Justice and Fairness

Welcome to this week’s Discuss HR, the HR blog written for and by members of Human Resources UK.

The other half of the Gloucestershire blogging twosome has again timed his appearance to coincide with the county’s events.  So carrying the torch for Discuss HR  today (I’ll stop the puns now) is John Hepworth who is continuing where he left off with his last post about the psychological contract and focuses on why HR need to go above and beyond equality legislation to improve organisational performance.  (Ed Scrivener)

Justice and Fairness

HR were ready to deliver justice!

I want to pick up on a theme from my last contribution to ‘Discuss HR’, namely: “Fairness and consistency in what we all do [as HR professionals] as a matter for competitive advantage, rather than because a law or an HR process says we have to”.

This comes after a discussion with a client on the ‘challenges’ – in the mind of the client – of employing women [and for this, Dear Reader, please also toggle with disability, gender, race, age and so on]. Such injustice! Such unfairness! To paraphrase the client and to be aware of sensitivities around the language they used: “Oh, dear, how on earth am I expected to run a business with all these ‘human rights’ in place?”.

You can imagine that the remaining sentences alluded to phrases such as ‘red tape’, ‘nanny state’ and ‘what about my rights as a business owner?’ But does my client have a point?

The themes of my ‘blogs’ have stemmed from employee engagement and culture and so I thought it a useful start point would be to investigate just what is justice and fairness, and for whom? Distributive justice would say that “benefits, risks and challenges of specific job categories [for example] should be distributed equally between those of different backgrounds (O’Boyle, 2001:962)”. This would suggest that the key is the outcome: how does the situation look when all is said and done? In the case of my client, is it appropriate for them to give a job, say, to an older male who is unemployed over and above a women, or disabled applicant?

Procedural justice would focus on the processes and procedures that are in place to ensure fairness (Bratton and Gold, 2007). This would mean that in a recruitment and selection process, if the processes used are fair and equitable, justice concerns are met – regardless of the outcomes. For distributive justice, therefore, the cry would automatically be one of ‘foul!’

I feel that there may be a comment coming on that states “well, yes, but it is both surely and that is the management challenge?” OK, to pre-empt this, let me explain further. For example, the stats state that we still have a financial gap between the genders, something like 15% and not reducing. My logical brain tells me that the Equal Pay Act and its successors over the past 40 years have therefore failed. And so too has procedural justice as a result. Yet there is a reluctance amongst management in general to adopt an informed, 21^st century stance on distributive justice, e.g. our company does not reflect our community so we need to address this to help our business brand AND put something back into the community.

My client was therefore subjected to my rational response to their dilemma – I say ‘subjected to’ in the sense of a helpful, questioning style rather than me losing my rag! Trying to adopt this 21^st century stance on distributive justice, I questioned how it might be different or the same with employing an older male with health problems. Would that be alright? Well, of course, the point that we agreed upon in the end, after much discussion, was that in the 21^st century, we have a diverse society with many ‘ways of working’. Whilst the lawyers and rule-makers have ensured procedural justice in the form of laws and codes of practice, it is up to the practioners to implement distributive justice and go beyond having a neat ‘Equal Opportunities’ policy that meets the law, but does nothing actively to reduce imbalances in the workforce.

I was, in effect, asking my client to deal in Interactional justice: how do you treat people in your company on a daily basis and what social processes need to be advanced? This is not just about a blanket approach to managing people – let’s be all ‘pc’ [although I guess we do now with the Equality Act’s protected characteristics] and be green with it too. It is all about getting the right people, in the right place [mentally and physically, by the way] and at the right time, so that the organisation is effective and the employees and customers are happy.

Think about the ‘enablers’ that can help achieve this nirvana – and utilise and develop the procedural justice that exists to help you.

HR practioners take note.

About the author

John helps organisations, especially in the SME sector, achieve competitive advantage.  He has a particular interest in translating strategic HR management into practice.  Typically, this has meant focusing his efforts on recruitment and selection, performance management and training and development activities.  John sees the challenge of matching the development of internal competencies with the externally driven demands of the market place as one of the key themes in developing organisational engagement, capability and performance.
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Discuss HR is the blog for Human Resources UK, the leading LinkedIn group for those involved with HR in the UK.  Next week’s Discuss HR will be published on Thursday 31^st May and will be written by Performance Consultant Una Doyle.

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