Category Archives: Diversity – EOD

Does diversity add value? What evidence do we have that diversity policies work?

That brash and intimidating humvee called ‘The American Way’

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I have just returned from a week in Pakistan where I taught strategic L&D Masterclasses in Karachi and Lahore.  When I received the original invitation, some months ago, I thought really long and hard before I decided to accept but still viewed the impending trip with some trepidation (especially after reading the advice from the UK foreign office). This was one of those trips you do not do just for the money.  As an evidence-based manager I wanted to see it and experience it for myself; following the principle of genchi genbutsu that I learned from Toyota.  I am really glad I did because this was one of the most rewarding trips of my entire career.  Both groups were amongst the most intelligent, most eager to learn, most open-minded and most mature in their thinking of all the groups I have ever worked with anywhere in the world. Maybe ironically, dire political and economic circumstances can somehow bring out the best in people rather than the worst?  Oh, I forgot to add, they were incredibly polite and a real pleasure to work with. I can also recommend flying PIA.

Did you just notice something as you read that opening paragraph?  Stop for a second and consider the perspective I appear to be taking – did it not sound incredibly patronising?  Why shouldn’t the people in Pakistan be better than some of the best people I have worked with; in fact why should they not already be better than me and anyone else in the West?  So let me immediately apologise to anyone from Pakistan who I might have already offended.  My praise is genuine and does not come from a place of assumed superiority, quite the opposite, it comes from a heartfelt and humble desire to learn with and from the best. It comes from the best traditions of the real gurus in the East – where the Sanskrit term for “teacher” or “master” originates.  The real wisdom of the guru surely comes from their humility and acute awareness of their own ignorance whilst trying to contemplate the world around them, in order to make sense of it. This is why those who seek true enlightenment have often travelled to the Indian subcontinent.

Maybe that is why I now feel more enlightened. My trip to this dangerous neck of the woods made me start thinking about what was happening back at the ranch.  Having worked in HR for over 30 years, and taught many management classes, I always reacted against the notion of such a thing as a ‘management guru’ and particularly from the country that seems to think it has more than anyone else – America.  I am also conscious, particularly these days, that any hint of ‘anti-Americanism’ could get me into trouble because that is associated with those who blindly follow an opposing ideology.  Yet that is precisely my point, any ideology that is followed blindly always ends up in intimidation and that is not good from a human capital management perspective. So what is this ideology called the American Way and is that ultimately in America’s interest, never mind anyone else’s?

Here is my take on it. By definition, ideologies are simplistic and dogmatic – the less thinking you have to do the better.  The profit motive that supposedly underpins capitalism in the US is the simplest ideology in the world – you invent or make something, if customers like it they buy it, you make a profit, they are satisfied, everyone is happy.  If it were that simple though why do gated communities start springing up in the most affluent areas?  If the sole motive of profit* is such a great way for us all to get along why does it have to split us apart?  If the people you have to employ, to make things customers want, are not 100% behind your philosophy then what are your chances of achieving your own simplistic ends?

The American Way certainly has some great strengths.  America welcomes talent and is generally a democratic meritocracy: that fits perfectly with getting the best value from human capital.  It has also done a great job, thus far, of providing Americans with great wealth and a very high GDP per head: let’s not mention the US’s huge debts or inequalities though.  In short, no ideology can be that simplistic and, the way the world is shifting at the moment, simplistic ideologies are snapping under the weight of changing paradigms.  So anyone who has learned their management practice from the American Way needs to think again but the dogma is so deeply-rooted in the American management psyche it tends to want to run over everything that it deems to be in its way.  It is the philosophy of ‘my way or the highway’ – it’s just a big, brash humvee. Silly me – I always thought humvee had something to do with humans in vee-hicles.  How wrong I was.

