Flip Chart Fairy Tales

Or so says the CBI’s Katja Hall in her response to the government’s proposed Equality Bill.

On the subject of compulsory equal pay audits, she said:

They are very expensive and very time-consuming. Pay gaps are not the result of discrimination - they are because many women would prefer to work in the HR department than the finance department.

Which begs a question: do women earn less because they gravitate towards careers like HR, or do these jobs pay less because more women work in them? You could ask a similar question about many other occupations.

My own view about HR’s low status, as I’ve said before, is that HR people are not bullish enough about what they do.  Which, inevitably, begs another question: Does the HR profession beat itself up so much because it has a disproportionate number of women in its ranks? Mind you, I have known some pretty fierce female HR directors. They tend to be the ones who make it onto the board too.

Anyway, when I have had time to read the government’s white paper, I will comment further on the contents. In the meantime, I will leave you to cogitate on the comments from the CBI’s Head of Employment and Employee Relations.

Incidentally, does anyone know if, all other things being equal, Finance managers do earn more than HR managers?

There’s an interview in the Guardian with Mike Turley, the head of the public sector consulting practice at Toilet and Douche. A lot of what he says rings true from my experience of working in the public sector.

In which management areas does the public sector excel?

Public sector leaders have always been proficient at policy-making and the communications that underpin public policy.

Where does it fall down?

Public sector organisations are not so good at putting great ideas into practice. There is a gap between policy intent and actual outcomes.

That’s perhaps a little unfair to managers in the NHS and local authorities but it pretty much sums up the central government mandarins. I have met very clever people who are excellent at devising, and thinking through the implications of, macro economic and social policy but hopeless when it comes to implementing change in their own organisations.

What barriers prevent public sector organisations from taking action against poor performers?

Most commentators recognise that trade union influence on the workforce and human resources policy emphasises individual rights to a depth that is not found in the private sector. Culturally, public sector line managers may not have the skills or confidence to confront underperforming colleagues.

It’s not just the trade unions. There seems to be a culture in some parts of the public sector in which fairness and equal treatment are carried to the point of absurdity. For example, in one organisation, equal opportunities officers sat in on interviews, not merely to ensure legal compliance but as the guardians of fairness and equity. Such was their zeal that managers felt shut out of their own recruitment processes.

The most extreme case I came across of this fetish for fairness was an organisation that ran two grading structures in parallel. The old grading system had been abolished in favour of broader pay bands, for all the usual reasons; to allow greater flexibility across jobs and wider discretion on pay. However, part of the deal struck to get it through was an agreement that no-one should be worse off. Therefore the organisation maintained the old grading structure too. Each year, every employee’s new salary was compared with what they would have got under the old system and, if it was lower, an upward adjustment was made, sometimes of only a few pence a month. Much of the efficiency and savings that were supposed to be achieved by the new grading structure were eroded by the overhead of keeping the shadow structure in place.

Mike Turley’s comments of performance management are interesting too:

Are you saying that poor performance is more tolerated in the public sector?

On balance, this is probably the case, yes. Obviously, there are good and bad examples in both sectors, but generally speaking, the private sector tends to embed expectation of delivery and “hard” results in their appraisal processes.

I’m not sure I entirely agree with that. Smaller organisations with less slack are probably harder on poor performance, as are charities who just don’t have the money to carry passengers. But the unwillingness to tackle performance issues is endemic in the large private sector bureaucracies. Huge budgets mean that performance problems can be fudged until they get too serious to hide. Rather than use the disciplinary process, the more common solution is to offer someone a large amount of money to leave. The further up the hierarchy people go, the less likely they are to be dismissed on the grounds of performance and the more money they get to sweeten their departure. In short, the private sector appears to have fewer performance management issues because it just pays its poor performers to leave.

That said, though, Mike Turley is right in that the public sector needs to get better at implementation and at managing performance. Regardless of who gets into power at the next election, economic factors are likely to force cutbacks in public spending in the near future. When that happens, public sector organisations are going to need to get good at both implementation and performance management, and they won’t have a lot of time to learn.

Laurie Ruettimann is at the SHRM conference. For British readers, that’s the US equivalent of the CIPD. That woman has natural comic talent; she can even make an HR conference sound funny.

The party culture of HR is weird. Get a group of middle-aged women together and offer them free drinks, and any sort of boundaries that existed around compliance, business-appropriate behavior, and workplace harassment concerns disappear.

I can just picture the scene.

This bit is funny too, although I really don’t get all this fashion jargon Laurie uses. I had to go and look up ‘gaucho pants’. Do people really wear flip-flops to a business conference? Ugh!!

