Are we still living in the information age? Maybe not. Here’s an interesting article from Harvard Business Review on the Human Economy, from November 2014. Societies have evolved from agrarian economies to industrial economies to service economies to knowledge economies. At this point, there’s such a glut of food and goods and services and information, the next bottleneck is humans. Businesses that do well in this new era will be those with a greater sense of humanity. Those that have a poor sense of humanity shall be sunk!
“In the human economy, the most valuable workers will be hired hearts.” It is what makes us different from robots and artificial intelligence (i.e. emotions) that will make us special as employees. Many of the examples in the article are from the perspective of a customer whose heart was won over. Noticeably there’s always and employee whose empathy and enthusiasm closed the deal (so to speak). The article cites several studies where CEOs place a higher priority on social skills than analytics.
This is what it feels like at my desk. I spend half of my time getting the formulas right, and the rest of the time helping people become happy about the numbers. They can’t use workforce analytics unless they trust us. The analytics influence the decision making. Clients get better because we help them develop patience. They come back for more the data is addictive. We persevere through inevitable errors and mistakes, being honest about having made best efforts.
Beyond customer engagement, employee engagement is increasingly recognized as having a major impact on productivity behind closed doors. People are not monkeys at a keyboard sending customer service complaints in circles. Or rather, sometimes it seems that way but it sure looks bad in the news.
At their best, people are the embodiment of the discretionary effort that dictates if a service or product gets to market, and they make every capital investment matter (or not).
Within human resources, truth is the first victim of industrial warfare. Does your working day involve manipulation of facts and truth? I bet it does.
Parties to negotiations proffer bargaining positions that are a precise distance from where things are really going. You support the management rights of managers who are clearly wrong. You conduct investigations into discipline cases where the facts are unclear or contradictory. You guard secrets on the tip of your tongue when people blather on at cocktail parties. As you empathize with diverse perspectives, there are multiple truths, things that may be true to one person but not the other.
The game of human resources brings an impish delight that you are at the crossroads between diplomacy, politics, espionage, and psychiatric nursing. If you can suspend your disbelief and stay in the adventure then truth be damned.
Workforce Analytics and the Re-Definition of Truth
But wait… here comes the human resource metrics team. We’re going to screw it up for you.
In order to love spending long hours getting the numbers right, analysts must develop a hatred for incorrect statements of fact. I feel a special kind of disgust when I discover that I have accidentally made a wrong statement. With large amounts of data, there are always errors inside the data I have received. And the more elaborate my calculations, the greater the risk that I have made a mistake, even when I apply good skills.
Between analysts there is a lot of blunt talk about whether formulas, numbers, and facts are correct. If something is wrong, the not-so-secret language of quants includes phrases like “that is false” and “I made a mistake” and “fix that now.” Analysts know how to talk with each other. Then we step into a meeting with non-quantitative colleagues who use very little math and lots of words. Dirty, filthy words, making statements that are incorrect. You know where this is going. Things must be corrected.
These two crowds – the generalists and the analysts – need a common language, an ability to translate words between two cultures. You might have experienced strange conversations involving phrases such as: How important is this fact? Is this really a fact? Is it true or false? Is it important if this fact is incorrect? Oh, look, someone made a mistake! Shall we discuss it with them? How can we talk about this mistake without embarrassing them? Oh goodness, the person who is wrong has the most power; who will talk with them about it? I’ll do it! No, not you. Wait, yes… you can tell them, you’re not a threat.
This dynamic give the human resource generalist an opportunity for an extremely complex skill set. Who in your office is the data translator between truth and context? As a generalist, how good are you at maintaining two mental states, one in which the facts are crystal clear in your mind, and another in which story and posture prevail? Can you pull together a discreet meeting to correct-course on a disputed fact? Can you prevent ill-informed decisions from being advanced, and also keep it quiet about it afterward?
It’s tough work to grapple with poker-faced stares between analysts, subordinates, and superiors while you navigate the rich world of debated facts. If the spreadsheet tells you only one thing that is certain, it is that this time you must do what feels right in your gut. You have been nourished with facts, and now your gut feels right. So put on your game face, and go! Now that’s employee engagement.
On average, you can get a new job making eye contact. That’s because the new technology just can’t get this right. While you brace yourself for massive technological disruption, new business models are emerging where your hands and your heart will guide you through the next era of technology and employment.
