Little Satisfaction from Zero Hours

Zero hour contracts are back in the news today (the picture above - not my best look! - is from my interview about them on BBC News).  The reporting started earlier in New Zealand where the contracts have been abolished, and the continued, but for rather different reasons, here in the UK where the number of employees working on them has increased 15% over the last year.

The Office for National Statistics suggests this number is now 800,000 people, or 2.5% of the working population.  However their suggestion is growth may not have been so high as these figures suggest because the contracts are now better known and the response may just be a result of people tuning into the term.

That's partly supported by Glassdoor's findings that 20% of unemployed people don't understand what the contracts are about (research completed before the ONS figures).  However Glassdoor also found that 25% of unemployed people have been offered a ZH contract and that about half have taken the offer.  That suggests a substantially higher number of people will be on ZH contracts and that the result of not understanding the term is that the ONS is understating not overstating the growth figures.

That matters because as I've posted previously, most of the people who have taken on ZH contracts feel they have had to do so because they needed the money or for other requirements.  A much smaller proportion of people value the flexibility they provide.  This contrasts with CIPD findings but Glassdoor has got real vs just survey data on its side ie if you look through Glassdoor comments on ZH contracts it's quite clear that people with them are no where near as satisfied with their employment as those on traditional full or part time contracts are.

These examples were published in the Daily Mail today:

• "Never worked longer than a 4 hour shift because they didn't want to have to give me a break."

• "The 0 hour contract is bad because you can end up not getting work for days, or even weeks."

• A part-time shop worker described the contracts as a "nightmare", saying staff wanted four-hour contracts to be doubled.

If you think these comments are biased just check the Twitter stream for a search on zero hour contracts (ignore the tweets from New Zealand).

We can debate the pros and cons of ZHCs but the bigger issue for employers at least is the way they're perceived so negatively, whether this is fair or not.  Whilst this is the case they're unlikely to play a role in improving employment flexibility and instead are more likely to be contributing to a continuation of the UK's low-commitment, low-productivity economy.

For more on this debate, here are some of my comments in the Guardian:

“The most common reason that unemployed people turn down zero-hours contracts is the need for a guaranteed level of income to make this a viable alternative to receiving unemployment benefit. These contracts favour the employers over the employees. 

With 38% of these contracts held by 16- to 24-year-olds, it means there is now a significant proportion of the young workforce without guaranteed incomes.

This pay-as-you-go employment causes issues and judging by the comments on Glassdoor, this is not a preferred choice of employment in the long term.”

And there's more on the research in these blog posts too:

• UK HR / Glassdoor / Zero Hour Contracts

• BBC Breakfast: Zero Hour Contracts (a previous BBC interview talking about the research)

• Consulting  Research   Speaking   Training  Writing 
• Strategy -  Talent  - Engagement - Change and OD 
• Contact  me to create more value for your business 
• jon  [dot] ingham [at] strategic [dash] hcm [dot] com

Picture credit: @Mid247

#HRGV2016 HR Grapevine: Is HR logical or creative?

I'll be attending HR Grapevine’s annual HR & Talent Management conference, Left Brain vs Right Brain, next week.

I'm looking forward to the event firstly as I admire HR Grapevine's nerve in using the left and right brain idea.  Most HR practitioners probably think this still applies to the way people think (no disrespect but just a recognition that the profession isn't always as up to date as it should be) but there's a small minority who knows it doesn't (though there are still certain differences in the two sides I think) and who are very proactive and vocal in shooting down anyone who use the term.  And of course there are those of us who understand it can be used figuratively without implying anything about the structure of the brain.

Secondly the need to be creative as well as logical was one of the themes we explored in the Art of HR conference in 2014.  I thought this event really brought out of the opportunities of, and I certainly felt inspired by HR's creative, right brained side.  I'm looking forward to more stimulation at the event next week.

In fact HR Grapevine have also looked at the issue of artistry and science.  That's not quite the same as the difference between being logical and creative (as both art and science need but logic and creativity) but there's clearly a level of connection between the two.  Science is more logical and art more creative.

As comments from HR practitioners suggest, we do need both.  To be both logical and creative, scientific and artful.  But I still suggest, as I did around the Art of HR event, that the priority for the profession at the moment is to focus on our creativity and artistry.  That's partly because the big problems in organisations at the moment are mainly about a lack of humanity - evidenced by low levels of engagement etc.  And also because HR profession seems to be moving in completely the opposite direction, becoming obsessed with measures, analytics, and it's own credibility within a business.

