Flip Chart Fairy Tales

Sorry for the break in transmission. I have been a bit busy this last couple of weeks.

From Guru’s blog, I learned that Personnel Today launched its HR with Oomph!campaign at the CIPD conference in Harrogate. Guru posted this video of the delegates’ reactions.

That first person interviewed said that HR should be about “creating an emotional bond between the company and the employee.”

Leaving aside the question of HR’s capacity to create such an emotional bond,  I always get nervous when companies start wanting their employees to become emotionally attached to them. It brings up images of rah-rah away days and company songs. Not content with our brainpower and brawn, employers now want to colonise our minds too.

I have been proud to work for all the organisations that have employed me. They delivered good products and services and, although I may have been critical of some aspects of their management, on the whole, they were good places to work. I’d stop short of saying that I had a strong emotional attachment to them though. Neither did most of the people who worked with me, yet it didn’t stop any of us doing a good job. We knew that, with a few exceptions, we would all move on and that the organisation was just another step in our careers.

I did, however, have more of an emotional attachment to some of the teams that I worked in.  In a couple of cases, that loyalty and friendship endured long after most of us had left the company where those bonds were formed. This, I think, provides a clue to that elusive employee engagement.

People are unlikely to form an emotional bond to something as abstract and ephemeral as a large organisation. It took nation-states centuries to create national identities. Organisational patriotism could not be created overnight.

But people do feel emotions like loyalty and commitment to other individuals. In a corporate environment, these are most likely to be their immediate team members. Employees can sometimes hold seemingly contradictory opinions whereby ‘my team members are all OK but the rest of the company stinks’.

Where I have worked with a cohesive team, it has been due, for the most part, to the way that team was led.  A boss who comes out of his office, talks to his team members, understands their skills and aspirations and knows what each of them is working on will win more loyalty than a boss who is barely visible.

That’s the problem though. A lot of bosses don’t spend much time engaging with their staff. As I said in an earlier post, many managers are frightened of getting to know their staff and would rather stay in their offices or hide in meetings than risk getting embroiled in potentially difficult conversations with their team members.

Which, of course, is the attraction of programmes which claim to build emotional bonds between company and employee. If people were more committed to the organisation, so the story goes, they would need less management. If they really loved the company, hell, you might not even need to manage them at all. They would just get on with stuff and you could sit in your office doing whatever you like doing and feeling important. You’d never have to have any of those difficult management conversations ever again.

Ever since the concept of organisational culture became popular in the 1980s, achieving these changes in mind-set and attitudes has been a holy grail for managers and management consultants. You often find that the managers who harp on about the need for mind-set shifts, strong shared values or culture change, are the same managers who hide in their offices and are the most reluctant to actually engage with their employees.

If you are looking for more emotional commitment from your employees, a good place to start is to show the people in your team that you are interested in them. Culture change programmes, employee engagement campaigns or any other such interventions are no substitutes for just getting out there and talking to people. The emotional bond that really matters is that between team leaders and team members. Without that, everything else just falls apart.