One extremely successful company that embodies the entirety of the American Way – its best and worst traits – is Google.  It was founded by two very bright people, whose ancestors may have emigrated to the US, who received an excellent education and used their brains to innovate. I truly bless the day Google allowed me to reduce my research time down to a fraction of a second, it could possibly be the greatest innovation of all time, benefitting everyone in the world. I might even go so far as to say I don’t mind a company holding a monopoly and literally ‘printing money’ – as long as that monopoly is not abused. Then I have to keep reminding myself that no social, political and economic system can ever be that straightforward.  Google is megalomania.  I don’t ever remember being asked whether a Google vee-hicle could trundle down my street and take photographs of me and my house.  Worse still, no doubt the CIA do some of their research using Google and I’m now on their anti-American list (read to the end fellas, it ain’t that black and white). I only want the good bits of Google thank you and the only good bits will be the democratically-sanctioned bits – so how anti-American is Google?!

I can even understand how the halo effect comes into play.  High profits lead the unthinking to assume that the management at Google must be equally talented and effective but I have seen no evidence from Google that they have any idea what good management means, never mind evidence-based management.  In fact techies are famous for their lack of interpersonal and other managerial qualities (Google acknowledge this) so let us think really hard and choose our evidence very carefully before we jump to any conclusions.

What conclusion would you draw from the The New York Times (12th March, 2011) article entitled “Google’s Quest to Build a Better Boss”?  Here, in my humble but evidence-based opinion, are some of my own tentative conclusions.  Its head of HR, Laszlo Bock, does not know how to build better bosses, presumably even after many years of working in the field called HR, which is supposed to be good at managing and developing people.  What does that tell me about the profession of HR – is it all smoke and mirrors?  Maybe.  It is more likely that the problem has always been one of measurement, how do you measure what makes a good boss?  Apparently nobody in HR knows, that is presumably why Bock recruited Prasad Setty (a mathematician) to crunch some ‘HR analytics’.

‘HR analytics’ is a new piece of HR jargon, invented in America to pretend that they are evidence-based, that does not stand up to the slightest scrutiny.  It is based on the very old ideas of HR measurement ‘guru’ Jac Fitz-Enz, who received SHRM’s blessing, despite causing HR to veer off the road a long time ago.  It has yet to climb out of that ditch because of its inability to admit it was wrong.  The same psyche is compelling Lee Webster, SHRM’s HR standards director, to jump into the driving seat of America’s ANSI humvee and take over the chair of ISO committee TC260 on international HR standards.  This is the downside of the unthinking American Way.  HR at Google is the disease run rampant in my view.  Should Google shareholders be afraid of what Bock is doing? Yes. Are current American HR practices a threat to the best aspects of the American Way?  Most definitely. Maybe the CIA ought to be investigating its own HR department first for signs of un-American activities?  It gets even worse – we are actually witnessing the birth of the next big HR fad.

According to the NY Times article “D. Scott DeRue, a management professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, applauds Google for its data-driven method for management.”  I don’t think an evidence-based management professor would be applauding Google; they would be advising serious caution.  Even if Google were good at this the professor should be saying don’t try and copy Google.  GM tried to do that with Toyota and look what happened to them because they did not (and still do not) fully understand Toyota’s Eastern philosophy.  So what is already being endorsed and disseminated in the headlines as leading edge practice (without any evidence of profit) could actually be worst practice.  Such American management practices can so easily become a deadly virus.  They already are. Go now and check your competence framework and calculate the damage it has already done.  Better still, go back and check every single, non-evidence-based, ‘HR best practice’ you have ever copied from all of your similarly non-evidence-based HR peers.

Alternatively, take a trip to Pakistan and meet some of the thoughtful people there who do not pretend that they know all the answers; who did not bat an eyelid when I said, on day one, that we were going to throw HR best practice out the window and who did not have to rise to the challenge of thinking for themselves because they already do. They readily accepted my advice that unless you can see the sense in something yourself you will not be able to get anyone else to.  More importantly, although most of them worked in commercial companies that had to make a profit, I sensed that they go to work for a much higher purpose than pure profit.  That might not be the American Way, it might not even be the highway but it is certainly the most intelligent way.