To be cold, clinical, observant, precise and law abiding surely can't be the basis for our future?  Even in analytics, the core need is to demonstrate validity not reliability.  But cold management of people as if they were widgets is going to spell doom.  The rest of business management may often be cold but that doesn't mean we need to be.  Instead we need to convince the rest of the business to be a bit warmer.  More emotional, creative and artful in their management of people.

In fact many business leaders and managers already understand this need.  If HR doesn't get with the programme there's a real risk we'll pass each other light ships in the night, with HR taking responsibility for people analytics, and Finance being given accountability for love, empathy, passion and everything's that important in an organisation.

Let's see where we get to next week...

• Consulting  Research   Speaking   Training  Writing 
• Strategy -  Talent  - Engagement - Change and OD 
• Contact  me to create more value for your business 
• jon  [dot] ingham [at] strategic [dash] hcm [dot] com

Top 75 HR Blogs

I like this list of top blogs to follow in 2016 - great to see Strategic HCM in there once again as well.

• Consulting  Research   Speaking   Training  Writing 
• Strategy -  Talent  - Engagement - Change and OD 
• Contact  me to create more value for your business 
• jon  [dot] ingham [at] strategic [dash] hcm [dot] com

Top Employers and other benchmarks

One of things I've been meaning to post about is Top Employers and other forms of benchmarking.

Top Employers released their 2016 lists of certified organisations a few weeks back and invited me to their swanky dinner at London's Guildhall which was good fun (I'm sitting behind the table sign in the pic above).  

Best Companies have recently released their lists too.  Then there's Great Places to Work - their list's out in April.  Investors in People have their awards in March.  And the lists go on.

So what do companies get from appearing in these lists - other than the engagement benefits of a nice dinner and the recruitment and retention benefits arising from the social proof that you're looking after your people well?

I tried to talk to quite a few of the certificated attendees (let's just call them winners) at the Top Employers do and the main thing I picked up was that it's seen as an opportunity to validate that they're as good as they think they are.

But this only applies if you're sure you want to manage your people in the same way as the awards suggest.  That's not always easy to do - it's easy to develop a standard which is so loose it's no use to anyone (valid but not reliable), or to make it so tight that it's not seen as relevant by many firms (reliable but not valid) or worse, that it encourages them to do things they shouldn't be doing.  That's a particular risk when you apply the same standard globally even though differences in national cultures mean you really need to do different things.

I talked about this with some of the winners at Top Employers too.  They seemed happy that they could tell Top Employers which things they didn't see as relevant and just be assessed on the things which are.  I'm not sure quite how this works, but if it's the case, that seems a good way to square the circle.

Other employers will be happy with the trade-off in validity vs reliability and they might want to engage in process benchmarking ie going to and studying one organisation in-depth.  Or other organisations will trade off reliability vs validity and use something like PwC Saratoga's benchmark dataset to compare their data against lots of other organisations.

There are also other ways to deliver high levels of validity / meaning and the reliability provided by comparing your data with lots of other organisations.  For example Glassdoor's newish Employee Choice Awards (and last year's) provides both high validity and high reliability by enabling a comparison of employees own comments about their employer, without the intervention of an assessor in the process.

Picture credit: Changeboard

• Consulting  Research   Speaking   Training  Writing 
• Strategy -  Talent  - Engagement - Change and OD 
• Contact  me to create more value for your business 
• jon  [dot] ingham [at] strategic [dash] hcm [dot] com

HR Analytics training in Australia

I've been touring through Australia delivering HR analytics training with Clariden for the last few weeks so have got a bit behind with a few things, including blogging, so I'll be making a quick attempt at catching up over the next few days.

But first a few thoughts on my four two-day sessions in Australia.  Firstly it was great to be there.  It was my first trip back since speaking at AHRI's national convention last August and the Summer is even nicer than the Winter.  I got to spend quite a bit of time outside and was particularly pleased to get an opportunity in Perth to walk a mile in the shoes of a shark attack survivor courtesy of Roman Krznaric's Empathy Museum (see my post on Roman's session at HRPA in Toronto last year). 

But other than the weather it was great to hear everyone (Perth excluded) talking about growth in their businesses and corresponding opportunities in HR.  I sometimes forget that the ongoing tentative approach to investment so prevalent in the UK isn't the global norm.  Australia is helped by its closeness to Asia rather than the EU but I think their generally more sunny disposition is part of their advantage as well.

