Over There: Jon Ingham Conquers the Globe!

Over There with Jon Ingham

I am really excited to be able to pro­vide a guest post from one of m favorite writ­ers in the Human Cap­i­tal space — Jon Ing­ham from the United King­dom.  John chides me mildly at the begin­ning of his post for imput­ing him with a “Euro­pean” per­spec­tive on mat­ters related to human resources.  He is correct.

A Global Perspective

Prob­a­bly more than any­one else I know, Jon is capa­ble of bring­ing a global per­spec­tive to his writ­ing in the HR space.   While  cre­at­ing this post (on his iPhone, no less), Jon was attend­ing con­fer­ences in no less than 3 coun­tries on tow dif­fer­ent con­ti­nents.  I can’t wait until my per­sonal street cred is (and my credit card lim­its!) are high enough to let me do the same

And now, with­out fur­ther ado, let’s see what Jon has to say regarding:

Met­rics, Trends, and the future of Human Resources

Michael sug­gests my HCM and Social Advan­tage blogs pro­vide a Euro­pean per­spec­tive for his largely US based read­er­ship.  I have to admit that this isn’t my intent.  I’m not even sure what a Euro­pean per­spec­tive looks like, although I’ll agree that I’m sure to have one.

One of the prob­lems is that HR issues often seem so dif­fer­ent in each dif­fer­ent coun­try across the EU, and par­tic­u­larly if
stretch­ing out across EMEA (Europe, Mid­dle East and Africa).

I was in Greece last week, pre­sent­ing on per­for­mance man­age­ment.  And the com­mon issue being dis­cussed by del­e­gates there seemed to
be how com­pa­nies could break­through the bureau­cracy and become more inno­v­a­tive by break­ing the rules.

I’m in France as I write this and the HR man­agers I’ve met here are still con­cerned about the impact of the reces­sion, and the
rel­a­tively unique French response to this with boss­nap­pings (includ­ing of French HR man­agers) and sui­cides (although there has been even worse reac­tions else­where) – includ­ing on Gautam’s home turf in India.

In a cou­ple of days I’m cross­ing over the Mediter­ranean to Egypt and I’m sure I will con­front a dif­fer­ent set of issues again.

How­ever, the sim­i­lar­i­ties across each of these coun­tries are, I believe, greater than the dif­fer­ences between them – and this
applies look­ing across Europe and the US too (see my post on inter­na­tional trends and dif­fer­ences for more dis­cus­sion on this).

Most HR man­agers, wher­ever they are based, con­front the same sorts of dif­fi­cul­ties in con­vinc­ing their busi­ness col­leagues of the
need to invest in peo­ple, to main­tain a long-term focus whilst com­pet­ing in the short-term, and to spon­sor pro­grammes with­out a
clear ROI.

And we all know that the way for­ward against these chal­lenges is to get closer to the busi­ness, to speak the lan­guage of busi­ness,
to get a grip on mea­sures and met­rics – right?

Well, hold your (human race) horses!

If I do have a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive to share with you, it’s that this isn’t the way to go.  In my view, peo­ple ben­e­fits can rarely
be pre­sented in finan­cial terms, and the more impor­tant the ben­e­fit, the more dif­fi­cult it becomes.

We also loose sight of one major poten­tial ben­e­fit in try­ing to become more metrics-based – that of mak­ing work itself become more
peo­ple shaped.  Yes, we might win the occa­sional bat­tle by pre­sent­ing a busi­ness case includ­ing a ROI (even though both we and our
busi­ness col­leagues under­stand the case is so riven with assump­tions, that the final num­ber could be any­thing we like), but the
longer war is about help­ing the rest of the busi­ness become more com­fort­able with com­plex­ity, ambi­gu­ity and squishy busi­ness cases.

And where we add most value is where we’re dif­fer­ent not the same.  Our value comes from an under­stand­ing of psy­chol­ogy, soci­ol­ogy,
anthro­pol­ogy, and all the other human arts and sci­ences.  And from the abil­ity this gives us to design devel­op­ment pro­grammes that
really help peo­ple learn; reward schemes that truly moti­vate peo­ple and change their behav­iours; employee rela­tion­ships poli­cies
that don’t just min­i­mize ten­sions, but cre­ate dynamic and inspi­ra­tional rela­tion­ships; the list goes on…

As Jef­frey Pfef­fer wrote 12 years ago: “If all Human Resources becomes is Finance with a dif­fer­ent set of mea­sures and topic
domains, then its future indeed is likely to be grim.”

But if HR devel­ops as a func­tion that is really able to influ­ence peo­ples’ capa­bil­ity and engage­ment; to develop our work­forces’
human and social cap­i­tal; to make work some­where that’s actu­ally fit for peo­ple to spend their time, to suc­ceed in cap­tur­ing
strate­gic oppor­tu­ni­ties whether these be break­ing the rules or man­ag­ing change — then I think we’ve got a very spe­cial future in
store for us.

Related Posts:

• A blog by any other name is still a blog!
• HR Car­ni­val of Global Giv­ing is now open!
• Have You Been Over There Yet?
• Time Man­age­ment: Huh?
• Life Lessons from 25 Years in HR

Tagged as: future of HR, global perspective, Human Capital, Human Resources, Jon Ingham, metrics, Over There, Social Advantage, trends