fall over. Coordinate the basics; computer, access cards /IDs and all the paraphernalia without which the new joiner will feel less than happy at the move they have just made.  Get it right first time on Day 1.
5. Develop – The problem part of the Talent Supply Chain. Without a strong development plan, the will to implement it and objectives to drive towards, the new joiner will rapidly feel that they have no future within their new company.
   

The Talent Supply Chain is not the “be all and end all” for HR operating as a business but it is going to be a critical service in enabling the success of the Company. As we move forward and evolve HR as a business function, we need to constantly bear in mind the key principles for managing the Talent Supply Chain.

And Finally...

As we consider the success  that an efficient and effective Talent Supply Chain can bring now, and in the future, I leave you with a quote from Henri Poincare:

"It is far better to foresee even without certainty than not to foresee at all."

All the best,

Jim

So where the Bloody Hell are You?

Most of you (if you are based in Australia or New Zealand) will probably have some memory of the 2006 advertising campaign from the M&C Saatchi agency for Tourism Australia. The campaign cost somewhere in the region of AUD $180M. It received massive publicity, not for the great cinematography nor even for Lara Bingle in her swimsuit but mainly for the fact that it was initially banned in the UK for using the words "bloody hell".

It took extensive lobbying from Tourism Australia as well as a visit to the UK by the Tourism Minister, Fran Bailey, to have the ban lifted although even then it was limited to showing after a 9pm "watershed" timeslot. If you want to have another look at the ad, here it is. Whilst the campaign itself was deemed by Tourism Australia to have been a success, others were not so sure. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is quoted as saying that the campaign was "an absolute rolled gold disaster".

So why am I revisiting an old and polarising campaign? Well, the Australian Federal Government are about to do it all again; this time with a tender for an AUD $20M campaign that will attempt to show Australia's entrepreneurial spirit, rather than just the standard fare of Uluru, Sydney, kangaroos and koalas. This got me thinking about the nature of brands and how powerful or problematic they can be, especially when thinking about HR operating as a business. HR has struggled for a long time to create an identity for itself. We seem to be unable to decide on even the basic descriptor for our profession. We have had, and still have in a variety of different companies and industries, Personnel, Human Resources, Human Capital, People and Culture, People and Talent. The list probably has many more variables.

Myself, I happen to prefer Human Resources.

However my point is not that there are many variables in describing our profession, but that in managing HR as a business, we need to market ourselves with a brand image within the Company. This has two purposes. Firstly it helps to provide a totem or cultural identity for the HR team against which they can begin to define themselves and their role. Second, it allows the HR business to begin to define itself and its products, solutions and service offerings to its Customers. The brand does not have to be clever, smart or cost large amounts of money. It does have to be clear, succinct and definite. Whether that brand is attached to a label that says Human Capital, People and Culture or even that old chestnut, Human Remains, is immaterial. It is, in the end, the actions aligned with the brand that do the talking.

Of course, we should not stop there. Having defined its own internal brand, HR has a key role to play in working with the CEO and Executive Leadership in defining the Employment Brand for the Company, but that's a discussion for another time.

Whoops!

Another advertising mishap but this time for Microsoft, who have been forced to apologise for altering a photo on its website to change the race of one of the people in the picture. Click here for the full story.


And Finally...

Any brand that is eventually adopted lives, or dies, through the actions of those associated with that brand. Having said that, I leave you to contemplate a quote from Antoine Saint-Exupery:

"A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral"

All the best,

Jim

Out of Time

"I'm late, I'm late, for a very important date, no time to say "hello", goodbye, I'm late!"

Before my redundancy, I used to spend my whole time feeling just like the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland; bouncing from one meeting to another; conference call to conference call, watching with mild disbelief as the Inbox seemed to fill up right before my eyes. I thought that it would slow down with my new status of being "between jobs", however it hasn't. Different things have taken the place of conference calls and meetings, but time still seems to fly past.

Do you ever get the feeling that you are speeding along at a hundred miles an hour and never have enough time to get done everything that needs to be done? Through the rose tinted glasses of hindsight, I look back to when I was a child (and yes, I can hear the world's smallest violins playing in the background) and remember long, lazy summer days that never seemed to end. Where we had all the time in the world to get done, not just what we wanted to, but also what our parents wanted us to do as well.

So where did those lazy days go?

