we don’t even know it’s there or take the time to explore it. I’m a bona fide geek and proud of it. I will be delighted if you read the next chapter and it ignites your ‘inner geek’ a little.
Toolkit A: Engaging your people
1. Explore your purpose or intent
o Consider why you’re focusing on what motivates your people. Bear with me here. It may seem bleedingly obvious but defining your purpose will guide where you focus your attention when we move to information gathering. Is this because it is a general expectation of the HR department? Is it because the market is competitive in terms of finding or retaining talented people? Is it because your senior leadership want to be known for creating a culture where people are valued and respected? Whatever it is, note it down.
o Test and agree your purpose with others. Is this what you should be aiming for, or prioritising, as a business at the moment? Defining and agreeing on this matters: when you go out to speak to people, which we’ll come onto next, this will be how you introduce your curiosity. You’re defining it at this stage because people have exceptionally strong BS detectors and it helps to be able to share your intent honestly and openly with them. If the honest answer is that no one other than you cares, but you’re delving into this to build that person case, that’s absolutely fine too (or it is for the purpose of this task).
2. Develop and test your understanding of your people – what motivates them?
o Ask them. Spend time speaking with your people, your business leaders and HR colleagues to understand what motivates differing groups of people in your organisation. Talk to real people, people you wouldn’t usually connect with, at this stage. If you think you’ve done this, stay curious and see what else you can find out.
o Listen and apply professional curiosity. Do you observe and hear differing needs and motivations depending on professional groupings, personal demographics or office location? How do you know this?
o Delve deeper. Consider other engagement data you have to draw on – climate surveys, team feedback, leavers’ interviews, ad hoc feedback and feedback or issues raised through employee relations cases. What do these tell you about people’s needs and how they are or are not being met?
o Look for patterns and themes with someone else. Consider the patterns and themes you find across both the quantitative and qualitative data you’ve gathered. Show it to another trusted person, in confidence naturally, and ask them what they see. You’re trying to explore the less obvious points – what does someone see from the ‘outside in’?
3. Sense-making and prioritisation
o Start to make sense of what you’ve found. You’ve defined why exploring what motivates your own people matters, and you’ve explored this yourself and with others. You’ll have hopefully found out some really interesting information or refuted/supported what you thought you already knew. Fantastic. And, ‘so what’? It’s now time for synthesising your information and some sense-making. I love this stage. It’s creative and allows you to consider practical steps for making your people feel valued, respected and motivated at work.
o Isolate your ‘engagement priorities’ or the differences that will make a difference to how you motivate your people. For example, you want to retain people because you have a high turnover rate and it’s disruptive and expensive. Your people are motivated by being involved in decisions that matter to them, they want to use their professional expertise to create impact, and certain teams are motivated by the opportunity to innovate and to develop their external profile. Great. But none of this happens. You’ve isolated your engagement priorities.
4. In deciding your interventions, keep it simple. A few tips.
o Ask real people for their opinions. You’re not Netflix or whoever else, so don’t build your engagement interventions based on somebody else’s slide deck. Refer to others’ ideas for inspiration but ask real-life people wandering around your offices what they would like to see.
o Remember technology is an enabler, not the ‘solution’. There are many tools available to support us to communicate better at work. In the same way that clicking a ‘like’ thumbs-up button on social media isn’t the same as actually taking meaningful social action, an employee communication mechanism that isn’t mirrored in open communication within the organisation will have limited impact. Technology enables cultural change, but your purpose needs to be achieved through careful consideration of how you can adapt your processes, ways of working, and most importantly, how your leadership can lead the way.
o You’ve gathered information and translated it into possibilities. This now needs to be owned and led by your leaders. Engagement and motivation aren’t an HR issue – as we know, it’s a business issue and therefore needs to be led by your leaders.
Chapter 2
Creating impact through evidence-based practice and innovation
Introduction
Having explored what motivates people and why it matters, we could be tempted to want to run off and change the world before breakfast. This chapter is an opportunity to step back and to reflect on how we might achieve that – in effect, a brief pause before we do in fact run off and change the world together. We will explore two key areas of work that will support us to create greater impact as HR functions. We want to create greater impact so that we shift our organisations toward being genuinely people-focused, but the topics we’ll explore will support you in achieving impact for any purpose. We will be exploring evidence-based practice in the workplace, and innovation as a skill, a value and a mechanism for change.
I will share the benefits of adopting ‘evidence-based practice’ in our work and will show how this need not be an onerous pursuit but has the potential to support better decision-making. I will raise awareness of the limitations of the beloved case study as a potential ‘evidence-base’, that is, ‘but it worked for them…’. And last, we’ll explore the role that innovation can and should play in driving our impact as an HR function. Innovation stretches the realms of what is possible in an organisation or for an individual, and a lack of innovation is what keeps some HR functions lagging behind as ‘personnel departments’ of yesteryear.
Introducing evidence-based practice as a no-brainer for the HR function
Decisions that can affect people and organisational decisions should not be based on guesswork or less than accurate data. We might invest a fortune in certain employee benefits or in employee bonuses, with no research to support these other than a ten-minute TED Talk and a brief Google search. So, we need to base our decisions on accurate data that we understand and need to ensure our decisions are also based on wider evidence. There are rarely silver bullets to solve our organisational problems, and however tempting it may be to rely on a shiny TED Talk or conference session to guide a ‘quick fix’, it will take a little more time and research to get to the right answer. This is where ‘evidence-based practice’ or seeking evidence to support our decisions, activities and interventions in Human Resources is hugely important to achieving any meaningful change.
The Key Performance Indicator (KPI) – we love it in HR, even if we’re not always sure of what we’re measuring, or perhaps why we’re doing so. I’m going to propose in this chapter that we in HR would benefit from stepping away from our scorecard, or management report, and taking some time to reflect on why we’re collecting this information. Or perhaps reflecting on how reliable or valid that data
