Six Grumps

On June 7, 2012, in HRExaminer, by John Sumser

Six Grumps - by John Sumser - HRExaminer

The rate of acceleration in technical change is, itself, accelerating.

  • I sat in on a Twitter chat session about ‘candidate experience.’ Lots of assertions, lots of speculation, no evidence that there is a real cost associated with bad candidate experience. My take continues to be that this is a solution that is in search of a problem.The costs associated with treating candidates badly vary with the economy (and the region).

    Any inventory in a massive surplus position gets treated roughly. Any inventory in a position of scarcity gets treated royally. These are the dynamics of the labor market. As long as jobs are the core of the labor market, inventory will be treated according to the laws of scarcity.

    I have a hard time imagining the day that migrant workers are treated to a ‘respectful’ candidate experience. The same holds true of many jobs at the low end of the economy. Candidate experience is an item that defines the difference between one class and another.

    That’s a way of saying that jobs in big companies (which are the ultimate relics of the industrial era) are now the exclusive privilege of the upper middle class. They may even define upper middle class in certain parts of the East Coast.

    Great candidate experience goes hand in hand with great health care benefits and extensive paid leave.

  • Big Data is the new oil. Most of what you see in HR, however, is a begrudging acceptance of the analytical tools that everyone else has been using since the beginning of the Total Quality movement in the 1980s.
  • I am a part of a team teaching Social Media and Internet Law at the local Law School. It turns out that the law doesn’t work the way I thought it did. My view was: legislature makes laws; executive branch enforces laws; judiciary sorts it out when things go crazy. Not so much.

    The rate of acceleration in technical change is, itself, accelerating. That means that what took Microsoft 15 years, took Facebook five; that the rate of change is leaving our 18th Century political system in the dust; that the new approach to government is using other countries as proxies; that the moment we nail it down, it gets screwed up again.

    The way that law actually happens is that two advocates fight it out in negotiations and courtrooms, while they try to define the metaphor. Once early precedent is established, the legislature acts. Usually, the early results are laws that wither under challenge. The first laws limp into their futures as skeletons of the original legislation. Meanwhile, the executive branch runs willy-nilly creating and enforcing regulations.

    Lawyers are the people who navigate this messy cauldron.

    Today, they have to understand technology. The most interesting lesson in this class was the judge in the Oracle-Google case. He informed his work by creating and working with computer code during the trial. With an adequate understanding of the core technology, he was able to guide the process with common sense.

    Meanwhile, we’re teaching this class how to think in advance of the emergence of the law. That’s the essential skill of 21st Century attorneys.

  • Rewards are punishment. The research is very clear; incentives (carrots) do not produce sustainable change. Mostly, they create an appetite (and a sense of entitlement) for getting incentives. Competitive incentive programs are the root of overcompensation for CEOs.

    The more an organization relies on incentives, the worse things get. Still, performance management (with its emphasis on incentives) continues to manipulate our work environments with a theory of motivation derived from lab animals.

    Rewards and incentives are ways of doing things to workers. As long as our management approach rests on objectification, we’re never going to see the sort of engagement people are fantasizing about these days.

  • There are two different HR conversations. When the CEO talks about people as the most important asset, he means those people who make a high value contribution to the organization. These are the people who create the core value of the company. When HR talks about people, they mean every single person in the company.

    Building processes that work for everyone makes the organization treat the core players badly. Because of their role in the value chain, they are entitle to better than what other people get. When HR proceduralizes and standardizes, it drives the company towards mediocrity. The answer is in the other direction.

  • The C-Level of most organizations is damagingly myopic. I don’t really have to tell you where most of them have their heads. You work with them. When HR tries to plan for foreseeable difficulty, they are derailed with executive intuition about people. The shortage of data in personnel decisions is a two way street in most companies
About the author

John Sumser

John Sumser is the founder, principal author and editor-in-chief of the HRExaminer Online Magazine. John explores the people, technology, ideas and careers of senior leaders in Human Resources and Human Capital. John is the also principal of Two Color Hat where he routinely advises Human Resources, Recruiting Departments and Talent Management teams with product analysis, market segmentation, positioning, strategy and branding guidance.