Einstein posited in his Special Theory of Relativity that time is relative to the speed that one is travelling. Now before you let out a mighty yawn and decide that now would be a good time to update your Faceboook page, just give me a moment. Let's amend the above statement to read "the speed that one feels they are travelling is relative to the time that one has available to complete their tasks". There are only so many hours in a working day, therefore compressing all that you do in that time will make the day appear to go by in the blink of an eye. This does not mean that I am about to launch into a justification for working longer hours or on weekends in order to get things done! Far from it. I believe in a healthy balance between work and life and am a firm believer in working to live, not the other way around.

One of the key aspects of managing HR as a business is that we must concentrate on providing targeted, value-add solutions and services to enable the success of the Company. In order to maximise their effectiveness, we need to be able to manage our time effectively and that means reducing the transactional administrative burden. However even with the various strategies that can be employed to achieve this, the HR team must always be cognisant of each others workloads. Reducing unnecessary meetings and e-mails, ensuring that meetings result in actions rather than compliments on the standards of PowerPoint manipulation are all things that will result in the ability of the team to work smarter, not harder. In the end this will help the true partnership engagement to begin.

And Finally...

Given the temporal theme of today's post, I leave you with a quote to ponder from Woody Allen:

"Why are our days numbered and not, say, lettered?"

All the best

Jim

Bohemian Rhapsody

"Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide,
No escape from reality.

Open your eyes,
Look up to the skies and see.
I'm just a poor boy,
I need no sympathy,

Because I'm easy come, easy go,
Little high, little low,
Any way the wind blows,
doesn't really matter to me."

I would hazard a guess that most of you who have just read the above lyrics will probably have been mentally singing them as well. Maybe as you did, a few of you would have been remembering when it was released in 1975. Some maybe would have remembered the "Live at Wembley '86" tour. Some maybe even from the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert in 1992 following Freddie's death from AIDS. Yet I would think a larger number of you would probably remember it best from the movie, "Wayne's World". In case you really have forgotten the song, here it is:

Bohemian Rhapsody is probably Queen's greatest song. It was written by Freddie Mercury for the group's 1975 album, "A Night at the Opera". According to the band's website, at 5 minutes and 55 seconds, it should have been too long for successful radio play but it became one of the greatest singles of all time, staying at No. 1 in the UK chart for nine weeks. The video, directed by Bruce Gowers, is credited with being the first genuine promotional video. The song has regularly featured in all major pop polls and was recently named again as the best single of all time. The amazing thing about this song is the way that it just seems to keep coming back into vogue. Maybe it has never really gone away.

Anyway, I wasn't really intending to run a dissertation on Queen. It was just that as I was listening to the song this morning and thinking about the number of times it has come back to prominence, it occurred to me that it was a little like Organisational Models in Business. Now I know this may be a stretch but bear with me. You don't have to work in a Company for very long nowadays to see the structure change from one model to another to another and then back to the original model. Whether those models be functional, geographic, centralised or decentralised, the fact remains that the Business will change it's structure. In some industries, such as IT, this is a more frequent occurrence. In others, not. The fact remains that structural change occurs, more often than not, either as a reaction to external stimuli, or an internal strategic change in direction often driven by a commensurate change in leadership.

We, as HR practitioners, need to both understand what models are out there as well as what are the commercial drivers for change. If we want to be viewed as true partners to the Business then we cannot wait to be told that "this is the change and fix the people part of it", we need to be proactively engaging with Leadership and discussing, from a point of knowledge, the differing responses that could be adopted to enable the success of the Business. To achieve that point of knowledge, we need to ensure that we don't just read HR magazines and websites. We need to be reading the same books, magazines and websites that the Executive Leadership read. Challenge yourself, step out of the comfort zone and you will find that it does expand to cover you again.

And Finally...

With a wild and windy day happening here in Sydney, I leave you with a surprising quote from Mark Twain:

"By law of periodical repetition, everything which has happened once must happen again and again -- and not capriciously, but at regular periods, and each thing in its own period, not another's and each obeying its own law."

All the best,

Jim

Let there be Light

How many mystery writers does it take to change a light bulb? Two; One to screw it almost all the way in, and the other to give it a surprising twist at the end.

1. How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb? One; but the bulb must want to change.

One of the earliest jokes I can remember is the one about how many does it take to change a light bulb. Simple, short and easy to remember, these jokes are often the one that most people will remember one variant or another from when they were younger. Of course, they all centre around the light bulb. Whilst most of us would think that the light bulb was invented by Thomas Edison, that is not strictly correct. There were many others who had gone before him in the process. Edison was actually the man who created a commercially viable "incandescent lamp", a success further enhanced by the introduction of a system for electricity distribution based upon Direct Current, as opposed to Alternating Current.

