People centricity, obliquity and engagement ~ Strategic Human Capital Management (HCM) Blog

Thursday 5 March 2015

People centricity, obliquity and engagement

NGA and Ceridian have been head to head over the last couple of days with conferences in Granada and London. I've been in Granada but I've been following the tweets from #Cconf15 too. There seem to have been some excellent sessions, particularly from Kate Russell of the BBC's Click on the opportunities for new technology, and from the ever insightful CRF.

However, I did strongly disagree with the CRF's Mike Haffenden regarding the tweet I've shown above.

As you might have seen, I've been posting about the need for people centricity in learning, but this same focus is needed across the full spectrum of HR. It's good to see that Josh Bersin is behind this agenda too:

But if there was one area that shouts out the need for a people centric stance it's got to be engagement.

Why? Well if you don't do this, if you support Mike and Rob Briner's desire to do engagement to fix something in the business then you're not going to get engagement.

This type of engagement would be better called manipulation and it's just not engaging!

I think Brian Solis expressed this point well as well. If we carry on trying to engage people fto fix something in the business, we're going to keep on these results:

1. We aren't actually trying to inspire employees in our day-to-day work even though we say we do.

2. We don't really know what employees value or how they truly want to work yet we make investments and changes as if we are in touch with them.

3. We force employees through systems, processes, and exercises that were invented in the mid-to-late 20th century.

And we'll deserve the title of 'Human Resistance' too.

The way to meet Mike's business objectives is to focus on engagement for its own sake. Create happy employees. Then you'll generate a better business as an oblique outcome too.