People Not Paperclips. Kath Howard

tea and sympathy at work before that, though. The industrial revolution marked the start of people working to time on a large scale, and great interest in people productivity. The divide between rich and poor, at least in the UK, was nothing to be proud of even back then. Though we started talking about people as assets decades later, what is clear is that people were still a commodity to be used to bring a profit to the organisation. What we are talking about here are human beings. The way we recruit someone into an organisation, the experience they have at work, and the stories and experience they take home to share with family and friends, is all part of their life. Organisations are a key part of the fabric of society and our human existence, and there is an enormous, somewhat daunting, opportunity here to do something differently. People want to work for organisations where they can find meaning in their work – if they are performing manual work, there are still massive opportunities for this work to be meaningful through social connection, the outcome of their work and their contribution to what the organisation achieves.

      I spent the first few years of my career being told that I was ‘too nice to be in HR’. They were picking up on the fact that I have a genuine and deeply felt care for people and their experience at work, and to be fair on occasion the heart on my sleeve did become emblazoned across my face and throughout my emails. However, the reason I first jumped ship from a generalist HR role was not because I was ‘too nice’, it was because I had a deep dislike for policy, process and rule books, aka HR manuals. I love a plan and parameters, but as a rule I only follow rules that I value, though luckily, I also value being a good citizen and staying out of jail. I like to understand how policies and process make a difference, and ultimately how they support whatever the organisation exists to achieve. I have studied human behaviour for as long as I can remember. I loved reading as a child because I loved getting under the skin of the character’s emotional reactions, and the human dynamics unfurling on the page. I loved writing because it enabled me to create my own personalities on a page. And then I found psychology. I am a bona fide geek, and proud of it. I love science, I love the study of human behaviour and, moreover, I love the impact that applying this knowledge can have on people, relationships and work. And then I found Organisation Development (OD) almost by accident. Apparently, I was one of those people ‘doing OD’ who had absolutely no idea. I was busy learning about systems theory and change, and the wonders of organisational norms or ways of working, and I stumbled upon a field of practice that sought to improve organisational performance through applying learning from behavioural science. Whilst I devoured as many workshops and readings by the ‘greats’ in OD that I could, with particular devotion to Ed Schein and Mee-Yan Cheung-Judge amongst others, it left me feeling adrift from Human Resources and unsure how I could bridge that gap.

       Applying learning from behavioural science to HR

      In recent years, there have been efforts to apply the learnings from behavioural science into Human Resources, though I know from my days of carrying the title ‘Occupational Psychologist’ that the investment in employing people with deep subject matter expertise is still thin on the ground. Organisation Development is now a core capability for the HR profession, as proposed by the Chartered Institute for Personnel & Development, and there are a growing number of conferences and talks on the topic for HR professionals to benefit from. However, I think it would be fair to say that OD remains a somewhat elusive concept for many HR professionals. Whilst the larger organisations, and often corporations, invest heavily in OD, often with a core change management responsibility, smaller organisations and those more strapped for cash are likely to know little on the topic. And should they wish to venture into the world of OD, they would be faced with a manual or educational text. Unfortunately, this book isn’t going to completely bridge that gap. I’m not aiming to write a seminal text on Behavioural Science for HR professionals. There are people far better qualified than I to do the job. I do, however, want to give it a shot – I’d like to share the magic of OD and how it can be part of all we do in HR. This is with the purpose of showing how it can really be a central part of putting the human back into Human Resources.

      OD has its roots in humanistic theories. Developed in the 1930s, it came from a central premise that organisations can only prosper through aligning the ways of working, capabilities and needs of their people with the vision of the organisation. It sought to show the importance of connections, and not of tinkering around with policies and processes that were out of sync with the overall needs and direction of the organisation. One of the key theories in OD is of systems theory, where the organisation is considered to be a system made up of key component parts, which interact with each other to produce an output, or outcome. Systems theory is an incredibly important concept in understanding why creating change in one aspect of the system will have an impact on the other components of the system, but that one change alone may not create the change or ‘systemic change’ the organisation was aiming for. OD is a field of practice in its own right, though it often sits within HR departments and is more recently viewed to be an ‘HR capability’. This has the potential to reduce OD to be a ‘skill’ demonstrated by a person, potentially someone who understands systemic change, and can design and front a change programme. However, an OD practitioner is so much more than this.

       HR needs to throw out the rule book and get ‘human’

      The field of Human Resources has got itself in a muddle over the last ten or so years. We’ve tried so hard to be seen as ‘business partners’ that we’ve almost forgotten our core role to support, develop and motivate the ‘humans’ in that business. In an effort to show our worth, we’ve designed new functions within HR with names such as ‘employee engagement’ and ‘employee experience’, all aiming to achieve innovative plans, and all pretty much drawing on the same psychological theories and practices we knew of at least 20 to 30 years ago. It’s become a re-marketing game, and whilst we’re busy focusing on who has managed to get the highest survey result this year, across the board it would appear that, globally, people have never been unhappier at work.

      I conducted a small number of interviews (approximately 15) with HR Directors, consultants and leaders to support my research for this book. I started by talking to people about compassion at work, but it then became clear that people were seeing HR as detracting from a focus on compassion and care for people, rather than championing this. One leader, a leader who had worked at very senior levels within the military, noted that our focus on compassion can often be ‘codified’ at work. In HR, we support our line managers to understand what they can do, and what they can give, to an employee who requires support. We give X numbers of days of compassionate leave, but only if the person who died is a close member of the family. We might allow unpaid leave, but it’s at the ‘manager’s discretion’ and depends on how busy we all are. This he described as ‘codifying compassion’ – we are codifying or standardising how to demonstrate a human emotion, how to care for another human being with individual needs. This probably best sums up my current and very personal challenge with how Human Resources has been conducted in the past – lots of rules, procedures and processes under the auspice of ‘fairness’, which in real terms rarely feels fair to anyone. This person told me a story of a lady who worked for him who he built great trust with, and one of the core ways in which they built trust was him offering her compassion at a time when she needed it most – when one of her parents passed away.

      And how do we bring the human back into Human Resources for companies on tight deadlines and tight margins, where every minute of a person’s time at work is calculated as a cost? If you haven’t read James Bloodworth’s Hired,³ then my goodness, please do. It’s fabulous to throw awards at the companies who take their staff away for weekend retreats, and who throw free breakfast and hot yoga on for their staff over lunch, but what about the real-life human beings who clock-on every morning, get told how many minutes they can take for a break each four to five hours, and face a disciplinary if they go a minute over? What about the employees who work for minimum wage, barely making ends meet, and who are treated as little more than a commodity? Surely if we’re going to celebrate ‘employee experience’ as an HR profession, we should shine some enormous beacon on these practices? How can that honestly be the only way to achieve organisational performance and growth? And, when does anyone have a lightbulb moment when they question whether the moral imperative should trump profit when you’re