People Not Paperclips. Kath Howard

across sectors, I’ve worked mainly in office environments, visiting pretty brilliant care centres, retail stores and professional services offices. I’ve seen varying work environments – from crumbling military accommodation, to spectacular stately homes used as offices, to the great heights of Canary Wharf and its endless escalators. I’ve also personally worked in a call centre though, and I lasted four days. I worked in a supermarket, where I lasted longer, and where we had to walk down onto the shop floor to a sign reading ‘You’re going on stage. Don’t forget to smile.’ We were usually too hungover to smile – I was 19 and worked in the café there to hang out with my friends, often eating ‘traffic-light jellies’ on the kitchen floor during breaks. I worked as a chambermaid, a silver service waitress, in endless temp jobs in factories and warehouses, and my own highlight – processing photos in ‘Snappy Snaps’. In none of these many jobs did I have any inkling of an HR department, beyond the fact that someone paid me, and I received a payslip. My first real experience of an HR department was when I lost my first graduate job as a corporate tax consultant before it even started and ended up applying for an HR graduate scheme for a law firm. It was a brilliant scheme, working with some excellent HR folk, but my own early beginnings in HR were quite adrift from anything I’d personally experienced as an employee. So what? I wonder how far HR has come to matter to everyone, to all businesses, and to be progressive in all businesses. Or whether it remains the remit of the companies with the big bucks, or where they are just fortunate to have a very forward-thinking executive team and/or HR Leader. There are call centres, care centres and small businesses with simply stunning HR practices. And then there are large-scale corporations hiring thousands of people that treat them akin to paperclips.

       Turning the tides together

      My purpose in writing this book is not to take a dig at capitalism. That would be somewhat rich, as I spent my early career working for large global corporates, though riches sadly never fell into my lap. However, I do think there is an opportunity for all to use this book to learn more about how behavioural science, and specifically OD, can support our practice as HR professionals, and to bring the human back into HR. And I do think there is an even bigger opportunity for us to do the right thing – to challenge where we see or know this isn’t the case within our profession, and to use our collective voice to bring change. Yes, let’s make sure we’ve got our own house in order first, fair enough. But let’s work together as an HR and OD professional to bring societal change where people are treated like people, and not paperclips.

      There can be a tendency within HR to lean on short-term interventions. This is perhaps born out of an economic and business context where ‘busyness’ is celebrated, and everything needed to be done yesterday. The ‘time is money’ mantra has done us no favours there and suggests that expediency should take favour over quality of outcome. Within HR, far more often than not, these interventions are both sensible and very well-intended. For example, well-being programmes. I am a huge advocate of supporting people’s mental health, both positive well-being and raising awareness of mental health issues. However, evidence suggests that these well-being programmes have limited impact on employee engagement or indeed on workplace productivity. This doesn’t matter greatly if the investment has been made on moral and ‘human’ grounds, but sadly we often hear organisations suggesting the enormous return on investment in monetary terms of their well-being programmes. Whilst it might be true that employee absence is costing the economy £x billion per annum, it is also somewhat far-fetched that a programme of well-being workshops, and getting employees to exercise more and eat healthily, is going to be the panacea that gets them out of bed and whistling as they work. And this is where OD comes in. What systemic change needs to be brought about to create a shift in employee absence? And what burning question, what well-thought out hypothesis are we trying to test here? This is where HR falls down repeatedly – whilst we talk about building OD capability, a central part of HR training does not focus on the curiosity of thought, the analytical thinking, the hypothesis building and research skills that would support people to hone their craft in the field.

       A guide to navigating this book

      This book is ordered into four key sections:

      1. Section one: Shaping the future of HR

      This section will introduce the concept that someone or something has taken the ‘human’ out of Human Resources, and I propose that we need to re-humanise the world of work and need to put that ‘human’ back in place within our HR functions. As an introduction to two key tenets of achieving this, I then take you on a whistle-stop tour of motivation theories and why free fruit and a table tennis table isn’t going to truly win your people over. The second key tenet of putting the ‘human’ back into Human Resources is via evidence-based practice, or actually testing a few well-thought-out hypotheses, as opposed to just trying on a few new fads that might be the next big thing in employee engagement. What you’ll find in practice is that, having shared quite a few stories and quite a bit of anecdotal ‘evidence’, I put forward an argument for doing it all properly and taking on board evidence-based practice in HR. If that doesn’t infuriate you enough to close the book, you’ll move onto Section two.

      2. Section two: Creating a people-focused culture

      The purpose of putting the ‘human’ back into Human Resources is to prevent people from being treated like paperclips in organisations across the globe. We’ll explore whether we can manage or can’t manage change, and how we can influence and shape organisational culture. The section will bring in thinking from the world of OD and behavioural science, and we will delve into systems thinking as a model and a mechanism for creating sustainable change and for creating cultures that care for their people. The final chapter of this section is devoted to a topic close to my heart, ‘compassion at work’. If we are to drive people-focused cultures and practices through all we achieve in HR, we need to have an awareness and understanding of what ‘compassion’ and ‘empathy’ look like in ways of working, behaviours and leadership practices.

      3. Section three: Leading an HR service with heart

      This is arguably the most practical section because it relates specifically to what you can do, and what you can develop and build in your own team. It’s easier to influence than building a case for systemic change, but no less important. We’ll consider how to rebrand your team, if needed, and I will be sharing ideas and tips for putting the ‘human’ back into your own HR professional practice and into our people processes and policies. We will focus on re-humanising the world of work through the seemingly small-scale stuff that actually has a large impact. For example, take the simple induction programme for a new starter. An induction experience lacking in personalised care and attention will be remembered by new starters and may have a lasting impact on how connected and loyal they are to the organisation.

      4. Section four: Over to you

      It is here that we draw together some of the key themes of the book, and I ask you to consider all that you can do to re-humanise your workplace and to support others to do the same. I am passionate that work is about treating people like ‘people not paperclips’, and that our current people processes, practices and ways of working serve to cause or at least to exacerbate this. This section is a call to action for you to actively shake up the system with me, to be a fellow change agent with a ‘people not paperclips’ plan.

      Each of the sections outlined above will be broken down into a series of relevant chapters, which will share a mix of research, stories and sometimes just my own viewpoint. There will be a summary at the end of each chapter to support you in making the connection to what comes next. Each section can stand alone, so do dip in and out as needed. There will also be a toolkit at the end of each chapter or topic area, and this is to bring a more practical element into the book. It might just be a series of questions to reflect on having read the chapter or may be a set of proposed actions you could take to apply the research and thinking within your own organisation. Not all of these toolkits will feel relevant to you, but I would suggest you stay curious and try to give them a whirl.

      I’ve already introduced myself and why I am writing this book; why now and why me. In terms of my style, you are likely to find it very informal. I am seeking to bring forward some big topics in an accessible and interesting way.