The HR Secret
The HR Secret Overview There is a gap in the practice of matching people to jobs. Matching people to jobs has been a critical management activity since the beginning of organised activity. Arguably, there is no more important management responsibility. Yet, despite its importance, the process of ensuring a good fit can go badly wrong. This gap can be described as a blind spot. Like all blind spots, there is a lack of awareness of what is missing and there are unintended negative consequences. The blind spot in question is so significant that it often results in disjointed HR processes that, in the worst cases, are time-consuming hindrances to line managers. This article identifies the blind spot and reveals how it developed. It also provides a new lens through which an integrated approach to HR can be viewed. This new lens is so powerful and yet so unfamiliar it can be truly described as HR’s best kept secret.
The Blind Spot Due to the breadth of activity covered within HR, the discipline easily fragments into highly specialised and unconnected areas that often require external consultancy support.
ignored. It is only after decades of treating the symptoms of disease that health practitioners understand the value of a holistic approach.
This fragmentation happens because People and Jobs have become disconnected concepts. With the different technologies and methods associated with job evaluation and psychometrics, it is as if jobs are measured in units of time and people in terms of weight. When trying to relate people and jobs using different measurement systems it is like trying to ask, ‘how many centimetres are there in a kilo?’ As such there is an inbuilt disconnect and there are many negative consequences. By way of comparison, this is akin to the unhelpful mind-body split in medicine where the psychological underpinnings of bodily symptoms can be easily
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Whilst health professionals are beginning to see the cost of a ‘dualist’ approach, HR is largely blind to it own disconnect and it is only the rare practitioner that understands that there is a holistic alternative.
The HR Secret At a time when Chief Executives are asking all of their functions to justify costs and identify the link to performance and profit, this blind spot prevents a straightforward response. Not only that, but it results in the risks associated with selecting, developing and organizing people not being adequately considered. The Unintended Consequences There are three main domains in commercial operations that require management and leadership attention, namely; money, markets and people. Yet, despite the tired old mantra of ‘people are our most important asset’, it is clear that the people domain is very often the neglected area of the three. This is surprising in today’s climate given that more than half of the value of many companies is found in the intangible assets that include intellectual capital and a diverse, knowledgeable and skilled workforce. The lack of attention given to the people domain in a business is reflected in the status of the people related function. The constant cry in the HR profession’s magazines over the last 30 years has been to elevate the stature of the Chief People Person so that they naturally sit on the right-hand side of the Chief Executive. These pleas still continue and the theme of improving the strategic impact of the function is often referenced in keynote speeches at professional conventions and conferences. One of the main reasons that the status of the people function and its strategic input are low is the identified disconnect between people and jobs. This disconnect results in the lack of a clear and consistent measurement system. Compare HR to finance. Within the finance discipline, money is described in clear and consistent terms and there is a common language that enables financial factors to be compared across organisations.
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Without a measurement system that makes a dynamic link between people and work, HR processes and methods are inevitably disjointed and, at worst, will be timeconsuming hindrances to line managers. The consequences of this disconnect are most evident in the area of resourcing The people and job matching processes including recruitment, selection and the management of talent have become complex, timeconsuming, massively costly and inefficient. Not only that, the result of the matching process is often a wrong fit. Despite advances in technology, recruitment continues to be very expensive for a recruiting manager and the selection process often involves difficult to articulate (and defend) factors such as ‘personal chemistry’. The HR secret that we reveal transforms resourcing including the recruitment costbase and lays the foundation for organisations to develop talent inventories and human capital metrics that are under the control of the HR function. The Historical Reasons The HR blind spot becomes apparent when a historical perspective is provided. In the words of Edgar Schein, ‘every organized activity gives rise to two fundamental and opposing requirements’. These are namely; the division of labour and the coordination of effort. The division of labour is about ‘chunking-up’ work into discrete and repeatable work packages and the coordination of effort relates to the holding together of related activities to meet the end goal. These two fundamental and opposing requirements have set the conditions for the development of the HR blind spot. Two Paths – Two Perspectives The focus on the work-flow and its division into repeatable components developed into
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The HR Secret a School of Scientific Management.
any changes in lighting conditions.
Scientific management is a theory of management that analyzes and synthesizes workflows, with the objective of improving labour productivity. The core ideas of the theory were developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the 1880s and 1890s, and integrated into Principles of Scientific Management (1911).
