HR, stop selling & start listening

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

I would just like to start off with a huge thank you to you all for supporting our networking events.  The London event sold out earlier this week and I am expecting the Bristol one to follow soon, so I hope you all do some great networking there!  I should hopefully be announcing the Birmingham and Manchester events by the end of the week too.  You can find more information about the events here http://goo.gl/jQuv7

One of the popular events is held in Newcastle and that is largely due to the drive of Antoinette Oglethorpe to build an active group.  So we know Antoinette is a great networker, but she also turns out to be a great blogger too! Today she is our latest guest blogger and she looks at why HR need to listen to their organisation’s needs rather than making presumptions. (Ed Scrivener)

HR, stop selling & start listening

The finance team just wouldn't listen!

As a profession, HR spends a fair time agonising over how to raise our profile as a strategic partner and add value to the business.

The accepted wisdom is that we need to “sell the benefit” of HR.  But I am inclined to disagree.  I believe that mindset is what gets in the way and makes it difficult.

You see the terminology of “selling the benefit” comes straight out of product sales training.  It smacks of a scenario where the challenge is to persuade managers to buy whatever it is that HR wants to give them by pointing out all the benefits HR thinks they will get as a result.

The difficulty with this is that HR is looking at the challenge of introducing an idea only from their perspective.  As professionals they know the “right” answer regarding people in the business and they see their job as persuading managers to do what is right.

I came across this situation the other day when speaking with a client.  The central Learning & Development team have developed an online Career Development Portal for employees.  It’s a good portal and the intention is a positive one in terms of retaining and developing employees.  They are now increasingly frustrated by what they make out to be the lack of buy-in from managers who need to have career conversations with employees to realise the benefit of the portal.

The difficulty here is that managers will only buy into something if they see it is going to solve a problem or meet a need or wish that they have.  And if they trust the solution they are buying in to is in line with their priorities and interests.

If HR is to be a true strategic partner they need to stop designing processes and initiatives that need “selling” to the business.  Instead they need to start listening to what the business needs and designing the services that will address those needs efficiently and effectively.

One way of doing that is to use your critics as designers.  This is an approach that I’ve learnt and adapted from Mike Harris, founding CEO of telephone bank Firstdirect and Internet bank Egg. 

I'm all ears!!

In his book, Find Your Lightbulb, Mike Harris describes how First Direct brought the critics out in full force.  Even his own mother joined the masses of banking experts and strategy consultants in telling him what a bad idea it was.  “That’s never going to work” she said.  “You are wasting your time with that telephone banking nonsense.  People hate using the telephone – they get passed from pillar to post, having to repeat the same story over and over again”

Her reaction inspired him to produce several statements of intent such as “We will answer the phone within three rings”.  These became the fundamental principles for Firstdirect and were at the heart of the exceptional service and customer loyalty for which it became famous.

I encourage you to take a similar approach to designing your HR initiatives by following these three steps:

1. Write down all the reasons you think managers will give for why an HR idea or initiative won’t work for your organisation
2. Get as many reasons “why not” in as much detail as possible
3. Now go through the list using your judgement and intuition.  Pick the most valid and important insights and turn them into “statements of intent” that address the objections.

For example, taking my client’s example above, a frequent objection is that career conversations can take too much time.  So the statement of intent could be “provide a framework of 3 questions that can enable a career conversation in 10-15 minutes” or “no career conversation will take longer than 30 minutes”.

We know that HR has real value to add.  By looking through the eyes of our managers and designing services that meet their needs, they will start to see it to.  They won’t need selling.

About the Author

Antoinette Oglethorpe is a Leadership Development & Career Management Consultant.  She provides coaching, training and facilitation services to help organisations develop their leaders and to help leaders develop their careers, drive change and achieve business growth.

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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 written by employment law expert Annabel Kaye.

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A little ray of sunshine – please!