Dustin McKissen of McKissen + Company wrote an intriguing article in July 2017 about non-degreed workers displaced by technology. The article is blunt: My Father-In-Law Won’t Become a Coder, No Matter What Economists Say. It’s a great critique, because it gets into the problem that technological change is supposed to be good for us “on average,” a concept that only makes sense to economists. If one million old jobs are eliminated, and a million-plus-one new jobs are created, an economist would talk in terms of a net gain of one job. Yay! However, the one million people who lost their jobs don’t see this change as positive, and they are perfectly entitled to speak as humans who have a voice, a home, a family, and a vote.
I endorse McKissen’s view that this human resources topic is highly political. What does the fast-changing world mean to those who are displaced? While the father-in-law is currently fine for work, the company is encouraging sales staff to get their customers to place orders online. Will that man have the same job, or any job, ten years from now? You see, if there is political blowback from those who are adversely affected by this net-positive change, the voice coming from the dis-employed may affect the viability of our economic and political system. McKissen calls for a new ideology, a new “ism,” that bypasses the politics of left vs. right.
Customer Engagement is Connected to Employee Engagement
I personally think the new ideology is starting to become evident. The idea is that business performance is hyper-sensitive to the work of engaged employees delivering meaningful experiences to engaged customers. For lack of a better word, let’s call it “double-engagement.”
Technology is just something that ramps-up productivity of those who advance the double-engagement experience. The use of wearable technology, hand-held computer devices, and links to large databases and artificial intelligence simply empower the front-line worker. The workers do what the technology cannot: make eye contact with customers, express empathy, display a sense of service, and show responsibility for getting the goods into the client or customer’s hands. Profits, investments, and public policy are just along for the ride, and people who are big in those areas need to stop pretending they’re the boss. This new model can be found in other articles, such as here and here.
It’s noteworthy that McKissen’s father-in-law works in the sale of food. Whole Foods was recently bought-out by Amazon; what does that mean for the future of food shopping? It is increasingly apparent that the retail sector is at risk of being savaged by online shopping. Sure, we’ll still be buying food a decade from now. But how will the food get from online order to a front-door delivery?
The Workplace Culture of Customer Engagements
In an article from the New York Times, there was an eye-opening exposé of the life of those who deliver food after the online order. It turns out that new technology is only efficient until the requested groceries make it to the last mile. In “the last mile problem,” tactile and emotional challenges emerge in a very human way.
The bananas must not be refrigerated, almost everything else must be kept cool, there is more than one optimal temperature for cooling, the milk must be stored upright, and apples must not be stored in a confined area with lettuce. Each hour of delay in getting the groceries to the customer eliminates one day of shelf life. The traffic is unpredictable, the parking rules are unpredictable, and there is physical effort to getting the containers from car to front door.
And the carton of eggs must be presented and inspected by the customer. Apparently intact eggs have a do-or-die influence on customer satisfaction. So this satisfaction is micro-managed by a devoted delivery person, in a face-to-face conversation. Double engagement.
The wages are modest, but the tips can be good. Why would someone provide a tip to someone delivering groceries from an online order? Because a worker put some enthusiasm and promptness into helping the customer get what they really wanted. How could you not tip this kind of service? As a customer, the cash rightfully belongs in your own hand, or the person who helped you. Why would your money go to anyone else?
Bias is bad for productivity. Here’s an overview of a study that came out in July 2017. The findings are that perceptions of bias have a negative impact on idea-sharing and job commitment. “Of employees who experienced bias, 34% reported withholding ideas or solutions in the last six months and 48% said they looked for a new job while at their current job during the same time period.”
Perceptions of implicit bias are reduced by an inclusive environment. “Employees were 64% less likely to perceive bias at companies with diverse leaders, 87% less likely when they had inclusive leaders, and 90% less likely when they had sponsors.”
The methodology was to compare self-assessments of employee potential to those employees’ estimates of how they would be rated by their manager. Larger gaps were interpreted as an indicator of bias. There’s room for debate about the methodology, but the findings ring true. That is, that managers who favour people like themselves discourage the productivity of a diverse workforce. Bias is simply malfunctioning thinking. Leading an organization with malfunctioning thought would presumably be a hindrance to workplace effectiveness.
What is the trade-off between a compassionate workplace culture and strong corporate performance? Surprise, there isn’t one! Corporate performance is subordinate to organizational culture and the emotional intelligence of senior leaders.
