Complaints - Separating facts from labels

I came across a worthwhile article in HR daily from a few weeks ago. "Handle complaints based on facts rather than labels." Check it out here.

The article focuses on a bullying complaint scenario but the ideas discussed can be expanded upon and used more generally; particularly when you're looking at solid communication techniques or being involved in any type of company investigation. Two points in particular I took from the article were:

1. Call out inappropriate behaviour straight away, when it is small. That way it is much less of an issue for an employee to acknowledge their behaviour and for them to apologise if required. It also helps create a culture where issues can resolve themselves rather than escalate and become much more serious.

2. When 'bullying' complaints to arise, move past the labels and work on the issue. Someone can claim that their being bullied and HR goes into serious formal investigation mode however when you dig down into the core issues of the complaint, it may just be a misunderstanding. The article gives a good example of annual leave being rejected. Jumping straight onto the bullying label can cause things to fester unnecessarily and can potentially sabotage a speedy resolution.

Unless you stay focused, it can be very easy to slip into accepting labels rather than facts, even if you ask clear and concise questions. Take for instance this example below:

Say to the employee: "When you say the person is being inappropriate; what are they saying? What are they doing? How often? How are they saying it?"

"If they say, 'They're rude to me. They always demean me', a lot of those things are labels. Ask, 'What do they do? When did they do it? Can you give me an example?'"

A personal example I can refer to is a complaint against an employee who was allegedly intoxicated. The labels thrown around in this instance were ones like drunk, alcoholic etc. However these were not facts and couldn’t form the basis of an investigation or decision. What could however was the behaviour of the employee, i.e. the facts. How was the employee acting? What did they do? What did they say? As long as you stay focused on the facts, and move past the labels you can be confident you will be making a decision on sound footing.

Changing the language around flexible work

I came across an interesting article in my HR Daily feed regarding flexible work options and the terminology used to describe them. Essentially it argues that "Work-life support" and "Flexible working arrangements" gives the impression that it is for staff receiving special treatment and reserved for the select few.

I tend to agree. Bar the new-age companies known for pushing the boundaries on flexibility such as Google, many other workplaces can have an unspoken stigma attached to flexibility. Even now I am working on a transition to retirement project specifically aimed at flexibility but only for those nearing retirement. The idea of pushing flexibility for staff throughout the organisation regardless of age is still a controversial idea. The term flexible careers, not to be confused transitional ones in the career path sense, is one that the article likes to use instead along with "flexible work" to help buck the stigma.

See the whole article here.

11 Key points from the article around flexibility are:

1. Incorporate flexibility into workplace design. - This includes job design. treat flexibility as a management deliverable
2. Create a culture of flexibility. - Remove the stigma of flexibility, make it part of the accepted culture.
3. Improve leadership around flexibility. - Make sure senior leaders can lead by example and are genuinely committed.
4. Talk about flexibility. - Illustrate success stories and detail examples.
5. Strategise around flexibility. - Include flexibility measurements in standard reporting and identify flexibility as a business need.
6. Make flexibility universal. - Make sure flexibility is truly open to all levels and job types within the business.
7. Provide resources to support flexibility. - Be sure to equip people with the tools they need (i.e IT resources).
8. Measure ROI on flexibility. - Engage in risk analysis and show financial returns.
9. Proactively Seek flexibility. - Try focusing on 'why not flexibility' as opposed to looking for reason to 'block' it.
10. Support team flexibility. - Remember to consider flexibility impacts within and across teams. Welcome feedback. 
11. Promote career flexibility. - Create flexible career opportunities and integrate them into senior roles.  

Building Assertive and Confident Statements

I came across a useful structure for building assertive and confident statements given to me at a professional development session. There were four key templates for delivering these statements. When communicating, following this structure should help you clearly package ideas and make them more powerful.

1. Make a point, support it with a reason, back it up with an example, reiterate the point.

• Point
• Reason
• Example (make it specific)
• Point

2. Make a point, support it with three reasons, reiterate the point.

• Point
• Reason
• Reason
• Reason
• Point

3. Make a point, acknowledge the counter view to this point, provide a reason supporting your point, reiterate your point.