And what’s with this talking-like-you-are-from-Wisconsin thing? Americans do accent snobbery just as well as the British, it seems.

Research by employment law advisers Peninsula found that two-thirds of job applicants had tried to hide their accents durning interviews and that most employers knew of cases where people had been discriminated against because of the way they spoke.

We should take this with a small pinch of salt as Peninsula are prolific survey producers and they haven’t said much about the questions they asked in this survey. Nevertheless, the findings do seem plausible, based on anecdotal evidence.

The study found that the most disliked accent was Brummie, followed by Scouse, Geordie, Glaswegian and Cockney. As George Bernard Shaw said in Pygmalion,

It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.

Of course, there is no legal protection against accent discrimination, although anyone who felt they were being persistently picked on because of their accent could probably claim that they were being bullied.

So is a regional accent behaviour? Is a refusal to change the way you speak the same as, say, refusing to smarten up the way you dress? Or is it something you are, as hard to change as your skin colour or sexual orientation?

The answer seems to lie somewhere in between. Some people can change their accents with enough training and practice. Like learning any new skill, it is much easier when you are young. I once read some research, which I can’t find so it must have been published before the Interweb was invented, that found changing your accent becomes much more difficult after your early twenties. After the age of 22, the authors reckoned, most people would find it almost impossible to lose their accents, although some modification was still possible.

That said, why should you change your accent? Should you have to pander to other people’s prejudices? Those who are confident about themselves often make their accents a feature of who they are. It becomes part of their ‘personal brand’ (yes, yes, I know but everyone’s at it these days). BBC presenter Adrian Chiles speaks with the hated Brummie accent but, rather than hide it, he has made it a badge of honour.

But there is another good reason not to change your accent. Unless you are a very good mimic, the chances are you’ll make a hash of it. There is nothing more embarrassing than someone trying to hide their accent and failing. I come from the northern half of England where people tend to say ‘boos pass’ rather than ‘bus parse’ and use ‘tooffened glass’ not ‘tuffened glarse’ in their windows. A few years ago, a lad I knew from school started to mix with some posh southerners. He tried to bury his accent under what he thought was a good imitation of Home Counties English. One evening in the pub he told his drinking mates how rich his new girlfriend’s ‘grarndfather’ was. We waited until he went to the bog then the rest of us fell about laughing.

You see, no-one says ‘grarndfather’, not even very posh people. Even the Queen doesn’t say ‘grarndfather’. In his attempt to fit in with his new friends, our old school-pal had started to speak with his own interpretation of a posh accent. Sadly, he was well wide of the mark.

The tragedy was that, while those of us who had known him for years thought his attempts to talk posh were amusing, his new friends were almost certainly laughing at him behind his back too. They would probably have had more respect for him had he been true to himself, flat vowels and all.

While there may be some benefit in trying to modify your speech to get rid of some of the worst excesses, I would never suggest that anyone tried to completely change their accent. Fretting about the way you speak will only reduce your self-esteem and make you sound even more awkward. At worst, as with my friend, it can make you sound ridiculous.

Ignore the critics, both inside and out. As Adrian Chiles has shown, in the right hands, even a Brummie accent can be an asset.

Alistair Darling and Mervyn King have called for pay restraint and warned of an inflationary spiral if wages and prices increase. Angry Alice is having none of it though:

The plea is almost certainly a hopeless one. Back in the 1970s, when pay restraint was a serious policy option, the country had a few haphazard institutions that could make the policy stick. It is largely forgotten period, but during the late 1970s, the Callaghan government managed to reduce inflation through a serious of agreements with trade unions. Callaghan traded off lower wage growth with high public sector expenditure.

However, it all fell apart in 1979, when Callaghan tried the trick once too often. Today, that corporatist cohesion has disappeared. Today, there are no private sector trade unions that could collectively enforce wage restraint.

Wage restraint failed in the 1970s, when the government had a lot more control over the economy than it does now. What makes Alistair Darling think he will be able to make it stick in 2008?

As Alice says, in today’s more individualist labour market, it is more likely that people will think, “wage restraint is fine for everyone else but I’m getting my pay claim in now.”

Over the last 25 years, income inequality has grown dramatically. The state owned enterprises were privatized; insiders grew rich, while millions of jobs were destroyed. Social housing has virtually disappeared, while the public services have deteriorated. The UK is a country where finance matters more than manufacturing, where profit is king and whatever is mine belongs to me alone.

I want my income stream fully indexed for inflation. If someone else wants to take Darling’s advice and become poorer, then go for it, but do not expect me to follow.

The other major difference between now and the 1970s is that, as Chris Dillow says, many of us are doing jobs which could be done elsewhere in the world.

