Thought Leadership or Fad?
I note with concern the recent article in the Australian Financial Review (AFR, 20 June 2006, p59 "Employees need great deal more than pay") relaying the views of several consultants that there are many other things that employees consider to be more important than pay when making employment decisions. If I were a Human Resources practitioner in a corporate role in this day and age, I would be very wary indeed of this nonsense.
One of the most important contributions that can be made by the HR practitioner in the current labour market is to establish a clear, empirical connection between performance and pay. The trouble with having to employ almost anyone who comes along is that the real high performers get very, very upset when the hacks get paid just as much as they do. They don't question or even consider whether they have the same access to expanding their skill set or are given equally interesting assignments. They don't care about that at all. What really gets up their goat is the pay - and they won't say so in a survey. The inability or unwillingness to differentiate between high and so-so performance - traditionally the job of the HR team - at the individual and business unit levels is a major contributor to employee turnover. And the ones who leave are not the so-so performers, it's the high performers who, in a tight labour market, are extremely attractive to your competitors and the most difficult to replace.
When anyone with half a brain can pick up a job, the guru's decide to foist upon an unsuspecting and very busy Management audience another survey of employees asking them to say how unimportant money is to them. When interviewing prospective billion-dollar multi-national corporations to decide which of them they'll charitably offer their exquisite services to, these 20-something CEO aspirants will, surprise, surprise, list at least ten other things that are more important to them than money. Of the oft-quoted more important things "work-life balance" seems to have a three to five year cyclical half-life. Like the isotope which shares it's rate of degradation, unfortunately it never seems to go away completely. Child care, depending on the prevailing tax regime and the current level of glass-ceiling angst, rears it's head on a bi-annual basis while flexible working conditions comes up with remarkably coincidental frequency alongside any home-office technology that's being pushed at the time, usually by a company associated with the guru who's telling us how irrelevant money is in the employment decision.
The fact is, as anyone who has been asked to answer one of these surveys will attest, it is rare for a respondent to agree that they are so mercenary that the main reason they are trying to succeed in business is to pay off their mortgage. God forbid. The guru's who have wrenched the Human Resources practitioner out of the Board room and thrust them in to the mail room by diluting the profession with ever increasing quantities of touchy-feely, are the same commentators who will now have us believe that we can further dilute the contribution of HR by expounding all this bunkum about the unimportance of money.
There is something tragically cyclical about the management gurus. For anyone who's been around long enough, the "thought leadership" - a self attached title that, in itself, explains how they like to think of their mostly dubious contribution to business - that is expounded from time to time seems to take us to the same places we've all seen them encourage us to go before. For those of us lucky enough not to have taken their advice in the past, hopefully we'll forever avoid having to go there. As with most things cyclical, the management gurus tend to follow, always at a great distance, the prevailing economic conditions. When we think about Human Resources, the prevailing economic condition is the once-in-a-lifetime low unemployment rate and the accompanying tight labour market. Human Resources practitioners need to help Management solve the business problem associated with these rare conditions. If they don't, Management will continue to pleasantly smile about the importance of work/life balance as they respectfully escort HR to the door so that they can start their real meeting.
Author: Greg Brogan
Date: 22 June 2006