Steve Church said it best: “If you help employees fix broken processes, you’ll gain employee engagement”. Not only is this quote spot on, but it brings me to my favorite ’HR People Make Me Crazy’ rant.
How HR Tries To Increase Engagement:
First, they have an ah-ha moment where they realize the key to employee engagement is understanding employees challenges, removing barriers, and fixing broken processes. Second, a survey is created, distributed, and analyzed. New policies are created based on those surveys (which captured 2% of what employees really wanted to say), and HR sits around wondering why their engagement scores haven’t gone up.
I/O folks, deep breathing will help clear the anger you’re feeling right now. Before you attack my seeming distrust of surveys, just know that I’m actually a huge fan and use engagement surveys often. HOWEVER, that survey can only give me a high level pulse on how my organization is doing. Increasing engagement is more than looking for high level trends throughout the organization and creating policies to fix them. It’s about understanding individual teams and divisions. More importantly, it’s about finding ways to understand individual employees.
How HR Should Increase Engagement:
Engagement goes up when employees feel they have someone to turn to who can help them fix what is broken in their lives. To increase engagement you need to be the type of HR person who employees feel comfortable opening up to, the kind of HR person employees want to open up to. If you are serious about increasing employee engagement, there is an easy place to start. Stop thinking that because you’re HR, you need to have your own office. Literally, my blood boils when HR people try to defend this need. I’m sure some of you are thinking. “But…
“…I have private conversations all the time and need a space where I can close a door”.
Does your company have conference rooms? When someone needs to have a private conversation with you, go into one of them. Also, tell me that you never close the door just to block out whatever is going on outside your office. A door (even when it’s open) is a barrier that takes a little bit of guts for an employee to walk through. It can even be a little bit scary, like going to the principal’s office. Building engagement is about being so easily accessible to employees that you are literally in the path of their frustrations when they need to get it all out.
“…if others see us walking into the conference room they’ll assume that employee is in trouble.”
That means you’re the HR person people only see when you’re carrying a pink slip in your hand (and I hate that for you). Maybe you need to pull employees into conference rooms more often just to tell them you’ve heard good things about their work, or simply to ask them what you can do to make their lives easier. If 80% of your private conversations with employees are positive, then when you have to have a negative one, no one on the outside will know the difference.
You Don’t Really Need That Office
I can’t stand HR people who think they have to have an office to get their job done, because they are the reason our industry has gotten so far away from the one thing that started our profession in the first place - being a resource for our employees. Some of my most enlightening years in HR happened when I was sitting smack in the middle of a sea of cubicles. I knew when someone hit a milestone, I knew the company gossip, I knew which managers rocked and which ones failed, and most importantly, I knew which processes were broken and I was able to help employees fix them.
I will never accept an office again and I will always be the HR person who knows which process to fix. Are you willing to join me?
I fully agree with your sentiment. Great for HR folks who sit in one building with their employees. How about HR folks who handle mulitple sites in multiple locations and states?
Terrific post! Applies equally (or moreso) to managers: the best I’ve ever known didn’t care about all the ancillary/political “badges and incidents” of authority — they just wanted to get stuff done (and help their people do more stuff, and do it better).
While I think the purpose of your point is a good one (be a part of the action with your people and know what’s happening), I have an issue with what you are saying…..and I work in a cubicle.
What would you do if you are on the phone with a distraught employee you need to help, or a manager that you are trying to coach. Do you just stop the conversation and call back from a more private place (if one happens to be available)? Luckily, I work in a cubical within the HR department, so if I’m on the phone telling a manager that the employee’s pregnancy can’t be considered an issue, I don’t have to worry about who is listening. Or, if I’m telling an employee that the best way to handle their new diagnosis is to seek help from our EAP, no one will be trying to guess who I am talking to.
How do you handle that kind of scenario if you are not in a private area? Again, I think your intentions are good, but the reality just might not live up to it.
Kim,
I will admit that there are times when sitting in a cubicle amongst non HR employees can be woefully inconvenient – especially if the employees you’re surrounded by aren’t the only ones you support. The issue is compounded if your organization doesn’t have an abundance of small meeting rooms that you can easily jump into.
That being said, I think you nailed it when you said, “Do you just stop the conversation and call back from a more private place?” Yes. I think the benefits of having employees have easy access to their HR business partner far outweighs the occasional inconvenience of you having to politely ask them to follow you to a conference room or wait for a quick call-back.
It seems like I’m not going to be able to convince you to spend all of your time sitting amongst the employees you serve, but try doing for even just a few hours a week. It makes a huge difference.
Liza,
That’s a great question. Many times HR is centralized but employees are all over the place. This makes continuously sitting with the employees nearly impossible. My suggestion would be to make sure you are utilizing your time with employees to the fullest. Here are a few suggestions:
1 – When you’re on a call with an employee, after the specific issue they called about is resolved, spend a few minutes asking them about any other challenges they’re having. Ask how their location as a whole is doing. Ask them what you can do to make one thing better for them and the others in their location.
2 – When you do visit other offices make sure you’re sitting with the employees, mingling with them, building relationships and making sure they know that you’re always there for them.
3 – This post is about being more accessible to employees. Many times I feel that HR (and Managers) need offices not because they spend ALL of their time doing confidential things but because an office signifies status quo. Take a minute to really figure out what your employees think of HR at your organization. If they think you’re inaccessible, unapproachable, etc. then reach out to change that image.
A lot of what you’ve said here is very true. But you’ve concentrated on the HR alone, and talked about how the whole concept of operating within the closed walls and the restrictions of an office must be done away with. However, I think that this concept should be applied universally, and even to the person in the highest rank. Here, I’m making a reference to Vineet Nayar’s book ‘Employees First, Customers Second’, in which he has dealt with the concept of ‘Destroying the office of the CEO’, and decentralizing all operations in the workplace. He’s also spoken a lot about ‘Trust through Transparency’ in an organization, where no operations are secretive, and honesty is a priority. A lot like what you’ve mentioned, but with a universal-workplace relevance. It’s time organizations started applying these principles, and make the office a more open and comfortable environment to work in.