Prior to arriving at his patented version, Edison and his team at his Menlo Park laboratory tested over 3,000 theories to develop an efficient incandescent lamp. Finally after two years (1878 - 1880), he filed for and was granted a patent for an electric bulb that employed "a carbon filament or strip coiled and connected to platina contact wires". What is remarkable about this success is not so much the fact that he arrived at the first commercially viable light bulb that subsequently went on to inspire our opening jokes, but more the fact that the breakthrough arrived as a result of tremendous perseverance. Edison himself is quoted as saying:

"If I find 10,000 ways something won't work, I haven't failed.I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another way forward."

Edison and his team demonstrated remarkable resilience in pursuing their target. Resilience can be defined as "the positive capacity of individuals and groups to deal with stress or catastrophe" and is a key requirement for ensuring the successful achievement of change projects or indeed even normal business in the face of a global recession. Edison never lost sight of his goal. Neither should we, as HR practitioners implementing change, lose sight of ours. Those change goals could range from major organisational restructures though large scale redundancy events to targeted M&A events. All of which are hugely demanding in terms of both stress and workload for the HR teams involved. Success does not come overnight with such projects. In fact, in bringing about change, failure will probably be experienced at least once or twice by those implementing it. This is not a bad thing. Failure helps us learn and grow, and so should be welcomed, although not repeated. After all, "success is not the result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire."

And Finally...

I leave you with a quote from Mario Andretti, one of only two drivers to win races at Formula One, IndyCar, World Sportscar Chapionship and NASCAR.

"Desire is the key to motivation, but its the determination and commitment to an unrelenting pursuit of your goal - a commitment to excellence - that will enable you to attain the success you seek."

All the best,

Jim

Pushmi-Pullyu

"Pushmi-Pullyus are now extinct. That means, there aren't any more. But long ago, when Doctor Dolittle was alive, there were some of them still left in the deepest jungles of Africa; and even then, they were very, very scarce. They had no tail, but a head at each end, and sharp horns on each head. They were very shy and terribly hard to catch." The Story of Doctor Dolittle

Doctor Dolittle began life in letters sent home during World War 1 when the author, Hugh Lofting, was serving in the trenches overseas. John Dolittle is a doctor who focuses on animals with whom he can talk and prefers their company to those of his fellow humans. The Pushmi-Pullyu made it's first appearance in the first book and was also shown in the 1967 Musical with Rex Harrison starring as Doctor Dolittle.

Anyway, it wasn't actually my intention to extol the virtues of books or musicals in this post. It was more the fact that the pushmi-pullyu came my mind (strange I know!) when I was thinking about the difficulties we regularly experience, as HR Practitioners, when we get so caught up in the day to day transactional requirements that we are unable to be proactive and so end up constantly reacting to the business demands. This in turn leads to the business saying, rightly or wrongly, that HR is not acting as a strategic partner. This leads on to reduced emphasis on HR and its attendant functions at a Board level and can result in a diminishing in HR's ability to effect change and enable success within the business.

One of the actions that HR can take to avoid the same fate of extinction as the Pushmi-Pullyu is to actively focus on minimising the administrative transactional burden that reduces the ability of the team to engage pro-actively with the Business. Having said that, I am not sure that it is possible or desirable to remove the transactional the team entirely, as our detailed empoyee contacts come from that source. So, what we are aiming for is to reduce it to such an extent that there is more time to focus on the pro-active business partnership we all want to be part of. Remember, we are thinking of HR as a business, so we need to concentrate our limited resources on those areas where most customer value can be gained, whilst leveraging a multi-faceted plan that enhances transactional efficiency and effectiveness using actions such as process review and automation, shared services, website enhancement and Manager/Employee Self Service, amongst others.

The structure that unites all these actions is a tiered Contact and Escalation Path that you would be familiar with either having seen or experienced through your own calls with various contact centres. The Employee or Manager's first port of call when they have a query is through a self-service portal accessing either web based information or process workflow through the HRIS. (Not all companies have sophisticated HRIS, however it is still possible to create process workflow through basic HTML). If they are unable to find their answer through these means or their query is urgent, then the next step is through the 1st line helpdesk in the Shared Services Contact Centre. This is the level where the majority of basic process queries should be answered. For more complex or Specialist queries, the call or query is then routed through to a specialist desk e.g. Compensation & Benefits. Finally, for increased escalation or interpretation, the query or issue is routed up through the HR leadership chain.