*See ‘The Value Motive’ for a more humane alternative

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The best of all cultures

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I’m always acutely aware that one of the dangers of adopting an evidence-based approach is leaving oneself open to the accusation of being negative.  This is a real paradox because what might appear to be a very critical perspective is, in fact, the opposite.  Being evidence based means taking a very positive stance with a very clear purpose to improve all of our lives.  Yesterday I was with a client where I met people from all corners of the world and I was immediately struck by the ‘family’ atmosphere but, more importantly, a family in to which I was warmly welcomed.  I don’t feel this very often and it is exactly the sort of thing that organisation developers would want to bottle if they could.

What was the real insight for me though was the way this company was growing and assimilating different cultures and yet, at the same time, apparently maintaining this ‘one family’ feel.  It inspired me – wouldn’t it be wonderful if an organisation really managed to take the best of all the cultures represented among its workforce?  If you wanted to do that with your organisation what would be the best bits from each?

As someone born in the UK, from Irish parentage, I am happy to start the ball rolling with what I believe are some of the best aspects of the cultures in which I grew up.  From the UK I would offer tolerance as one of our most attractive features.  There is plenty of evidence that the UK is an incredibly tolerant society, which includes allowing opinionated so-and-so’s like me to vent.  Of the many things I could have chosen from my Irish heritage I would take self-deprecation; it is very easy to get on with people who do not take themselves too seriously and prefer informality to ceremony: my own family would never allow anyone to have pretensions or to regard themselves as ‘better’ than anyone else.

I imagine there is not a nation on earth that could not offer something to strengthen these family ties so what would you bring from your own culture?

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International Women’s Day should celebrate women’s common sense

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Although an argumentative soul I try not to get caught up in arguments over women’s rights because I hold the very simple view that every human being should have the same rights – end of story – it is not a gender issue for me.  My two daughters and son were all treated exactly the same – no preference either way.  No doubt some ardent feminist reading this might accuse me of all sorts of biases, and my own grown-up kids will definitely have their own perspectives on their upbringing, but in my mind at least I am doing my best.

Anyway, today I want to make an exception because of two recent events.  One was International Women’s Day (IWD) on 8th March – to which I would just like to offer my most sincere, if belated, support and encouragement to all the women around the world who are abused, treated as second class citizens or in any way face unfair treatment; whether that be by men or other women.  The second was a conversation I had with a female client from a male-dominated part of the world, who for me is a shining example of someone doing their best, in a very professional and yet quietly passionate way, to change outmoded attitudes. Neither of those events led me to write this though.

The spark was the juxtaposition between these events and an article I read today by the HR director at Enterprise Rent-a-car.  It appeared under the same umbrella of IWD but is, I believe, an insult to women’s intelligence, a disservice to the cause of women’s rights and totally inappropriate for celebrating IWD.  It encapsulates everything that is wrong with the world of ill-conceived, mis-guided, HR-driven, diversity policies perpetrated by HR directors who have little common sense (and that includes HR men of course) and yet the same company is showcased on the IWD site where the Chairman and CEO, Andy Taylor is quoted as saying: -

 “Enterprise is fully committed to providing every employee with an inclusive workplace that offers the respect, training and opportunities to succeed. That’s simply who we are as a company, who we are as individuals and how we will continue to build our success in the 21st century.”

Andy is absolutely correct in my view (and Enterprise is a business I used to admire) because there is nothing in his quote that refers only to women – so why does his HR director think that it is in keeping with this policy for women at Enterprise to have their own special mentoring scheme?

If you search in Leigh Lafever-Ayer’s article for any evidence that mentoring women provided any benefits to the business you will not find it.  In fact I am not at all sure why Leigh is so keen on mentoring women; her motives seem unclear and initiatives that do plan for specific outcomes can lead to serious, unintended consequences.  There is a reference to staff retention (but no evidence on relative retention rates of men and women) and apparently Enterprise’s

“latest employee opinion survey showed that our female workers are now slightly more engaged overall than their male counterparts.”