Secondly I was pleased that my Aussie participants weren't as wedded to a hard HR measurement approach as is often the case in the UK (that measurement always needs to be quantitive and ideally financial, that more analytics means dispensing with intuition, etc).  The Australian perspective on this seemed much more open to recognising and tolerating the squishy nature of HR outcomes and the qualitative and subjective response to HR analytics this implies.  I normally manage to convince UK participants of the need for this perspective but it was nice in Australia to have this understood without having to sell it.

I'm aware that other HR analytics commentators may feel the difference in perspective means that Australia is further back in their development of analytical approaches but to me it means they're more mature and will be able to make more progress in their use of measures and analytics too.

Reflecting back on the trip I'm also wondering if my two insights are partly connected.  Is the more positive economic environment connected to the more mature analytical perspective too?  I wouldn't suggest that the two things are causally related any more than I'd suggest a real link between shark attacks and ice cream sales but there might be a real causal factor underpinning the two - for example a less US oriented focus on short-term earnings?

Anyway, I look forward to going back again soon.

• Consulting  Research   Speaking   Training  Writing 
• Strategy -  Talent  - Engagement - Change and OD 
• Contact  me to create more value for your business 
• jon  [dot] ingham [at] strategic [dash] hcm [dot] com

Speaking at Tech HR in India

I'm delighted to confirm that I'll be speaking at Tech HR 16 in Gurgaon, outside Delhi, India in August.

Although I've not spoken at / chaired HR Technology in Las Vegas or HR Tech Europe / World in London / Amsterdam / Paris for a few years I continue to do a lot of work in the technology space and as well as sharing some of my own ideas and perspectives I look forward to catching up with Holger, Josh, Johnny, Gerry and Laurie, and all of the Indian speakers and attendees.

And if you're attending, let me know if you'd like to meet up whilst I'm there.

 
For more information:

• Consulting   Research  Speaking  Training  Writing 
• Strategy  - Talent - Engagement  - Change and OD    
• Contact me to create more value for your business   
• jon [dot] ingham [at] strategic [dash] hcm [dot] com

Social recognition for more innovation in talent management and reward

I've got a few more comments to share with you from my chapter on reward in the ATD's new Handbook of Talent Management.

These are on the value of social recognition:

One of the main opportunities for transforming reward in many organizations is likely to be to introduce or reinforce the use of recognition using new social and gamified technologies which help organizations focus recognition upon their strategy or organizational values and help draw all employees into giving recognition.

Social recognition supports the need to move towards non-financial and personalized reward and is the nearest reward oriented equivalent to the shift towards informal and social learning within the talent development space.

Of course people and companies do not need these systems to express appreciation for each other.  For example, Doug Conant sent 30,000 personalised thank you cards to his employees during 10 years as CEO of Campbell Soup Company.  But technology makes it easy for everyone, not just the most dedicated people, to do this and can build a culture where a large proportion of the workforce participate in giving and receiving recognition to each other.

Also see:

• Personalised reward

• Reward gamification

• Pay transparency

• Pay ratios

And you may also be interested in my posts on Workstars' social recognition system:

• Core values - moving from laminated to lived

• The benefits of employee voice at work

• The art and science of workplace communication

• Humanising HR using digital technology

For more information:

• Consulting   Research  Speaking  Training  Writing 

• Strategy  - Talent - Engagement  - Change and OD   

• Contact me to create more value for your business  

• jon [dot] ingham [at] strategic [dash] hcm [dot] com

Innovation in Reward through Personalisation / Customisation

One of the other areas of innovative reward strategies I address in the new Talent Management Handbook from the ATD is personalisation / customisation.  Here are a few of my thoughts on this:


Personalised Reward

Whatever the approach to reward an organization wants to use, this will need to be tailored according to different groups within the workforce.  One of the key needs in companies operating across geographies will be to tailor rewards based upon national cultures as well as different legislation (and managing global reward can therefore be just as or even more complex than managing global talent development.)

Organizations may also need to respond to sector based differences.  This applies in particular to differences between the private and public sectors and between sales and everything else - sales performance management and incentivization will always be a special case requiring specific types of reward.

There may also be a need to take account of generational differences.  There is considerable debate about the extent to which employees from generations Y and Z are less materialist ie less interested in pay and more interested in having a job which provides them with meaning and development opportunities.  In my view the greatest shift that any differences have produced is to make employees from all generations feel able to ask for work which is meaningful for them.

In any case, age differences are likely to be more significant than generational ones as pay, as opposed other elements of total reward, is likely to more important to people early on in their careers.  This is likely to counterbalance any increased desire for self actualization within newer generation employees, at least in the short-term.

People working in different roles and employment relationships, for example part-timers and homeworkers, will also have different needs.