Although we are never going to remove the administrative and transactional entirely, we should always be careful never to lose sight of the fact that HR is there to enable the success of the Business. We achieve this through being pro-active, effective and efficient in all that we do. The model above is but one focus as to how to focus on the transactional. It does work but it is not the only way of achieving success. Remember that every business is different and therefore requires differing ways of engineering the same outcome. But with a good basic model, the interpretation becomes easier.

And Finally...

I leave you with this quote from Albert Einstein to ponder as you consider the model.

"Innovation is not the product of logical thought, although the result is tied to logical structure"

All the best

Jim

Did You Know?

Watch this video first and then let's chat...

Mind blowing, isn't it? One quote in the above presentation really hits home with me and it's this; "We are living in exponential times". The definition of exponential that I really like, not being a mathematician, is "increasing at an increasing rate". Given that, it is easy to lose sight of just how quickly the world around us changes. That change used to be measured in years, and now is measured in hours and minutes. Change is both a reality and a requirement. We cannot ignore the reality of the changes that happen around us both in the wider world as well as in our businesses and homes. We also cannot ignore the fact that, if we are to continue to be successful and grow, either as individuals or businesses, then we must change.

In my last post, I suggested that we, as HR practitioners, must shift the current paradigm and perceptions from HR being seen as a reactive, potentially bureaucratic organisation to that of a proactive, commercially focused business. In doing so, changes to the norm that we are used to, positive or not, will impact on us as individuals as well as those that we provide services to. We are all familiar with the Change Curve that was created by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in "On Death and Dying" (1969). Yet what is forgotten is that the intention was never that this should become a rigid structure that defined how all people react to such significant events. There's a good blog post that covers this here. Personally, I don't believe that a change in the way HR operates and engages will impact the inidviduals involved necessarily across all 3 Stages of personal Development and 9 States of Emotion. Certainly I did not see it when we made the changes in my last Company. We do however need to be aware that in bringing about change we, and our customers, inevitably will experience some of the States.

So what can we do to mitigate this when we implement change? We become aware. We empathise with the people with whom we interact; customers, staff and colleagues. By our actions, we will encourage them to make the changes that will drive success, both personally and professionally.

And Finally...

I leave you with this quote from Charles Darwin to ponder;

"It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most reponsive to change"

All the best

Jim

HR2BE

Every journey has a beginning; A single step taken, over the bridge between Then and Now, that challenges the adventurer to continue what has been started and to go forward and explore, learning new things and to share those experiences with those of like mind. We know this as easily as we know the back of our own hands. As Children, we learned it through the fairy tales and adventure stories that we read. As Adults, we learned through our own actions and experiences and in turn became defined by the journey that we have taken so far. Not only does every journey have a beginning but they also have a past; light or dark; long or short; sweet or sour. A past that defines the reasons for the journey itself.

The past behind this journey is simple enough. As I said in my first post, until recently I was the HR Director for a large multi-national (Fortune 500) in Australia & New Zealand. Over the years prior to being appointed to the role, I had steadily been building a model in my mind for HR that I hoped would enable the function to become a true business partner, not just a token voice at the table or, worse, viewed as a bureaucratic necessity. Though in itself, that is exactly the perception we continually have to challenge. The model itself centres on trying to balance the schizophrenia that HR practitioners feel between Process / Compliance and Strategic partnership and engagement. The only real way to achieve this is to realise that HR, as a function, needs to be operated as a business with all HR practitioners adopting a commercial focus.

If we look at HR as a business, then certain things become clear. A successful business with multiple complementary product lines has a solution oriented approach to providing services to the customer; it undertakes detailed and regular reviews as to who are their customers and what are their needs; and it regularly reviews its products and demonstrate the cost of delivery of a service as well as the net benefit of that service to a customer. It is evident that if you look at HR, it has multiple product lines or, better still, call them Lines of Business. These range from Recruitment through to HR Business Partners; Training to Compensation; and Benefits and beyond. Within each of those Lines of Business, there are multiple product offerings whether that be as simple as an Advertisement for recruitment, or as complex as Change Management for organisational restructure.

