The human and the machine

 

   The best session at CIPD11 by far was on efficiency and performance and was delivered by John Greatrex, Group HR Director at Unipart, and Franceso Mereu, Director, HR, Corporate Planning and CSR at Toyota Motor Europe.

For Greatrex there is a growing perspective that there needs to be more of the Human in HR.  He described the need not just to be lean and efficient, but for this to be combined with employee engagement too.  These are both central to the Unipart Way which includes beliefs about there always being a better way, that no problem is a problem etc, but also that engagement drives performance.

Unipart have some great approaches to support this, eg the communication cell providing a framework for daily 10-15 minute briefings ensuring that structured communication takes place every day.

I also liked the way their engagement survey is dealt with in work teams with the results only being passed up to group level if the team can’t deal with them, or the survey process needs to be improved.

More generally, they attempt to measure the process, not the score.  Eg they don’t compare everyone’s engagement score but look for and spread best practice.  The objective is to identify problems – they don’t want people to disguise them.

For Greatrex, all this is about combining lean tools with an engagement philosophy.

In a similar manner, the Toyota Way is based on continuous improvement and a respect for people with a big focus on teamwork.  This needs mutual trust and respect:

• Setting goals together
• Involving in decision making
• On-going sharing of information.

 

For example, business planning is based on the concept of ‘nemawashi’ or consensus building.  Toyota seek to prepare the ground gradually, building opportunities to work as a team through 20 group discussions with 50 managers walking about – looking at documents, asking clarification questions.  If someone doesn’t feel involved properly they can register their desire to be consulted.  It’s then the relevant department’s responsibility to do this.  This encourages the mindset for people to be involved from the beginning.

Also middle and senior managers’ ratings are aligned across the organisation, ensuring that rewards are based on company-wide vs just departmental interactions and ending a clear message that managers are part of a wider team.

 

I loved the way that people were so central to business strategy in these two examples.

The point came up again later in a session on leadership for the future with John Burgoyne who suggested that leadership shouldn’t be either human relations or management science but a mixture of both - the human and the machine.

And it’s what Marcus Buckingham was talking about in his point about organisational leaders’ challenge being to take what is unique in their people, and themselves, and make it useful (he’s been reading Strategic HCM!).

 

I also thought it was interesting to see this today as well: How social media can make your organization stronger:

“For centuries, we have been intentionally creating organizations that are machinelike — rigid departmental silos, detailed policies and procedures, strict roles and responsibilities, detailed strategic plans, etc.

Becoming a human organization is hard mostly because you’re going against centuries of tradition that have a track record of success. We accomplished amazing things in our mechanically inclined organizations, yet becoming more human requires that we change the way we have been doing things.”

 

Technorati Tags: John Greatrex,Unipart,Franceso Mereu,HR,Corporate Planning,Toyota,CIPD,conference,lean,management,science,human,relations

 

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TRU London: Why does 95% of what we do in HR focus on individuals (when what’s most important is teams)?

 

  I had a good session at the end of the TRU London Masterclasses yesterday (based on the fact most participants suggested at the end of the session that they agreed Social HR is a, if not the, major new challenge for HR.

You can review some of the points I discussed in yesterday’s post.

Today, I’m leading a linked track on HR and Teams during the main unconference.  And this supports a key message from my session yesterday, and one of my points which generated most controversy:

“If the point of performance in most organisations is the team, why is it that 95% of what we do in HR focuses on the individual?”

 

I was challenged on this statement, but I still think it’s correct.  Certainly the point of performance piece is true.

Organisations succeed or fail because of the way individuals work with each other, particularly in teams and also increasingly in networks and communities – NOT because of the way any particular individual, or the sum of all these individuals, perform.

And there’s very little relationships between the absolute quality of individuals who are assembled to be part of a team and the performance of a team that results.  I talked about England’s performance last year but the best sports example is Real Madrid in the Galacticos era.  And I think we can all think of business teams that have suffered the same fate.

And we do tend to focus on individuals in HR.  We treat each person as an individual human resource and we don’t think of how these resources work together as a collective:

• We measure and attempt to manage the performance of individuals
• We reward people in the main for their own individual performance
• We attempt to develop the capabilities of individuals, not those of whole teams (eg their shared mental models, shared understandings etc).

 

Why?  Well for one thing, managing Team Resources is a lot more challenging than managing the individual HR.  We just about understand how to influence individual performance (although there’s still a big disconnect between the way we manage and reward people and what really turns people on – as per Dan Pink and others).  But the truth is we don’t really know what makes teams succeed or fail.  So it’s either not thought about, or it’s parked in the ‘too difficult’ box.

But if it’s as important I suggest, surely doing this can’t be the right response?

This is what I’ll be talking about today.

 

Also see my other posts on TRU.

