Don’t bombard people with HR initiatives – wait for them to come to you
Ever find yourself dashing from meeting to meeting in the dim hope of getting the chance to promote your people agenda, or sending out memo after memo about your newest great idea only to be met with a deafening wall of silence?
All too often, HR professionals – especially those who are early on in their careers – end up chasing work, because you think the service you’re providing deserves to have impact and influence. But you can actually be much more effective if you stop careering around, and let people come to you.
This isn’t about being lazy, but going where the demand for your valuable support is. When people need your help, your advice and guidance will be invaluable. But there’s no point trying to force it on those who don’t need support or who aren’t interested in your ideas. It’s much better to do good work with those who are interested, and your reputation will build over time to a point where more and more people regard your HR counsel as a credible and strategic force in the organisation.
This is one of the hardest lessons I’ve had to learn, and one that only crystallised when I joined dmg media at the start of 2014. I’d come from organisations such as PepsiCo and B&Q where HR participation was actively encouraged, and we didn’t have to fight for a seat at the table. At these organisations, I had open lines of communication to line managers and permission to talk about HR at a senior level. That simply wasn’t the case here: the HR function didn’t have that credibility or connection to managers.
Initially, the need to broadcast and communicate the new HR agenda I wanted to implement was weighing heavily on my shoulders. Actually, that was 100 per cent the wrong thing to do. My boss gave me some good counsel – to stop chasing, wait, and if the products and services I was offering were good enough, then people will come. There was an uncomfortable period when we turned off that broadcast mentality and waited. But when those who are interested in learning more discover how good your service is, your reputation will build through word of mouth.
HR can generate loads of initiatives and good ideas, but so often many of these are solutions that are looking for a problem. It’s far better to offer two or three really fantastic, well thought-out, business-appropriate initiatives than a whole host of programmes that aren’t fit for purpose. Too many times, I’ve seen HR professionals come into a new organisation and try to implement programmes that worked in their old workplace, without considering the context or needs of the line manager. It’s almost like saying: “Here’s my best practice HR medicine… you need to consume this because it’ll make you a better team, culture and business.”
That’s nonsense. It’s an arrogant, ignorant position to take. Our role as a support function should be to say: what are your requirements right now? And we shouldn’t be judgemental about what they’re doing – it’s our role to help managers make better decisions, faster. That support should be backed up by simple, pragmatic programmes: don’t come up with a brochure with 15 different solutions, just come up with one that’s based on solid thinking and tackles the issue in hand.
And you should think about how the managers in your organisation consume your HR agenda. The technologists at MailOnline are very different from the sales teams at the Daily Mail. Each one wants to interact with HR when and how they need to. It’s our job to be ready and able to support them when the time is right.
Nathan Clements is group HR director at dmg media, whose titles include the Daily Mail and Metro