Wage inflation is low because there are two billion Indians and Chinese threatening to do our jobs more cheaply - not because anyone wants to make a contribution towards achieving low inflation.

If there are reduced pay demands this year, it will be due to the threat of redundancy rather than government policy or any concern for the greater good.

As ever, pay is a function of power. Those whose skills are in demand and, more importantly, who have the right networks and know the right people will see their pay continue to rise. Those that don’t will be nailed down with paltry pay rises or will find themselves, as one of my former lecturers put it, being empowered to remodel their careers within the labour market.

Now you don’t often see terms like ‘pikey’ on an HR blog but Guru has leapt to the defence of motor-racing commentator Martin Brundle, who remarked:

There are some pikeys there at turn 10 putting tarmac down - what do you think of that?

The blue-headed one asks:

But what is offensive about the term pikey? 

It is said to be offensive as it means someone who travels (pikeys do), someone who has a tendency to lay Tarmac (pikeys do), and someone with scant regard for established society (pikeys are past masters at this). In which case, it’s a remarkably accurate demonstration of observational skill from Mr Brundle and not at all offensive to anyone.

By coincidence, I was round at a friend’s house a couple of weeks ago and she dug out some of her old records. Among them was All The Fun Of The Fair by David Essex. (Yes, I have some strange friends.) On the back of the sleeve was a dedication to showmen, travellers and pikeys.

Has “pikey” become a derogatory term in the thirty years since that album was released or is it just that David Essex was ‘allowed’ to use the term because his grandfather was a Gipsy?

In any case, because of its perceived racial overtones, the term seems to be beyond the pale now.  Guru might get away with it because he is paid to be naughty and controversial but, to paraphrase the old conjurers warning, don’t try this at work! You might get into trouble with HR.

A conversation between an HR manager and a group of line managers.

It’s appraisal time again and the scene is the appraisal and objective setting workshop where the process is explained for the umpteenth time to managers who have worked for the company for years.

Line Manager: So….could I set someone an objective like ’Fill in your timesheet on time’ ?

HR Manager: Well, not really. Objectives are supposed to be specific goals that you set people year on year. Filling in timesheets is just an ongoing requirement of the job.

Line Manager: Yes, but if someone isn’t doing it properly and I want them to start, surely if I put it in their objectives, which they know is linked to their bonus, then they are more likely to do it.

HR Manager: Have you tried explaining that this is simply part of the job?

Line Manager: Yes but a bit of an incentive would give some encouragement to improve.

HR Manager: (Getting a bit exasperated by now.) What next? Shall we set objectives like, ‘Don’t fiddle your expenses’ or ‘Turn up to work on time’ or perhaps even ‘Just turn up for work’ and then give people bonuses for achieving them? If people are failing to complete timesheets we should be giving them warnings not offering them incentives.

As she said to me afterwards, “I’ve been having these sort of conversations for years and I’m fucking sick of it.”

Our meeja have gone Apprentice-mad. Even Wayne Rooney’s wedding has been blown off the front pages.

The finalists were interviewed to death on the BBC last night and then again this morning. All the papers have extensive commentary about the show.

Many of those writing about The Apprentice infer from the show that it is representative of the business world in general. Stephen Glover worries:

[I]f The Apprentice does, in any way, hold up a mirror to the world of business in Britain today  - to those who are rich and those who want to become rich  -  then the reflection it shows is pretty depressing.

Let’s pray that the whole thing is an entertaining fantasy that has no more to do with business than the Vicar Of Dibley has to do with religion or ‘Allo ‘Allo has to do with World War II.

Well, Stephen, that’s pretty much it. As Alan Sugar says, he is unique and, therefore, so is his organisation. The Apprentice is, at best, a long drawn out assessment centre for an idiosyncratic organisation with an egotistical boss. At worst, it is a contrived drama, designed to entertain us all with a bit of conflict and confrontation. The truth is probably somewhere in between.

What might work for Alan Sugar’s organisation won’t necessarily work anywhere else. The sort of behaviour on display in his boardroom on the show is likely to get you fired from many organisations. Increasingly, companies are getting wise to the destructive impact of toxic talent.

That said, though, it has certainly gripped the nation. Perhaps it is because there are no British teams in the European Championship but last night’s Apprentice was watched by more than 9 million people. And those of us who work in organisation development, HR or any of the related disciplines, seem to be more fascinated by the programme than most.

Last week I was talking to a friend who had been giving a presentation on staff development. His audience weren’t getting it until he said, “Did anyone see The Apprentice last night?” Suddenly, they all tuned in and he was able to use an anecdote from the show to illustrate his point.

Has anyone else used examples from The Apprentice to make similar points? I know I have. At least once during each series.