– so what, Leigh?

Regular readers might now accuse me of being sexist having only recently pointed out that a very senior HR woman at Tesco was also talking absolute nonsense in the guise of ‘employee engagement’ but I would remind them that the ‘Most-Disastrous-Load-of-Nonsense Award’ on this site is still currently held by a man – Neil Roden.  So no prejudice or bias intended here – HR idiocy is readily evident in both genders while common sense is rare.  So IWD needs to be careful; if it becomes associated with a lack of common sense it will set back the cause of women’s rights and we cannot afford to let that happen for one, single second.

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“We’re alright as long as we’re all wrong.”

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The Emperor’s new clothes by Thorarinn Leifsson www.totil.com

Time and time again this silent mantra, this fatal assumption that there is safety in numbers, has been HR and Learning’s undoing.  While you are all comparing management competence models no one will be stupid enough to break ranks and admit that they don’t work.

If you all talk about ROI and profess to use the same 4-level model of evaluation you can just about maintain the pretence that your training is a good investment.

Using 360° feedback might mean you all end up disappearing up your own orifices but hey, while you are all up there together, you can pretend that there is some illumination in the darkness.

You can all keep your bosses happy by sending them on expensive leadership programmes that help them to feel good about themselves while masking their inadequacies.

You dare anyone to challenge your diversity policies and ignore the very obvious evidence that there can be a serious and problematic downside.

Well, maybe your dirty little secrets were OK once, while everyone kept their mouths shut, but you were bound to be outed by evidence in the end weren’t you?  Now what do you do?

You could plead ignorance perhaps; although that is no defence in the eyes of the law.  Be a bit difficult to now say you did not realise that training without identified business needs is nonsense.  You could throw yourself on the mercy of your ‘customers’ when they realise you have made a fool out of them as well?  I don’t fancy your chances though, do you?

I suppose you could use the same tactic again of jumping on any passing bandwagon (HR analytics?) in the forlorn hope that it might either bamboozle people further or at least buy you a bit of time?  You haven’t learned have you?  That new fad is bound to suffer the same fate as all the others eventually.

Old HR habits die hard don’t they?  If you are only comfortable being part of the crowd then at least recognise that the numbers game is going in the opposite direction now.  The façade of HR convention has finally crumbled and no one will be rushing to join your shrinking minority.  Also, you are up against much more powerful competition than ever before.  The evidence-based can prick every one of your non-evidence-based bubbles with absolute ease and impunity; one at a time.  That can be a very painful process.

There is only one way out.  Come clean.  Get it off your chest.  Start working from evidence.  It’s a lot simpler and much less painful than what you are doing now.  The real beauty is that you don’t even have to explain yourself to your customers after all – they are no more evidence-based than you are – why do you think it’s called evidence-based management? – and you will be one page ahead.

Whatever criticism they might want to hurl at you is really just self-criticism.  They always knew your competence dictionary was unadulterated gibberish so why did they pretend to support it?  They know they still have serious problems with managing performance (that’s their dirty little secret) so they will welcome anything that makes their lives easier: evidence-based performance management will certainly do that.

Go on – you know you don’t like feeling naked – go and get some clothes on.  Get some evidence.

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A travesty of EB-HR principles – A book review of Transformative HR* by John Boudreau and Ravin Jesuthasan

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Book titles can be very misleading and we are all used to reading management books that never come close to delivering on what they promise but I think this book deserves a special award for – ‘The Most Perverse use of Evidence’.

Its full title is “Transformative HR. How Great Companies Use Evidence-Based Change for Sustainable Advantage” and, by an amazing feat of inverse logic, offers the Royal Bank of Scotland  as one of its ‘great companies’ – a too-big-to-fail bank that had to be sustained by UK taxpayers because it collapsed in 2008.

