Do you ever look at the title of People Management as you unwrap it and think about what it means? Catching up on the latest issue last weekend and the regular e-updates I receive hardly suggests that this is a stand-out period for good people management. Graduate salaries back to 2003 levels; one in six employees retiring with no pension beyond the inadequate state provision; call centre workers suffering permanent voice problems; poorly paid care home workers mistreating the elderly.
As journalist Deborah Orr commenting on the Panorama expose of care home workers put it pointedly: “why be poorly paid and poorly respected for caring when you can be poorly paid for not caring?” A recent study clearly shows the strong relationship between pay levels and quality of care in such homes, just as wider research in the service sector shows that the highest levels of customer service are reinforced by good, secure total rewards and benefitspackages.
Of course in virtually all UK employers, times are tough and money tight and these packages are under pressure. But then this weekend we also had the gloss taken off the stellar sales performance of both Apple and Abercrombie and Fitch by further allegations of labour mistreatment, in the former case at one of their major suppliers in China, Foxcomm; and in the latter at its alleged staff ‘looks’ policy.
In a fascinating book, Professor Guy Standing argues that the current global cost pressures and ways employers (and their HR professionals) are responding to them is creating a new ‘Precariat’ of unskilled, casual workers with no regular jobs, poor working conditions and pay, with the concomitant risk of social instability.
One of my teenage nephews was offered a service job on this basis recently, expected to pay for his own uniform up-front, working on a part-time basis, with shifts only confirmed 24 hours in advance. As Standing alleges, “a large and growing number of young people in western societies have no security at all, while the affluent luxuriate in it”.
I don’t meet many HR professionals who are deliberately worsening employee conditions. But a combination of cost pressures and the mindless implementation of standardised, ‘best practice’ HR systems and processes is having this effect. Take supposed off-the-shelf job evaluation and grading systems, implemented globally in the name of cost-efficiency across some of our largest corporations. These incorporate built-in, hidden valuations of what work is important and why, often exaggerating the worth of senior jobs with ‘business impact’ and under-valuing the importance of social and other ‘soft’ skills, which are critical in our increasingly elderly Western societies and service-driven economies. (And talking of customer service, where these systems have self-service aspects, they are often in practice awful from the employee users and experience ‘end’ as well).
This is not though what many of us came into HR to achieve, quite the reverse. As Linda Holbeche’s excellent profiles of the leading exponents of HR Leadership reveals, they come from a wide diversity of backgrounds, such as social work and teaching. And like David Fairhurst at McDonalds, many have had and succeeded at delivering a broader social mission, beyond achieving high business performance through excellent people management of their own employees, in his case to improve the image, education and rewards of service sector workers as a whole.
Providing secure employment and a living wage is critical in maintaining the living standards of the bulk of our employees in the current environment and addressing wider social issues such as child poverty.
Many of the CIPD’s founders more than a century ago didn’t have it easy either, in making the case for investments in the care and welfare of their employees. They prospered in value-based organisations, where Quaker owners such asGeorge Cadbury recognised that business performance and employee welfare were “different sides of the same coin”, whatever the short term cost and business pressures he faced.
HR has to get back to looking at the fundamental purpose of what we are doing. As I am currently reflecting on for my Abercrombie and Apple-loving teenage girls, we need to get home each evening and ask ourselves, are we building the sort of workplaces of the future that we can be proud for our kids to work in?