HR Consultants News

It is so often the case that the 'next big thing' resembles the 'last-but-one-big-thing'. In other words, what goes around, all too often, comes around.

 So it is with 'serious gaming'. This is games playing as a business development-learning-coaching tool. Essentially, these are corporate training computer games, but they've got a bright, shiny new title : 'serious gaming' [cue predictable Wikipedia link ].

The tastemakers over at HR Magazine are making quite a fuss about it, claiming it's the saviour of e-learning, will revolutionise training in your organisation, will ensure all your employees are fully involved, trained and on-message.

 Oh yes, and they mention classic HR buzzwords such as  'employee engagement'.

 All very commendable, I'm sure. The thing is though, reading closely, it appears these games take between 3-6 months to produce and can cost up to £250,000.

Now, I'm in favour of any tool that will assist in coaching and training staff. And, anything that makes the process a little more interesting can't be bad, either.

However, we've seen computer based learning solutions before and calling them 'serious gaming' isn't going to make a blind bit of difference to their effectiveness. Spending a cool quarter of a million quid and waiting six months to get the finished article is, however.

It's going to be interesting to see if the future pans out in quite the way the article suggests. Personally, though, I think this is nothing new and won't be the revolutionary, next big thing in the HR coaching and staff training sphere. 

Today's not very surprising news is that offshore customer support and call centres may be aren't the cost effective HR solution that they were touted as a few years back.

PersonnelToday quotes research from Compass Management Consulting that suggests that increasing wages of 15% per year in places like India is making the offshore call centre not so very cost-effective after all.

Problems with language and quality of customer service, resulting in longer call times, were also mentioned as a major factor in the research.

 My question is: why would this come as a surprise to anyone? It was perfectly obviously that outsourcing customer support functions to countries that don't speak English as a first language is a recipe for disaster. 

 There are already a growing number of people who just won't engage with companies who outsource their call centres abroad. Companies even mention 'UK Only Call Centres' in their Television advertising.

 Anyone who has had the misfortune to deal with some of these call centres could tell you that, ultimately, this is not the way forward.

Personally, I've dealt with a number of Indian based call centres where the operator at the other end has no power to rectify any problems; where they never make a note of my issue so that the next time I call, I have to start all over again from scratch and where the promised callbacks, literally, never materialised.

Surely, the point should be to improve customer experience and speed up dealing with issues not to bog the whole process down. That is the way to really save money and increase cost-efficiency in this sector of HR. 

Most larger companies have employee handbooks and HR policy documents of one kind of another, but when it comes down to it, are these grievance procedures just pie-in-the-sky nonsense? Are they even followed at all in practise?

 The problem for employers is, that if your grievance procedures are not being followed, then you are opening yourself up to legal problems, tribunals, compensation - the whole nine yards. Indeed, if you can't show - indeed, prove - that employees are aware of your current grievance procedure and that you have followed the minimum statutory three steps , then any tribunal or legal challenge is inevitably going to go against you.

It doesn't matter whether your company has 20,000 employees or just two, the same rules apply.

In effect, grievance policies must be as watertight as possible. ACAS has a good self-help guide to creating grievance procedures, but you must ensure your staff are both aware of and have accepted the policies.

A good HR consultant can assist you in auditing, reviewing and implementing compliant grievance policies but the rule of thumb is that you should :

• Meet the minimum legal requirements at least
• Be clear, fair and reflect your business' specific needs
• Ensure staff are aware of the policies and what is required of them
• Cover all the main grievance areas such as
  

1. bullying
2. drunkenness/drug abuse
3. fighting at work
4. fraud
5. gross negligence/ insubordination
6. serious breaches of health and safety
7. theft
8. wilful damage to property

A couple of years back Fast Company published a cover story called 'Why We Hate HR' . Cue lots of fuss, defensiveness from HR professionals and general pointless arguing.

Now - two years on - there is a new survey from Deloitte/Economist that indicates "only 23 percent of corporate leaders feel their HR departments play a crucial role in corporate strategy or have a significant impact on operating results."

Workforce.com magazine suggests that HR departments are "fixated on administrative and procedural functions and generally ignored larger strategic imperatives." (such as nuturing talent and building value) and that, in fact, the human resources profession at large isn't particularly concerned about such things.

Most HR consultants reading this far would surely already be up in arms and would, rightly, point out that a large part of the focus of their work is in putting HR at the centre of people related issues; whether that is performance, strategy or procedural.

The author of the Workforce.com piece and, indeed, the original Fast Company article, both suggest that HR departments aren't doing their job and are focusing only on support rather than leadership functions.

However, putting aside any gut reactions, let's take a closer look at the survey to see what's really going on.

How about this: 50% of those companies polled don't have a chief human resources officer who is solely dedicated to people issues and who reports directly to the CEO. Hmmm...it makes it a little hard for HR to be leaders in strategic people issues if the company doesn't have anyone assigned to that role, doesn't it ?

Let's move on to Question 21.1 of the survey , which is this :

How often do you consult directly with your organisation's Head of HR, CHRO, or senior HR team with regard to the following issues?