This article by Travis Bradberry of Emotional Intelligence 2.0 fame describes an interesting conundrum. A large number of top corporate leaders have poor emotional intelligence. The highest emotional intelligence is found amongst front-line managers and then each management level upward the leaders display increasingly diminished emotional intelligence.
Bradberry attributes this phenomenon to two factors. First, corporate boards are selecting for leaders who deliver the numbers, such as profits, sales volumes, and stock price appreciation. Second, the work environment of senior leaders impairs emotional intelligence and inhibits its growth. Severe stress, lack of rest, regulatory enforcement, and a low-trust and blame-heavy environment can drag anyone into an emotional stone age (and keep them there).
What is fascinating is that corporate leaders with high emotional intelligence, although fewer in number, still perform better than others. It may be that organizations will select the occasional gem of a leader, but otherwise we are mostly recruiting and promoting lower-functioning leaders into senior roles. So how do mean bosses even get the job in the first place?
It is reminiscent of Jeffrey Pfeffer’s book Power: Why Some People Have it and Others Don’t. Pfeffer provides endless examples of how an executive’s career prospects are often inversely proportional to their performance. In brief, being a cold and calculating savage will motivate people to not mess with you. It is possible to rig your career towards a poisoned and under-performing work environment where you still reign supreme. When corporate leaders spend all day making power plays, there appears to be no beneficiary of this behavior other than the leader. Look directly at these kinds of leaders. How are they doing? They seem to be doing well. It’s just everyone around them who is falling apart. It’s all of those people who just can’t play the game and can’t keep up; they aren’t able to deliver corporate performance. Of course, the punchline is that downstream inability to perform is a hallmark of inferior top leadership.
There is another consideration; do major corporations have sufficient protections against leaders who have personality disorders? The best-known personality disorder is psychopathy, which is well-documented in Robert Hare’s Without Conscience. The other disorders are important, but psychopaths are special. When you get to know the type, it sounds like the personality of someone who perfectly reflects the values of an emotionless profit-maximizing corporation.
Indeed this was well documented in The Corporation, a movie by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott, and Joel Bakan. Their critique is that the behavior of major corporations (as institutions) ticks all of the boxes on the checklist of psychopath behaviors for people. If we promote leaders who reflect corporate values, and the corporate values are that we should act like psychopaths, then who is going to end up in charge?
There is a lack of insight amongst psychopaths, corporations, and many corporate leaders, and this lack of insight is at the root of poor emotional intelligence. Let’s face it, if you got cut off in traffic by some jerk on your way to the office, and then a colleague cuts in front of you at the coffee station, it’s easy to get snippy. Do you keep control? Are you even aware that you’re just carrying-forward a residual emotion from an hour earlier? I mean, if it’s possible to carry-forward quarterly accounting indicators, surely it’s possible to carry forward emotions.
How can corporations be unaware of the need for a compassionate working environment? I think it’s because hierarchy diminishes the two-directional information flow up and down the chain of command. If the board wants numbers, executives commit to deliver, and the rest of the hierarchy snaps into line, this reveals an opinion that the best opinions come from the top. However, this might not be how the world really works. It is an organization’s history, geography, and people that determine the culture. And it is the culture that determines the customer experience, the spirit of innovation, a healthy attitude towards rules, compassion during crisis, and discretionary effort amongst staff.
One does not simply demand good numbers. Rather, we harvest good numbers from a well-cultivated culture.
What’s with all this bold talk from millennials? Don’t they know to keep hush about their outlandish opinions? In a recent article from Lisa Earle McLeod the author submits an open letter (closer to a manifesto) that explains why millennials have the opinions they have.
She has two key points. First, employers are tolerating poor performers, and those poor performers drag everyone else down, including highly-motivated millennials. It’s not so much that millennials are unreasonably ambitious and over-eager, it is that their enthusiasm is the correct attitude and lower-functioning colleagues should not be setting the pace. Fair ball.
Secondly, we must give our work purpose. Organizations that have “a purpose bigger than money” have better business results. This purpose-driven organization is reminiscent of Simon Sinek’s Power of Why although McLeod’s critique is closer to a sense of Noble Purpose amongst the sales team, a major concern of hers.
This focus on enthusiastic front-line staff is consistent with other critiques. Josh Bersin notes that many organizations are flipping their hierarchy to place priority on engaged employees first, who then attract and retain customers who, in turn, keep the profits alive. If it works, go for it.
Stuart Murray Speaks 