I wonder, though, if we are endowing The Apprentice with a greater importance than it deserves. It is, after all, only a TV show. It contains few lessons in behaviour that really transfer to the outside world.

And as for those consultancies that are trying to market their products on the back of The Apprentice, they should be even more ashamed of themselves than the show’s failed candidates are.

The latest HR blog carnival is over on Jon Ingham’s site. (I wouldn’t let Jon anywhere near my office until he promised to stop doing his impression of The Fonz - see the avatar in the bottom right corner of his blog.)

Anyway, there is plenty of good stuff on the carnival but one piece caught my eye. Jessica Lee at Fistful of Talent (what a great name for a blog) complains that HR just isn’t sexy enough.

Before my first “office job,” when I thought about the business world, I thought… Marketing – sexy. International finance – sexy. Investment banking – really sexy. Human resources – huh? The profession of HR never crossed my mind, and I’m not sure if I would venture to call it sexy even today.

Well, yes, maybe. Some jobs like marketing, PR and advertising may be intrinsically sexy because they are perceived to offer exciting and glamorous work. Others, like investment banking, are only sexy because they pay lots of money. Some very highly paid City jobs, especially those involving derivatives and other complex financial instruments, are filled by geeky maths graduates who spend most of their time number crunching. Take away the huge salaries and these jobs are very unsexy.

I also wonder why people in Finance don’t worry about their profession being more sexy. Perhaps for the same reason that you never hear them say things like “Finance must be aligned to the business strategy”. They just take it as read and take their seats at the top tables as a matter of right.

People who worry too much about being sexy usually aren’t. As I have said before, this kind of introspection is what stops HR people being powerful. No other business function beats itself up in quite the same way.

I much prefer Dan McCarthy’s approach:

For about the last 20 years, I’ve heard a lot of whining from training and HR folks about wanting to “have a seat at the table”. We love to flog ourselves about why we stink , and to criticize our executives about having their heads up their behinds for not recognizing how important we could be.

I know, I used to do the same thing. And I also spent time “marketing” my training team, conducting phony ROI studies, and taking on any scrap assignment thrown my way as a way to prove our worth and “earn” a seat at the all important table.

Well, I’ve learned over the years that if you want a seat at the table, you need to assume it’s yours, just barge in, and take it. Grab a cookie, have a seat, pour a glass of water, and contribute to the success of the business. Executives aren’t stupid people – if you have something substantial to offer, they listen.

That’s what Finance and Marketing Directors have been doing for years - and I bet most of them never stop to think about whether or not they are sexy.

That said, Jessica makes some good suggestions, such as not using employment law to justify your existence, becoming a shameless self promoter and, most importantly in my view, not colluding when people have a go at HR. She also criticises SHRM which, if the comments of American HR bloggers are anything to go by, is even less dynamic and forward looking than our equivalent, the CIPD.

But while I agree with these points, I feel that Jessica has the argument arse about face. HR does not need to become more sexy to gain more power and influence. It needs to gain more power and influence if it is to become more sexy.

In the end HR will only win power in organisations if those currently in the profession are prepared to be more bullish about what they do. HR could be more sexy but to become so, it must stop apologising for its existence and fight its corner.

Oh FFS! This is just bleedin’ stupid.

Essex County Council has said that it will offer a job to the runner up in tonight’s final of The Apprentice.

Which job will that be? Apparently, it will be tailored to the person’s strengths. In other words, the candidate will be able to write his or her own job description.

Paul White, also known as Lord Hanningfield, leader of Essex County Council, said:

We unashamedly want the best and brightest to come and work for us.

Now come on Paul, are you really suggesting that the candidates on The Apprentice are the best and brightest? The programme is unreality TV. People are selected because they are good telly, not because they are any good at business and certainly not because they have any aptitude for running an English county council.

That’s why the penultimate show is always so funny; the interviews show up the lies the candidates have been telling all the way through. For example, any half-decent selection process would have revealed that Lee had lied about his university education. Why did he get though? Because the programme makers wanted to entertain us by humiliating him during the show.

Now, because of his rash promise, Lord Hanningfield could end up offering Lee a job. After Lee’s recent performance, no-one else I have spoken to (and I know plenty of people in recruitment) would offer him a job anywhere.

I was about to say that this is a cheap publicity stunt by Essex County Council but it could well turn out to be a very expensive one.  The council has a reasonably good performance rating. How recruiting one of the failed apprentices will help to improve that is anybody’s guess. Save your county’s money, Paul, and spend it on something, or someone, more useful.

Hat Tip: Mike Berry at Personnel Today, who has been inundated with press releases from consultancies offering help and advice to the candidates. I think he should name and shame them.