 

Technorati Tags: Teams,communities,performance,reward,TRU,London,3,2011

 

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Genevieve Glover, Executive Director, HR for AEG Europe: Developing a One Team focus

 

   You already know my Talking HR show, in which I and my co-host Krishna De talk about HR, right?

Well today, I begin a new series of shows, deliberately titled HR Talks Back.  The idea of this is to give HR leaders, located anywhere in the world, the opportunity to talk about something that’s important to them.

We kick off the series with an interview with Genevieve Glover, Executive Director, HR for AEG Europe in which Genevieve talks about developing a one team (‘one tent’) focus.  The show broadcasts at 12.00pm BST on Thursday 8 June and an archive will be available after this time.

• Listen to the show at blogtalkradio
• Subscribe to the show at itunes

 

The show also gives you the opportunity to talk the Genevieve and ask her questions about this one team approach.  The number if you’d like to do this is +1 917 932 1997.

 

Some background

AEG, with its international head office in Los Angeles, is one of the leading sports and entertainment presenters in the world. It owns or operates some of the world’s best arenas and theatres, numerous sports franchises and a collection of companies dedicated to producing, promoting and presenting world-class live entertainment.

Genevieve is responsible for the development and deployment of the HR and Training strategies for the various businesses within the European Group. This includes The O2, the world’s most popular music venue for the last 3 years, and also incorporates businesses within the exhibition, family entertainment and transport sectors. Genevieve is also Chairman of Thames Clippers, the commuter boat service along the Thames and majority owned AEG business.

Genevieve is a Non Executive Director for London Excellence, a not for profit organisation who’s vision is "all organisations in London and beyond will be recognised as performing to world-class excellence standards" and represent AEG Europe as an ‘employer representative’ on the London Accord Employers Coalition board (an employer-facing government initiative set up to enhance employment and skills provision for those furthest away from the labour market. The LEAC has a minimum target of helping an additional 5,000 people into jobs by 2012). Finally, Genevieve was a finalist in the CQI UK Quality Business Leader of the Year Award 2008.

 

Future shows

I’d like to start broadcasting these interviews every couple of weeks, so look out for future shows.  And if you think that you’ve got something important to say on HR and talent management, then do get in touch.

 

Technorati Tags: Genevieve Glover,HR,Director,AEG,The O2,customer service,one team,culture

 

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HR and Communities (Talking HR 029)

   Yes there was a reason why I suddenly did those two Social Advantage posts on communities (1, 2): so that I could refer to them in tonight’s podcast on the role of communities, their importance, their management (or facilitation!), and also on the HR function’s role in supporting them (see this post at Strategic HCM).

For this show, Krishna and I were joined by Claire Boyles from Management Matters.  Thanks a lot, Claire, it was great speaking with you.

You can listen to the archive here.

 

Picture: Community Maturity Model from the Community Roundtable

Technorati Tags: Communityship,Enterprise,2.0,Talking,HR,podcasts,Krishna De,Claire Boyles

 

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Is social learning team learning?

 

   I commented on an excellent post by Mervyn Dinnen, reflecting on social learning at HRevolution, yesterday.

Mervyn asks:

“Maybe if we are to get maximum benefit from Social Learning, especially from our unconferences, networking and crowd sourcing then…the answer may well lie in getting Social before you can get to the Learning…”

And I respond:

“Absolutely. Social learning isn’t just about sitting round with a group of people, it’s connecting with people you have a relationship with. It’s these relationships that give knowledge an added element and which makes the learning deeper than that gained from formal training. If you don’t have relationships with the other people, these need to be developed first, or together. So it’s probably easier in smaller rather than larger groups. But it can be done in larger groups too, depending on the context, ie as long as everyone understands what the objective and approach is, participates in helping to achieve this, and that’s there time to do the social relationship as well as the content learning stuff.”

 

Then last night, I was flicking through a presentation send to me by a friend and partner in India, which included the attached slide.  And I thought, is social learning team learning?

I don’t mean by this that social learning can only be done in a workplace team.  After all, unconferences like HRevolution and ConnectingHR aren’t based on teams, rather just collections of people with common interests.

But perhaps these people do need to think about being in a team – a learning team – in order to maximise the benefits they get out of their social learning?

One in which they need to progress from forming to norming (with a focus on connecting / relating itself as the ‘task’ objective) before they can proceed onto performing ie learning?  What do you think?

 

Also see:

• More more social learning at informatology
• More social learning at informatology
• Google Collaboration
• The future of learning (Talking HR 026)
• Josh Bersin on informal and social learning
• Using social media at CIPD09
• Social Learning (Talking HR 020)
• Learning 2.0

 

Technorati Tags: Social learning,unconference,HRevolution,Connecting,HR,team,Mervyn Dinnen,Bruce Tuckman

 

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