In fact, at some point, organizations face so many different factors to take account of that the only way to respond to them effectively is to personalize every person’s reward - at the very least ensuring that this is based upon them as a person rather than just the job they are holding, but ideally by trying to take account of their individual engagement needs as well.  One example of this is Deloitte’s approach to career customization which allows people to dial up or down the demands of their jobs along with their career expectations but also their rewards, depending upon their personal needs and the way these factors change during their careers.

Also see:

• Reward gamification in talent management

• Pay transparency in talent management

• ATD Talent Management Handbook - pay ratios

And for more information:

• Consulting   Research  Speaking  Training  Writing 
• Strategy  - Talent - Engagement  - Change and OD   
• Contact me to create more value for your business  
• jon [dot] ingham [at] strategic [dash] hcm [dot] com

Best country in Europe to get a job

And if you are thinking of quitting your job, this research from Glassdoor reviews some of the economic factors which are important in providing good job prospects.  And the video is my interview talking about the research on BBC World (in Europe).

Basically, the research supports Glassdoor's entry into the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Germany, Austria and Switzerland as well as the UK and Ireland with more national url sites so if you're in Switzerland you can go to de.glassdoor.ch or fr.glassdoor.ch, depending on the language you want to use.  But their experience is that even within Europe there are vast differences between countries with high growth and employment (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) and those with double digit unemployment and slow economic growth (Greece, Spain and Portugal).

Their review of the various factors relating to and the quantity and quality of employment, centred around unemployment, temporary work and involuntary part-time work suggests that Estonia, Norway, the UK and Austria are the best countries to apply for a new job.

The main finding is that regulated markets do seem to suffer more temporary and part-time work as well as unemployment and an ongoing employment gap (between levels of employment before the global financial crisis and today).  I'd also suggests that Spain's growth today is almost certainly linked to the recent easing of their previously right regulations.

However, I also agree with the report's comments on side effects eg the potential to form a dual labour market with the rise of 'mini jobs' (part-time, temporary contracts).  Or in the UK where we don't have high rates of these, the prevalence of zero hour contracts (see my previous BBC interview on these), self employment and increasingly, completely unregulated roles in the sharing economy.

The key point for me, once again, is designing these types of roles for an organisation's employees and to suit their needs for flexibility, and not just business needs.  And that applies for individuals, businesses, countries and the whole of Europe too.

It's great to have a role which gets me thinking about macro level issues as well as just those operating within companies, and gets me thinking back to some of the economic development projects we did when I worked at one of the government's Training & Enterprise Councils 20+ years ago.

You may also be interested in these posts on a similar agenda.  Firstly, for Glassdoor:

• Zero hour contracts (interview on BBC Breakfast)

• The gender pay gap (interview on BBC Radio 4 Today programme) and Gender pay gap in bonuses (interview on BBC News Channel)

• Pay transparency - on Glassdoor and in your organisation too

• Why men won't ask for Shared Parental Leave (interview on Sky Breakfast)

And for / related to the UK's Commission for Employment and Skills:

• Employment, skills and energy

• Preventative skills planning

• Investors in People VI: Outperformance

For further details or support, get in touch:

• Consulting   Research  Speaking  Training  Writing 
• Strategy  - Talent - Engagement  - Change and OD   
• Contact me to create more value for your business  
• jon [dot] ingham [at] strategic [dash] hcm [dot] com

The need for less boring work in 2016

Glassdoor has released some new research looking at the reasons people leave work - with January being a key month for doing so.

The research identified low salaries as the main factor that led people to quit  - not surprisingly given the questions asked the last straws which caused people to leave.  Other factors like relationships with the line manager, and other people, will still be more critical in getting people to start thinking about leaving - at which point levels of reward start to become more of a thing.

But it's also interesting to see factors we think about less frequently - such as the boring nature of a lot of the work people are asked to do - appearing as important tipping point factors too.

These were my comments in Glassdoor's press release:

“Understanding what causes employees to leave a company is beneficial to both the job seeker and the employer. For job seekers, this survey in particular, offers an important reminder to research a company before applying or accepting a job offer to understand what keeps current and even former employees satisfied and what would or did cause them to resign. For employers, understanding reasons for resignation both across the country, at competitors and within your own company can help in evaluating and improving recruiting and retention efforts.”

For more, see the commentary on OnRec.

• Consulting   Research  Speaking  Training  Writing 
• Strategy  - Talent - Engagement  - Change and OD   
• Contact me to create more value for your business  
• jon [dot] ingham [at] strategic [dash] hcm [dot] com