Such stark evidence of failure is just brushed aside by the two authors who are blinded by the need to get this sales brochure from Towers Watson out into the burgeoning market of evidence-based HR before it is too late.  The critical reader will see that it shows serious deficiencies in the claims made by its protagonists – but then Towers Watson (or at least Watson Wyatt as was) and the University of Southern California both have previous form in this respect.

According to a 2001 Watson Wyatt survey of more than 400 US and Canada-based companies, in support of their earlier doomed product – the Human Capital Index -

“there was a clear relationship between the effectiveness of a company’s human capital and shareholder value creation. This relationship we found is so clear that a significant improvement in 30 key HR practices is associated with a 30% increase in market value.” 

This is typical correlation-speak passed off as causation but actuaries like Watson know better so they had to admit, in a similar report they produced in Europe (“HCI – European Survey Report 2000”), that while their data in North America

“… demonstrates a very strong correlation between effective people practices and shareholder value, on its own it does not prove a causal link”.

So don’t be surprised if you get different answers from different people in the same firm. I guess they realised us Europeans were not so easily fooled and so had to come clean; all the while hoping their HR clients were either too disinterested or innumerate to notice their contradictions. If you visit Towers Watson’s site today you will be treated to similar double-speak in a video from Ravin Jesuthasan himself.

Meanwhile, over in Southern California  John Boudreau, who proves that the title ‘professor’ brings with it no guarantees of academic rigour, should still know better than to say RBS clarified (p.208) -

“…the causal connections between people data and business data”

when the evidence he presents does no such thing; but then he comes from the same ‘misleading correlation’ school as Ed Lawler III who happily offers his endorsement that these are-

“two of the most respected thinkers in HR”

- without, of course, offering any evidence to back up such an assertion.

Presumably they are respected by the sort of people who provide the other testimonials for the dust jacket?  People like Stephen Corrone of Sara Lee, Brian Schipper of Cisco, Lynn Tetrault of AstraZeneca (“chairperson of the board, HR people and strategy” no less), Elaine Arden of Royal Bank of Scotland (do I detect a note of bias here?) and David Farrant of Nomura; all of whom don’t seem to mind risking their careers by associating themselves, and their employers, with such obvious nonsense.  Maybe they are just deluding themselves that this has something to do with evidence-based HR or possibly it is the sort of flannel that got them to where they are in the first place?

Perhaps it is just what their CEO’s want to hear: which is much more worrying. CEO’s of very large companies can be incredibly illogical and downright crass when it comes to strategic HR matters.  Apparently the current CEO of RBS, Stephen Hester (weho is otherwise well respected), is getting in on the act of using the wrong evidence for the wrong purpose (p.210) –

“A good deal of the communication about results of employee listening (sic) comes directly from Hester, the CEO.  That sends a message to staff that RBS takes the information gathered from employees seriously.”

Yes I think it does and it also tells them, and any investment analysts watching, that he has taken his eye off the ball of transforming the bank into one that can relieve UK taxpayers of their present burden (all £45 billion of it).  Even the CEOs of successful companies can make themselves look particularly stupid when desperately trying to be politically correct, rather than evidence-based.  Here is a quote from CEO of Coca Cola, Muhtar Kent (pp 138-139) –

“I looked at who was buying our products and found that 70 percent of our shoppers were women.  Then I looked at our workforce …. and saw a huge mismatch”

- such imperfect logic and superficial analysis led Coca Cola to create

“several programs to attract, retain and develop women leaders including the Women’s Leadership Council”. 

I am sure the women of Coca Cola are not at all patronised, and the men not insulted – at least those who were not removed to make way for the women, by such inane and misguided thinking about diversity.  Presumably they also do not mind having to have their own council or being allowed to break through the glass ceiling by dint of the fact that ‘women buy Coke’, rather than through their own efforts or abilities.  If this logic holds and women stop buying Coke does this mean the policy will go into reverse?