If we do not change our way of managing HR and how we deliver services to the Businesses that we support, we will always be viewed as the Bureaucracy or the Process Police. At best, we will have pockets of true partnership but no real coherence in the model and solutions that are used to supplement that partnership. Change must come to HR or what remaining value we have will steadily erode and we will, once again, find ourselves as a sub set of Finance or, even worse, Facilities! Of course, these are all just my thoughts and they may be wrong. Having put the model in place once, there are certain things that must be true and in place in order to stand a chance of success and therefore this model may not suit every organisation. However it is not just a model, it is about cultivating true partnership through commercial bias and demonstrated successful delivery of business enabling solutions that speak loudest. I hope you travel with me and help me develop the ideas further as we go.

Why HR2BE?

Of course, every model needs a label. Mine has HR2BE. On one level it stands for the delivery of HR solutions and services to the Business and the Employees. On the other level, it stands for the potential in HR to truly become a recognised business function. One that when realised has the same level of impact, influence, partnership and respect as any other part of the key business functions.

And Finally...
I leave you with a quote from John Steinbeck to think about when you consider the journey that HR must take to realise its full potential:

"A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you can control it"

All the best

Jim

Good-bye to All That

Yesterday, having been made redundant, I left my role as HR Director for a Multi-National Fortune 500 in Australia and New Zealand and in doing so, closed that particular chapter of my life with a final blog to the team with whom I had worked so closely and had so much fun with during my time with the Company. I thought I would share it with you so you could see a bit of the past that creates the future. By the way, in case you are wondering, "Good-bye to All That" is the title to Robert Graves' autobiograhy.

If Today was your Last Day

For those of you not aware, I used to write a weekly blog for the HR team in A&NZ. It seemed somehow appropriate to finish my time with one final edition.

I was driving in to work this morning. Not too early, you understand, but still early enough to catch the last of Sonia and Todd on Mix 106.5 FM. Anyway, I was coming down the freeway and just driving on to the Bridge when a new song from the “Dark Horse” album by Nickleback came on.

Now I am sure you can appreciate, as tomorrow, my last day with the Company, has drawn ever nearer, my thoughts have perhaps inevitably turned inwards and centred on things achieved and not achieved, successes and failures, fun and frustrations. I have also been thinking about how to celebrate all that we achieved together and a way for me to say goodbye. As I think the majority of you know by now, I am a firm believer in everything happening for a reason. Whether that be not being able to buy the house you had set your heart on, or missing the train, or indeed heading off to find another role. So picture this. There I was, pulling on to the Bridge (that’s the Harbour Bridge, in case you were wondering) and wondering how best to take that next step and what it might look like when the song came on. The song is called “If Today was your Last Day” and the first three lines of the lyrics answered everything for me in one perfect moment.

“My best friend gave me the best advice

He said each day's a gift and not a given right

Leave no stone unturned, leave your fears behind”

Have a watch of the video:


(Sadly to watch the actual music video you have to go to YouTube direct. Here's the link)

Too often in our lives we spend too much time either worrying about the future or wishing we could change the past. Too little of the time, do we spend living in the present. We should celebrate and recognise the past for providing all the events that have made us who we are today. We should also recognise that the future is uncertain and with that recognition, deal with it when it happens rather than worry about it before it does. After all, it may not happen the way you think it will.

We are all being impacted by change. We are implementing it particularly with the current changes and this will occupy you all in ever increasing ways over the coming months. Don’t lose sight of how this can affect you as individuals. Try and become more aware of how you react in your dealings with people. We need to continue to empathise with our customers, staff and team members and in doing so, help them to make the changes that will drive success, both personally and professionally.

I will close by just saying this. I have thoroughly enjoyed working alongside you all. In everything that we have achieved, I have never once had cause to doubt that the team could, and would, do it. We embarked on a journey and, although the brand and the path of that journey may have changed, the philosophy must not. We must continue to recognise that by acting as a business and not a bureaucracy, HR shifts the paradigm. We become the trusted advisor that creates value within the Business through the targeted solutions and services that we deliver. By understanding the business imperatives and adopting a commercial bias, we prove ourselves as true partners.

Thank you for your unfailing support, guidance, humour and, above all, your teamwork.

And Finally…

With another cold weekend forecast, wrap up warm, relax and get ready to keep doing that voodoo that you do so well next week! I leave you with a quote by that famous Greek author, Anonymous:

“Life may not be the party we hoped for, but while we’re here we should dance”

All the best
Jim