This photo is a view of our garden in the early Spring. You can see the old shed and some of our apple trees bursting with leaves. I enjoy growing things, it is enormously satisfying. Growing fruit and veg, growing business, growing community.
On May 5th the #connectinghr community will get together for our second unconference. I will be helping to disorganise things. The full details are here and it would be great if you could join us. Why should you? I would like to share a couple of feelings about the last one which I hope will resonate with you.
In October 2010 I attended the first #connectinghr unconference. It was the kind of powerful community event that I really enjoy. I went along with one objective: to share. And I benefited enormously from it. I picked up loads of ideas, and the event inspired me to write and perform a little song, on the spot. That last sentence says a lot to me about inclusion, involvement and encouragement. I felt sufficiently confident to experiment. When was the last time you went to a meeting of new minds and dared to be different? In the moment.
I was and still am hugely grateful for the support of the #connectinghr community. And I want to help it grow.
Will you?
Jam, onions and garlic are among the many things we grow and make from our garden. We have more than we need and enjoy sharing with friends and neighbours.
I’m delighted to welcome Louise Restell as our special guest blogger today. Louise is Head of Public Affairs and CSR for a London city law firm. I first met Louise at a Convergence networking event and we’ve kept in regular touch ever since. I saw Louise again most recently at a lively Big Society debate earlier this week and she got in touch with me the following day with this provocative piece about service in the legal profession. Huge thanks to Louise for putting pen to paper, we hope you enjoy the read. Louise and I would be very keen to hear from you about your experiences of dealing with lawyers, good and not so good.
I love the title of this blog, it seems tailor made for the legal profession. In fact, I was rather surprised that Doug isn’t making a fortune out of law firms desperate to learn how to improve their customer service. Or not, since I know a thing or two about lawyers.
I have decided to take up Doug on his offer to write a guest blog as I was particularly flabbergasted this morning when a colleague told me about some emails he’d received. He is responsible for trying to get our lawyers to understand the new way the profession is regulated, which in a nutshell is about delivering what customers want rather than what lawyers decide to provide.
Following a routine presentation about what the changes will mean in our firm he was challenged over his use of the word ‘customer’. Lawyers, apparently, just have clients. He (and I) would beg to differ. But the stream of emails he received, taking him to task on this apparently semantic point, was extraordinary.
Lawyers do have clients – these are organisations they work with for a number of years and to whom they provide a range of services. They also have customers. Individuals, who don’t want to have an ongoing relationship with a lawyer. In fact they probably don’t even want to know who their lawyer is, they just want to get their compensation, their will or their new house.
The problem is by focussing on what they want to call their customers and providing the service they want to provide, lawyers don’t realise they are, in fact, doing dumb things to customers. It’s a bit like the coffin-makers with the rule that all coffins should be six feet long. They can pat themselves on the back if every coffin they make is, indeed, six feet long. But quite a lot of their tall customers might be a bit annoyed (if they weren’t dead).
Until they realise this, lawyers will continue to get a disproportionately high level of complaints. It’s a bit like going to a restaurant and eating the best steak ever. This won’t be what you remember if it took an hour to arrive, the waiter was rude and a 20 per cent ‘suggested service charge’ is added to your bill. Likewise, you can give fantastic legal advice, but if you are patronising, charge through the nose, bill higher than expected and never return phonecalls then your customers aren’t going to be happy.
We’re continuing our series of HR ghosts and ghouls and tonight it’s the turn of the mummy. When I think of mummies I think of them in the classic horror pose, arms oustretched, shambling along bound in tape and bandages. And it’s the tape which binds these soulless creatures that I want to focus on. The bureaucratic tape which binds organisations and lashes them to the stumbling shambling gait of the mummy.
I enjoyed reading a great conversation started by Ben Eubanks over at UpstartHR recently all about whether companies should have a working through lunch policy. Seriously, lunch policy. I recommend you pop over and read the whole piece, to get you started here’s a snippet provided by Steve Browne:
My question is “Why is the HR person looking to add yet another policy?”
If the behavior isn’t working, or if the employee isn’t doing work, then just TALK TO THEM !!
Sorry to yell, but it blows me away that HR has fallen into such a deep hole when it comes to writing policies. We forget that there are many employees who work for us and not just a few. Most policies are written because of the behavior of a few folks.
And what about dress code policy? I was talking about this with a couple of HR practitioners just recently and one of them said “dress code policy is a great way of showing folks that you don’t trust them with even the most basic things”. Unnecessary bureaucracy and more tape round the mummy. I went to agree and before I could do so – the third member of our conversation violently disagreed. “You have to tell people what to wear or they will just wear what they like”. All I could manage was a head slap of disdain. I slapped my own head, not theirs.
Sometimes my work involves carrying out stakeholder engagement audits. As part of these audit my associates and I talk with lots of staff, and the stories they tell us about unnecessary policies written and implemented to “legislate” against things that haven’t happened and in all likelihood won’t, are eye boggling. I can’t go into detail but things like no alcohol and no toasters (yup – no toasters) are often used to bind the policy mummy even tighter. The tighter the policy, the greater the lack of trust, and this lack of trust is a root cause of people feeling disengaged from their employer. It is damaging and unnecessary.
You may think, I can run faster than the mummy, it’ll never catch me. And you forget – the mummy is undead. It will shamble on until you can run no more and then, and only then will it wrap you in its lunch/dress code/alcohol/toaster bandages. And you will suffocate.
Despite my punk roots I’m not advocating anarchy, and I appreciate the requirement for policy. But surely policy should be stuff that enables work, makes things happen, not stuff that binds and chokes the life from the company?
I’d love to hear from you if you have ever seen mummy HR stumbling along your corridors binding folk with its policy bandages.
