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