• Point
• Counter (acknowledge counter view)
• Reason
• Point

4. Make a point, note a past example, present actions and then future goal/direction, reiterate your point.

• Point
• Past
• Present
• Future

The final point does not need to be big or forced. It is simply a way to notify your audience that you have finished your statement by rounding it off, keeping your communication clear and focused.

Quotes to ponder

Every week or so I come across an interesting quote which causes me to reflect on my own profession and wonder how things could be done, structured or viewed differently to change results.

I'll start uploading these quotes as I come across them. Today I will be uploading quotes from a Donnington Report. The report itself is a few years old now (2008) but I find its content still particularly relevant. I came across it attending one of Donnington's professional development seminars.

I feel these quotes really speak for themselves and I particularly like the last one:

A lot of seemingly very important talk about culture, but the one question I always ask is: how aligned is the culture that we're talking about to the stuff that makes the business actually perform? Or is it really just an interesting theoretical chat about what happens to motivate people or how things are done in an organisation at a particular point in time? Unless the talk about culture is linked to what makes the business perform, then the only people who will be talking about it are people in HR who are probably surveying it.

I think in the professionalising of HR, the professional training has become incredibly narrow and, without being too derogatory, is a bit "pop psychology". In my opinion, really good HR people should know how to write a decent business case, not make it up or hope they can find someone who could help them do it. HR professionals need to demonstrate a greater awareness that the world is a complex place and that the issues they deal with are amongst the most complex. This means that they shouldn't rush to find solutions that they can package up nearly, tie bows around - which is why I think HR people love policies.

For all the rhetoric about people being the most important asset in our businesses, we haven't done the work that makes sense of that; we are just stating a truism. You know, like saying the world is round, so what! People are important, so what!

What we have ended up doing in our businesses is professionalise HR so people go zip up the ladder in HR and never touch anything else. It's the same with risk functions where you have people who only know how to do the technical analysis, they actually don't get how it interacts with the business. And yet we are looking for leadership and capacity to drive across functions of our organisations.   

I don't think many of us in the HR function are anywhere near enough engaged in the business of business. Rather than finding the courage to solve complex business problems we have instead tended to drape ourselves in moral authority and hope people notice us as we swan through organisations.

We need the courage as a profession to stop doing the stuff that doesn't make any difference. We need to do the things we know are right in our organisations and something that will make a fundamental difference. HR needs to measure the right things so they can have the debate differently. They then need to find the people they can align within the business to take it forward.

Restructuring Tips

I attended an FCB Seminar yesterday, check out their website below.

http://www.fcbgroup.com.au/

These breakfast seminars have been of a continuous high quality and I would highly recommend you attend one in the future if you get the chance. If only for the opportunity to engage in the roundtable discussions with professionals from varying industries on ideas/plans you might have for your own business units – you may find someone who had been in your situation only a few months ago. Often presented by lawyers, you will also find they back up nearly every piece of advice with an actual case study.

The session was on "Optimising Business Efficiencies During an Economic Downturn" and the roundtable I attended was "Change Management and optimising workplace culture in difficult economic times". However there were other roundtables on Industrial Disputes and OHS.
Two notable points I took from the session were:

1. During a restructure be careful with your terminology. When communicating with employees you should refer to the structure as a “proposed” one. This is to ensure you allow employees the chance to comment and communicate on the restructure. If the restructure was to result in the redundancy of a position, the potentially to be retrenched employee should have the opportunity to present a business case to challenge the change. If you communicate restructures as stated fact from the get go you could be at risk of appearing to not have a genuine consolation with staff.

2. Something I had not thought of before – incentivising handovers. Sometimes handovers, particularly if the result of a restructure and or redundancies can increase the risk of poor information transfer if the leaving employee is disgruntled. Incentivising handovers linked to KPI’s could alleviate this by giving the employee a clear benefit to conducting a proper handover. A secondary effect of this is it formalises the handover process, something that particularly important to help avoid knowledge loss. A handover process does not need to be incentivized to make it formalised obviously, it is just a bi-product.