The architect of all HR data gathering at RBS is one Greg Aitken, who was amassing meaningless HR data at RBS as far back as 2001 – has no one told him the bank has since crashed – and did he have anything to do with it?  His sort of data has as much to do with business strategy as train-spotting has to do with the punctuality of trains.  This obsession with so-called ‘HR analytics’ completely misses the point of EB-HR and has spawned Mickey Mouse jobs for a new breed of HR-analytical nerd at respected companies like Walt Disney Studios (my apologies Disney for that awful pun but you wrote the job advertisement).

This book is a travesty – especially for those of us who want to raise standards of professionalism in HR by basing our decisions on evidence of value. For anyone who falls into that category I do have one recommendation for you – buy a copy of this book and send it straight to your competitors, if they are gullible enough it will transform them into misguided, data-chasing automatons while you steal a march on them by putting proper evidence to good use – value creation.

*“Transformative HR. How Great Companies Use Evidence-Based Change for Sustainable Advantage” John Boudreau (Professor of Management & Organization at the Marshall School, University of Southern California) and Ravin Jesuthasan (MD of Towers Watson’s Talent Management Practice)

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Equal opportunities can have unintended consequences

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One of the fundamental notions that underpins evidence-based management is that one should always look at the specific context before trying to apply a generic (HR) policy.  If you need convincing of this then look no further than the application of equal opportunities policies to women entering the medical profession. In the UK the number of women entering medical school rose from 492 in 1960/61 to 4,583 in 2008/09.  By 2017 the majority of doctors are likely to be women (this could of course be more to do with merit than any explicit equal opps policy). However, for very obvious reasons (motherhood being one of them) this has engendered some significant shifts in the gender profile of the medical profession as well as a disproportionate representation of genders in various areas (especially those becoming GP’s).  This is a statement of fact – pure evidence – but should not be read as the author taking a particular stance or view on equal opportunities policies, or the relative merits of male versus female doctors. However, the financial and practical implications of the present situation are significant and will have to be addressed at some stage.

I now set this difficult and complex issue as an assignment for my MBA HR Strategy class.  There are at least two main concerns.

It costs approximately £250,000 to train a doctor. For an annual intake of 10,000 that would be £2.5 billion.  If we assume that each doctor works a full career and, let us just say for the sake of argument, that their work repays the UK economy 5 times their training cost (net), in terms of better health outcomes, then we can attach a net benefit to the UK of £12.5 billion. Following this simple logic (the evidence-based manager always tries to construct a causal hypothesis) for every doctor that does not work a full career (i.e. leaves the profession, takes time out etc.) there will be a direct and causal drop in the value created from this group of doctors. In short, having more women doctors could result in a bigger fall in value than just employing men.

In addition, women doctors tend (according to the evidence) to require more flexible working arrangements than men, which places further possible strains on planning and delivering healthcare services.

So, two of the key (and deliberately provocative) questions for the MBA class are: -

  1. Should equal opportunities policies apply to the training of doctors?
  2. If so, what other strategic HR policies should be introduced in order to provide the most valuable solution?

This is not a hypothetical conundrum it is a very real and live debate that has been going on in the UK’s NHS for at least 5 years and there is no easy answer.

For what it is worth, the evidence-based manager does not have a magic wand but they do have the next best thing, a clearly thought out, coherent approach that aims to provide the most valuable answer to whatever specific objective is set.  So in this case the objective could be: -

  • The best overall care of patients (output and outcome measures) – in which case the evidence-based argument would have to include the relative performance of male versus female doctors (i.e. if women perform twice as well as men then they will produce as much value in half a career span)
  • The lowest average cost of training a doctor – a very different (input) objective – which might lead towards a policy where all doctors have to work long enough to repay their initial training cost – a very different HR policy perspective with huge ramifications (e.g. the whole principle of paying back training costs in any publicly funded role)
  • A set proportion of women in medicine – a typical diversity target – which has already led to the idea of quotas being mooted.  Jill Kirby, director of the Centre for Policy Studies was quoted in the Sunday Times (9 May 2010) as saying -“Clearly it’s unacceptable to start imposing quotas but we have to recognise this is one of the downsides of equal opportunities”.