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

Firstly some news from the group.  The latest round of networking events were announced at the weekend.  We have 7 events in London, Uxbridge, Cambridge, Reading, Wootton Bassett, Bristol and Newcastle and hopefully we’ll add Manchester, Birmingham and Glasgow to the list shortly. You can find more information at this link http://bit.ly/HKjYZl

Now to the post at hand.  Our resident HR Director Sheena McLullich returns to draws upon her experience as only she can and looks at the parallels between our rotten summer and our rotten economy! (Ed Scrivener)

A little ray of sunshine – please!

It doesn’t feel like summer does it?  I know there have been lots of theories about global warming driving the jet-stream further south, causing the unseasonable weather conditions we seem to have endured for ages now.  All the other signs of summer are plentiful enough – the roads round here are deserted, most email requests are met with an ‘out of office’ response and when I arrived in one of our office car parks last week, I really thought I’d gone to work on a Saturday by mistake – the car park was almost empty at 9 o’clock in the morning!

I know this is an unusual year and the Olympics have had a distorting effect on London.  Like many people, I heeded the warnings about travel chaos in the city and made plans to work at our other office locations for the duration.  I needn’t have bothered – if the reports I’ve heard are correct, travel in and around central London has been a breeze recently.

Maybe it is the awful weather that’s making things feel a bit strange.  Apart from one nice week here in the south-east of England (and with apologies to anyone north of Birmingham who didn’t even get that!), it’s rained nearly every day with temperatures way below what we normally expect.  I now permanently carry a waterproof jacket in the back of the car and an umbrella in my handbag, having been caught out more than once in a sudden downpour between car park and office!

Maybe it’s more than that.  As Brits, we all know that our weather patterns are unpredictable.  We’ve all experienced the disappointment of cancelled events, spoiled days out and everyone constantly moaning about how awful things are.  Unfortunately a lot of people have also experienced the heartbreak of flooded homes and businesses, the nightmare and delays of insurance claims and the uncertainty of not knowing when and if the same thing might happen again. 

Is there a parallel between our washed-out summer and our washed-up economy?

There’s a plethora of grim economic news around just now.  It looks like the recession is deepening, long-term unemployment remains high, economic growth is non-existent with most businesses deeply uncertain about what the future might bring and reluctant or unable to invest as a result.

For many of us who at least have a job, there’s a nagging worry about rising prices, how to make your income last until the end of each month, pay rising more slowly than inflation (or not at all) and continuing job insecurity.  Yes, and everyone constantly moaning about how awful things are.  Unfortunately, I know too many people who have suffered greatly during the four years since the banking crisis really began to have an effect.  Whether unemployed or forced into part-time working ‘picking up enough bits of work just to scrape by’ as one of my contacts put it, it must seem to a lot of people that the sun hasn’t shone in their lives for a very long time.

I had occasion the other day to look through the personnel file of one of our longest serving employees.  Intrigued by some of the older typewritten documents (and carbon paper!), I looked further back than I needed to and was fascinated to see a number of internal memos from the then Managing Director warning of poor trading conditions, and the likely effects on salary increases, bonuses and job security – all dated in the early 1990s.  The tone of these was almost identical to the tone I’ve been using in similar communications for much of the past 4 years. 

Yet as I read on and got to the middle of the decade, the annual review letters started to look more positive.  Bonus payments and double-digit salary increases were back on the agenda and it stayed that way for quite some time.

Hopefully there is a parallel.  I’m writing this (today is Saturday, 11^th August – almost a week before you read it) from a sun lounger on the patio.  A cold drink by my side, the sun blazing down from a nearly cloudless sky.  Maybe summer has come back after all …..

(Sheena is away on holiday at the moment, I don’t know if I have the heart to tell her that we’re in the midst of torrential rain again! – Ed)

About the author

Sheena began her career in Training & Development before moving to a generalist HR position in 1998.  Since then she has held senior HR roles for several SMEs in a wide range of industries. A Fellow of the CIPD and Member of the US SHRM, she has a keen interest in Employee Development, specifically in coaching and supporting managers to enable them to get the best from their people.  She was appointed as Director of People for SPA Future Thinking in September 2011.

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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 we will welcome our latest guest writer Leadership Development Consultant Antoinette Oglethorpe.

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