Doug Shaw

HR Cupcakes

My current (not currant!) client is having a fund raising bake sale tomorrow. At the end of last week I overheard a couple of the HR peeps talking. They were worried they may be short of cakes.

Earlier this weekend I spotted a fantastic batch of baking by Katie, aka @HRHopeful. Katie inspired me to spend this Sunday doing something I haven’t done for years. I’m reliably informed that these taste pretty good. I hope they help my client hit their fund raising target tomorrow.

Even consultants can be nice guys…sometimes.

Update: In case you are interested, there are plenty more hrcupcakes out there. This montage was kindly put together by @MJCarty over at XpertHR. Enjoy.

Update: Monday morning. I’m on the train into London. The phone rings. It’s Carole – is she calling to say thanks for the miniature home made valentine?

Miniature Home Made Valentine Cards. Lots of patience - lots of rhinestones.

Nope. Carole is calling me to tell me the cakes I made are sitting in their box in the hallway, d’oh! A slap to the forehead moment. Fortunately I’m only one stop down the line so I make a snap decision to get off the train – dash back home and grab the cakes. I’m just about to leave for London….again. Wonder what I’ve forgotten this time?

Happy Valentine.

Vampire HR

The #zombiehr series continues…

Oh happy day! The UK civil service has just published its 2010 staff survey results. 325,119 people (62% of the 528,729 who were invited) took part. What did they tell us? Well for starters 32% believe “I have the opportunity to contribute my views before decisions are made that affect me”. A whopping 38% of the people who replied believe that senior management will take action based on these survey results, and 27% believe change is managed well in their organisation. What that says in relation to achieving the seismic changes that are about to hit the civil service is anyone’s guess. Pick a number – and make it a low one. There are more questions and answers in the survey than you can shake a stick at. Each one of them registers considerably lower on my interest scale than the last.

I posted a link to these results over on David Zinger’s Employee Engagement Network. Jean Douglas was kind enough to get in touch. She notes:

You have to wade through the methodology to find out that the engagement index is calculated in a manner different than what you might think – I am still trying to understand what they did – and this is my field.

Here is their description:

The employee engagement index is calculated as a weighted average of the response to the five employee engagement questions and ranges from 0 to 100. An index score of 0 indicates all respondents strongly disagree to all five engagement questions and a score of 100 represents all respondents strongly agree to all five engagement questions. The 2010 benchmark is the median (midpoint) engagement index of the 103 organisations that participated in the CSPS 2010.

The engagement score is listed as 56%; however, the “%” is misleading. There is no 56% of something. The score is simply 56 (the highest number is 100 – which does not automatically mean it is a percent). It could have been from a range of scores running from 0 to 157).

They have also “mooshed” together the scores in a department (“moosh” is my new statistical term when numbers are added and divided to come up with another difficult to understand index).

They missed some real opportunities here to get at some good predictive results. .

The individual departmental results are more meaningful (except for the engagement score) as they have not done all that mooshing.

Thanks Jean. So basically the civil service is frigging around with numbers and mooshing stuff. That figures.

Beyond the survey we find…the initial findings. The initial findings – there’s a title to stir the soul. The initial findings are about the rationale behind the survey and why it is important to measure engagement. Apparently it is important to measure engagement because:

Engaged employees in the UK take an average of 2.7 sick days per year, the disengaged 6.2 days (Gallup Research, 2003)

59% of engaged employee say their work “brings out creative ideas”, compared to just 3% of disengaged employees (Gallup Research, 2003)

70% of engaged employees indicate that they have a good understanding of how to meet customer needs, compared to 17% of nonengaged employees (Right Management Research, 2006)

Branches of Standard Chartered bank with high levels of engagement have a 16% higher profit margin than branches where it is low (evidence submitted to MacLeod and Clarke, 2009)

Improving engagement levels in branches of the Co-op supermarket has been estimated to save the organisation £600,000 per annum from reduced food wastage. (evidence submitted to MacLeod and Clarke, 2009)

Rotten vegetables aside – this whole project is dull and unimaginitive. Trying to measure engagement sucks. Sucks like a vampire. It sucks cost and it sucks time ( I estimate that the completion of the survey alone took over 6,000 person days). And having gone to all the trouble to measure – the evidence shows us that few believe action will be taken, fewer still believe that any action taken will be managed well. This sucks. Sucks in a way that the good Count Dracula himself would be proud of.

Stop measuring engagement and just start doing it.

Complete Control – A Total Illusion

Last summer I was in conversation with a senior manager in a global company. He was stressed. The guy simply had too much work on and didn’t know what to do. I met him again a few weeks later and having taken the difficult decision to talk to his boss and tell her that he couldn’t cope, he seemed more relaxed. She had responded by helping to reprioritise things and importantly, together they had agreed to stop a couple of tasks. Of course the decision he took shouldn’t be difficult but we have a culture of generally trying to cope with things in the world of work (and this is exacerbated when the fear of losing your job is doing the rounds).

Two weeks ago over on our Facebook page there was a response to an earlier post I wrote titled Busy Sucks. The Facebook note read, “Hey Doug, I’m busy & not as productive as I’d like. But with 1200 job cuts I guess I’m going to be even busier. And even less productive. Thank heavens the Govt cuts aren’t going to affect front line services. Yay! [ironic cheer]”. To our contributor Nigel I say – hand back what’s not important, what doesn’t add value to the plan. Stay sane.

The words Complete Control written in Chinese

I was talking with a friend last week who had boldly decided to hand back a piece of work to the business. This difficult decision meant my friend can now concentrate on doing a manageable bunch of stuff well, rather than trying to do too much. I applaud this.

HR has an important role to play in helping people to manage work volumes, particularly in the public sector where there is such pressure to cut staff without cutting front line services (as Nigel highlighted above). Worryingly, in the recent experience of TheHRD and other commentators on his blog, the reputation for managing this critical balance is not good.

We can only control so much – very often far less than we believe. And I don’t think that trying to control and keep hold of stuff, or taking on too much stuff is the way to a purposeful, flowful workstyle, do you?

I’d be interested to hear from you if you have experiences of people having this rebalancing conversation successfully or otherwise?