Where business and the arts meet, making work better together.
Unless you’ve been on Mars for the last twenty four hours, it can’t have escaped your attention that TheHRD has left the building. He’s stopped blogging. Not quite sure where I’m going to get my swearing fix from now but I’ll survive.
I wish him well in his future endeavours, as I would wish anyone who has shown me kindness the same thing.
I’d like to mark the occasion, and indeed any occasion where someone has decided to move on, with a little verse. I hope you like it.
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.
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?
So what would make someone pull out a guitar and try singing a song he’d never played or sung before, written just an hour or two earlier? Did someone say stupidity? Seriously folks – the answer is simple (not stupid). The answer is encouragement.
I was privileged to get myself down to the latest ConnectingHR tweetup last Monday. There was a great party atmosphere and I enjoyed catching up with some familiar faces and was excited to meet new people too.
I tried putting off the inevitability of leaving I was enjoying myself so much, but Southern Trains waits for no man. On went my coat, I picked up my guitar bag and went to leave. “Surely you’re not going without a song for us?”. And the next thing I was surfing a wave of encouragement and massacring a version of Johnny Cash’s 25 minutes to go, rewritten for the HR community.
Encouragement is very powerful stuff. When I get together with folks in the ConnectingHR community I get a sense of a great movement being co-created. It’s fun, inspiring and I believe this community is really starting to help folks to make work better. Who would have thought that HR could be such great fun? Brilliant!
Thanks to Julia Davies for holding and shaking the words. Thanks to Martin Couzins for shooting the vid. There are some great pics from the evening on his blog too.