The only thing that can be said with some certainty is that the current situation just highlights that there is no such thing as an automatically beneficial policy when it comes to HR strategy. Also, if I get any miraculous answers from the MBA class I will post them here!

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EBHR Critique – Cambridgeshire County Council – People Strategy 2006-10

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In order to follow this critique you will need to view Cambs CC PeopleStrategy 2006-10

It is also worth mentioning that, as part of the research for this critique, other HR ‘strategies’ were reviewed including the strategies for the county councils of Gloucestershire, Somerset and Wiltshire – all of which are not markedly different to Cambridgeshire – and they would all regard their strategies as being based on commonly accepted HR practice.  So Cambridgeshire is being used here as a single representation of what the CIPD would regard as a generally, acceptable approach.

Let us look at each section of this document and ask where does it refer directly to any evidence of impact or value added.

Foreword

Nothing remarkable or unusual here.  A general coverage of HR issues and declarations of very broad intentions so we should not expect to see any specific evidence presented yet. There is one reference to wanting to be ‘Employer of first choice’ and it would be interesting to hear from Cambridgeshire Council Members how they would ever produce evidence that they have managed to achieve this? Maybe they should just concentrate on “ensuring that we can continue to deliver high quality public services, at low cost” which would certainly qualify as meaningful evidence, if they could show a before and after picture based on baseline measures.

Introduction

This is still a statement of intent rather than specifics but already some assumptions, based on questionable evidence, start to creep in. For example in –

“1.6 Employers who are winning the battles in ‘the war for talent’ are investing in their people. Continuous learning and development is a key factor for many people. In local government we have a strong tradition of developing people…;”

What does ‘winning the battles in the war for talent’ actually mean in terms of evidence?

It continues by recognising that they need to produce better evidence by ensuring -

“that learning and development is aligned more effectively to business needs”.

but there is no indication of how they might do that.  In fact they would have to adopt a fully fledged, evidence-based methodology to do so.

Unfortunately the following sections –

‘2. Vision and Values’

and

‘3. Strategic objectives and principles’

- still resort to using very generalised phrases and so cannot be pinned down in terms of evidence.

4. People Strategy

We should expect something more concrete to appear here but the phraseology is still very nebulous and starts to make some very non-evidence-based leaps of logic and faith. For example –

“These five strategic objectives are founded upon the need to achieve equality and celebrate diversity within our workforce.”

This might be a laudable aim but in the absence of what this means in practice, or the logic behind it, how will the Council produce evidence that demonstrates it has succeeded in ‘celebrating diversity’?

5. Resourcing the Council

It’s time now for a specific strategic objective. Maybe simple staff turnover figures in 2006, and what is planned for 2010, would suffice as basic evidence. A more complex measure might be much more useful though.  How about the number of high performers the council wants to retain? Unfortunately the opportunity to include this high level evidence is missed and the language remains non-specific and sections …..

6. Developing the Council

to

9. Reward and recognition

…. continue in the same vein. All statements of good intentions and process but the document is no clearer on outputs or outcomes that will result from this People ‘Strategy’.  So far this is a non-evidence-based document. So we wait with baited breath for…

10. Evaluation and Review of the Strategy

… only to be told that

“Recognition of effective people management and development approaches by external inspectors, such (as) the Audit Commission, Ofsted, the Commission for Social Care Inspection, etc.”

So the HR Director cannot assess his People Strategy and expects an outside body to do it for him.  If HR cannot measure itself what chance do these non-HR qualified bodies have of providing evidence?

This is not a strategy.  It is a statement of ill-defined intent. Motherhood and apple pie rhetoric that has no place in a properly evidence-based strategic approach to managing people.  Any action plans, policies and procedures that stem from this ‘strategy’ are bound to be unfocused and largely ineffective in bringing about the significant and continuous improvements that are required.

4 out of 10

For personal development linked to this topic visit the Consummate Professional Series

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