The long shadow of the Human Relations Movement can be seen in the writing of Maslow, Herzberg and Rogers and such work as Emotional Intelligence. The themes are self-awareness and selfactualization. Little if any direct connection is made to the work-place other than to set this as the scene for personal growth and leadership.
Taylor believed that decisions based upon tradition and rules of thumb should be replaced by precise procedures developed after careful study of an individual at work. Its application is contingent on a high level of managerial control over employee work practice. Modern variations of the scientific management principles include Process Reengineering. A significant criticism of this methodology is that it treats people as-if they are simply components in a process flow. Perhaps as a counter-balance to the dehumanizing effects of Scientific Management’s emphasis on creating repeatable, quality controlled work elements, the Human Relations Movement arose and focused on the quality of leadership, individual motivation and psychological factors. One of the earliest studies that informed the fledgling Human Relations Movement were those carried out at the Hawthorne Works (a Western Electric factory outside of Chicago). Hawthorne Works had commissioned a study to see if its workers would become more productive in higher or lower levels of light. The workers' productivity seemed to improve when changes were made and slumped when the study was concluded. It was suggested that the productivity gain, now known as the Hawthorne Effect, was due to the motivational effect of the interest being shown in the workers and not due to
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Two Technologies Whilst the hard management focus on work and the soft, even touchy-feely, world of human relationships has often erupted in fierce intellectual battles, the real negative outcome of these perspectives is the different HR technologies that have arisen from these perspectives. As is characteristic of different technologies, each does not connect well with the other. Once the total work-flow had been chunked into separate components organisations turned to job evaluation technologies to help identify the worth of the job elements to the organisation. Job evaluation may enable job comparison but the systems rarely link to the capabilities and competencies that a person requires to successfully undertake the job. Not only is there a lack of connection to the person specification, the resulting job grading often has a pernicious effect. Whilst these systems are designed to compare different sorts of jobs and assign a grade that equates to a pay level or band they often become the basis for organisation/career structures. In practice, this has a terrible side effect. Intended for one use, these grading systems end-up adding to the costs of bureaucracy, frustrating employees and undermining leadership development. Green Paper series
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The HR Secret The Disconnect
Competency frameworks. These often focus on behaviour- but behaviour is an output – an end result of something else,
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Different measurement systems reinforce the separation However, the data generated rarely dovetails with the specific job requirements. Not only that but psychometrics also have a pernicious side-effect. People seem to like to put a label on others and say that they are this or that kind of person. Many psychological approaches to people-profiling provide nice easy labels and this may account for their popularity. However individuals resent being labeled themselves for the very real reason that they do behave in different ways in different situations. Many standard psychologically based profiling tools are designed to neatly ‘box’ someone. However, they not only create the impression that people are unable to flex their behaviour once labeled, they also lose the essence of the person in the analysis.
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Emotional Intelligence (E.Q.) . Emotional awareness is important but emotions are difficult to name, often come from deep within us and are often the result of how we interpret the world and make meaning. In terms of broader analyses, many approaches to organisation development rest on psychological theories that see aspects of business life such as interpersonal stresses, aggression and damaging game-playing as the results of psychological processes involving the unconscious. As a natural follow-on, practitioners utilising these underlying ideas espouse that in order to change behaviour, it is necessary to change the psychological make-up of individuals. The change programmes that result are often slow and painful. The HR Secret Whilst the battle between hard and soft has taken centre stage, in fact there is an approach that encompasses both aspects and provides the basis for the HR secret. The HR secret is a body of work that arose out of socio-technical systems theory. Socio-technical refers to the interrelatedness of social and technical aspects in an organisation. This body of work can be summarized as Work Levels. Work Levels is so powerful and yet so unfamiliar to even HR professionals that it can be described as HR’s best kept secret
The following approaches have severe limitations when it comes to fully understanding a person at work:
Work Levels makes the dynamic link between people and jobs by referencing the context, especially the complexity of the decision-making environment.
Personality factors. Traits and factors don’t take into account context - but human beings are highly context sensitive,
Work Levels addresses how someone has to think in order handle varying degrees of uncertainty and complexity.
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The HR Secret This is in contrast to psychometrics, where thinking (i.e. the essence of being human) is limited to the classical aptitudes of logic and analysis.
The profound difference that can be made through Work Levels and associated diagnostic tools is this; by profiling jobs and people using consistent concepts and a common language the extent of the match can be measured.