You would expect that, if HR really is failing in its role, that companies would be regularly consulting with HR over leadership, performance reviews, talent management. That way they would be in a position to know that the human resources people aren't doing their job.

What you wouldn't expect to find is that over 47% of companies polled only speak with HR once per year regarding performance issues and 13.04% never spoke to them at all.

Once again, it is difficult for HR to contribute if they aren't being consulted at all.

And here's the problem. The real problem this survey reveals isn't that HR is useless. It's that the people related knowledge and skillset of human resources is just being ignored. The real issue is that the value HR can bring is being neglected.

The problem, I would humbly suggest, is not with HR, but with other senior executives and departments within an organisation.

One of the areas in which businesses often require the assistance of HR consultants is employee absense.

It is estimated that staff absence costs employers between £10.5 and £13billion per year, so is obviously a serious issue.

Often an employer's first thought is to get an absence/attendance policy in place double quick and enforce it vigorously. While, obviously, absence policies are a must have for most companies, the focus really has to be on making the workplace a better place to be in.

For example, if you have lots of working mothers in your company, then consider introducing a creche in the workplace, thereby eliminating childcare problems.

If your staff aren't motivated or are, frankly, bored then, again, absence is going to increase. No attendance policy is going to be able to prevent it. Vary the work that staff do and encourage their feedback and you will find that your absenteeism problem starts to diminish.

Flexibility in dealing with staff is one of the key's to reducing absenteeism. If you remember that you are dealing with individuals with individual needs and concerns, then a flexible approach will work wonders for your organisation. You never know, you may not need an HR consultant after all!

The problem with being a self-employed consultant, I'm told, is that you can get too isolated from the very people that you need to engage with : namely potential clients. It's all too easy to end up talking HR consultants jargon and not use the language of your prospects.

This was brought home to me recently when I was involved in creating content for the performance management section of the Consultant Matters.co.uk website.

We have quickly learnt that the terms performance evaluation, performance management, performance appraisal and, even, performance review are interchangeable in the minds of potential clients. The problem is that, from an HR consultant's perspective, performance management covers a very different set of tasks than performance review.

And don't even get me started on things like employee feedback, balanced scorecard, 360 degree feedback and the myriad of other performance evaluation tools available.

The point I'm making, I guess, is that in order to really serve clients needs, there needs to be a greater understanding of the language that they use and not the language HR consultants wish they would use.

Consultants traditionally like jargon. It makes them sound like experts (sometimes, they even are experts). But I'm here to tell you that you may very well be confusing your prospects way before they ever become your clients. And that, surely, is a bad thing.

It can only be in your interest to simplify the terminology you use when talking to potential clients. So let's start using - at least on initial contact - the language of the client.

From October this year, companies will not be allowed to deduct bank holidays from their employees annnual leave entitlement.

 This will bring annual leave entitlements up to 24 days from October 2007 and up to 28 days from April 2009.

 The General Secretary of the TUC, Brendan Barber is understandably pleased, claiming it as "another important milestone on the road to giving workers in the UK the same holiday rights as those enjoyed by their colleagues in the rest of Europe" but the effect, of course, remains to be seen.

Personally, I'm a big believer in the idea that generous holiday allowances for staff means that they become more, not less, productive. However, there is a real bottom line cost to this move, especially for larger companies, and my feeling is that such companies will attempt to recoup the cost via other methods, possibly creating further dissatistfaction among their workforce.

I truly hope this isn't the case, but it does remain to be seen. 

A recent report from the Economist in association with Capgemini Consulting entitled 'Trends In Business Transformation' found 86% of European senior executives believe that business transformation is an integral part of management.

So far so good. If executives recognise the need for change and understand the fundamental drivers for organisation change, that can only be a positive thing.

However, it appears that many executives feel unqualified to manage change (around 70% felt this way) and almost half felt that the project failed to achieve it's original goals.

If executives within the companies themselves are unable to manage organisational change effectively, then it is up to professional human resources consultants to pick up the slack. The reluctanct among certain classes of senior management to engage with outside assistance should be sent this survey as compulsory reading.

Organisational restructuring and change can be an immense task and senior executives still have to manage their day to day roles within an organisation, meaning that they are overstretched during such transitions. When "70% [of senior executives] said they are not in a position to properly assess the success of their programme", then the need for HR consultants experienced in change management is all too obvious.

A recent Personnel Today article suggests that HR professionals "can't be bothered" to calculate the return on investment their company has gained from the use of executive coaching.

The author uses this to bash the coaching industry and suggests that "it's highly unlikely that anyone will bother to check or ask you to prove your worth."

However, maybe the real issue is that quantifying human resources coaching and executive training isn't the simple task that the author suggests it might be.

Properly defined performance management and evaluation schemes can enable HR departments to measure whether an individual's skills are improving and whether there is an increased value to the company. However, putting such things in purely monetary/return on investment terms is not always that easy.

To blame, as Karen Dempsey does in this article, the executive coaching industry itself and to suggest that it is nothing more than an "executive perk" does noone any favours. Consultants, in general, get enough bad press without this kind of stuff.