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Work Level provides the ruler against which people and jobs can be measured. As people and jobs are the building blocks of organisations, Work Levels also enables the measurement of organisational capability and efficiency. Work Levels starts by clearly segmenting the world of work into different valueadding levels of contribution. Contribution describes the purpose, accountabilities and main outputs of the job. At each successive level, value is added to the work carried out above and below. This value-add is expressed as level specific accountabilities. Work Levels is a holistic system that sees work and people as two sides of the same coin. As such, there’s a dynamic link between the contribution of a job and the required capability of the person to meet the challenge. The end result is that accountabilities are clearly defined and people are placed into jobs where they can make their maximum contribution.
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Application of the HR Secret Work Levels are used by some of the most successful organisations on the planet to underpin key management processes such as job design, organisation design and assessment. Work Levels; it is what leaders of such organisations as Unilever, Axa, Tesco and Tata Group can describe as their ‘competitive advantage’. Interestingly, Work Levels were introduced into organisations through either OD specialist that were tuned into academic research or the Chief Executives who were often looking for a ways to get around shortfalls in HR practice. This is illustrated in the case of Tesco. In July 2001, Tesco PLC began replacing its management job grades with Work Levels. CEO, Sir Terry Leahy was concerned that his managers spent too much time arguing over their job evaluation points. Leahy said to Brian Dive, the external consultant that implemented Work Levels in Tesco, ‘I want a system that is simple, clear, and transparent, which managers understand, trust, and then forget about and get on and serve our customers’.
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The HR Secret ‘Although initially introduced to solve a compensation issue (fair pay for accountable work), Work Levels has subsequently been applied in Tesco to drive more effective organization design, reduce costbases and help control costs in a time of great organic growth. They also now underpin the company’s leadership development programme with key differentiating competences identified at each level of work’. (Dive 2008). Many organisations such as BHP Billiton and SABMiller have used Work Level based methods to identify high potential people and future leaders. This is especially relevant in complex cross-cultural settings where all traces of bias have to removed. Why Is It a Secret? Given that Work Levels generates such a powerful dynamic link between people and jobs, it is a perfectly good question to ask, ‘well if that’s the case, how come I’ve never heard of it’? Well one of the positive reasons is that for some organisations Work Levels forms part of their competitive advantage. As with all forms of advantage and intellectual property, few organisations are that keen on revealing their sources. However, there have been some selfimposed barriers to the widespread uptake of Work Levels. Firstly, the work originated from a deep consideration of complexity. Its academic background and the terms first utilised proved to be off-putting for all except those most resolute to pan for the gold in the hills. The other reason that Work Levels is generally hidden from the general HR population is that the consultants using the ideas and methods have tended to keep Work Levels as a sort of black box that only the initiated know about.
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Neither of these barriers need to exist. A deep understanding of complexity provides the foundation for Work Levels but the variances in complexity can be easily articulated. As complexity increases the contribution of the job increases in direct proportion. The different levels of contribution also can be easily defined. Equally, there is no reason to keep Work Levels in a black box that only the initiated can open. As Microsoft found when it was head to head with Apple in the early days, if you make your application compatible with all platforms, you take over the market. Summary HR’s best kept secret is Work Levels. This provides the basis for integrated HR as: The connection between jobs and people are made The foundations for sound principles are laid HR processes are mutually reinforcing The big difference though is that Work Levels provides the basis for objective decision support. Despite investing in sophisticated HR information systems, many organisations have only a partial understanding of their current workforce and its future needs. They lack the necessary insight to identify the current capability within the talent pool and to assess this against work requirements. As a result, organisations are failing to seize opportunities that could further differentiate themselves in the market Work Levels ensures that HR can fulfill its business partner role by providing timely data that helps business leaders make key fact-based decisions that impact or depend upon people. It does this by making a comprehensive and seamless connection between the job and the person.
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The HR Secret By using job profiles and person profiles that share a common language and the same dimensions the potential is there to automatically measure the extent to which people match jobs. With an integrated approach to HR there is a dynamic alignment between jobs, people and the organisation and the core processes that encompass selecting, enabling, engaging, aligning and envisioning the workforce are dovetailed and mutually reinforcing.
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Contacts Dynamic Link Ltd UK Suite 2, 16-25 Bastwick Street London EC1V 3PS Phone +44(0) 207 608 1118 Please email: Rosemarie McGuire, Partner, Head of Practice at rmcguire@dynamic-link.com www.dynamic-link.com
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