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  • http://www.wphebert.com Paul Hebert

    I have to jump in on the conversation on rewards.

    Incentives should never be used for long-term change.  Research on poorly designed
    incentives is clear.  When used incorrectly they do more harm than good. So to with scalpels – but when used correctly they are a huge benefit.  Incentives are tools, like the scalpel.  Don’t hate the tool – hate the user. 

    Too often the incentives designed are overly focused on goals, are too reward heavy
    and are not short term.  Mess with any one of those levers and the result is bad for everyone.  I wouldn’t condemn incentives just because they are poorly designed and badly applied.

    Incentives are not ways of doing “to” anyone.  You cannot force someone to participate in an incentive.  Incentives are decision architectures.  The person has a choice to do one thing and get a reward – do another and not get a reward. 

    The problem, as already stated, is when the reward outstrips the change.  Offer someone $1 Billion dollars to manipulate the market and create a new financial instrument that can bring down an economy – most would do it.  Once again – the design if flawed, the application if flawed.  Not the tool.

    When designed correctly incentives provide people with a reason to break behavioral inertia. Nothing more.  When we rely on incentives to drive more than that is when we get into trouble.  There are many reasons a company may want to break behavioral inertia – good reasons – and incentives are a very effective way to do that. 

    I also don’t think incentives drive over compensation of CEOs – to me the issue of pay transparency had more to do with that than anything.  Once CEOs saw what other
    companies were paying their CEOs the floodgates opened.  New “averages” were established and the “norm” changed. 

    Hate the player – but don’t hate the game.

  • Tom Bolt

    Since I am an advocate for improving the candidate experience, I guess I have to comment on two of these grumps. First of all, the large majority of people who comment on the topic, especially in a twitter chat session, are simply parroting the popular trend that something is wrong with the way we handle candidates in the hiring process. There is enough anecdotal evidence to give it credibility so the drummer keeps beating and the masses keep marching. And this brings me to comment on the other grump about big data: It is worse than you stated. HR is not only rooted in antiquated analytical tools there are few advocates of digging into the data or researching it. Perhaps this is a cynical viewpoint, but there needs to be a shake-up in HR that requires a broader perspective. It is hard work to analyze data correctly or even find the significant numbers in the first place, so we perpetuate the mediocrity of the whole profession by just ignoring it.

    I recently wrote a series of articles on the candidate experience and spent an inordinate amount of time looking for supporting data. There is enough legitimate research by key advocates to support the theory that there is a problem, but I really wanted more hard data and we aren’t there yet. There are also leaders who are pushing for HR to embrace modern data collection, analysis and reporting. We aren’t there yet either. I’m not convinced these issues are solutions in search of problems, but obviously I don’t have the data to prove it. Talking about issues, assuming we are talking about real issues, will raise consciousness but talk alone wont solve anything. We all need to keep looking for the next best thing in our profession, listen to the grumps and do something about it.   

  • http://compensationinsider.com/ Sandrine Bardot

    I have to say I was struck by the point that the CEO and HR don’t mean the same when they talk about “people, our greatest asset”. That is very true !

    I think however that the “all people” view is not only that of HR – it is drilled in HR by the pressure of line managers (and often even senior executives) who hate to differentiate based on performance or potential.

    Actually, they don’t hate to positively differentiate the top people (those that the CEO loves so much), because these are the ones who create value for their unit or division.

    What they hate is to have the realistic conversations with the rest of the organisation, the solid performers who do they job averagely (is that a word?).

    And so they push HR to create these processes that treat everyone the same, in order to reduce to a minimum these feedback conversations and the time and discomfort they create in managers.

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  • JP Winker

    Love the ‘rewards are punishment’ point. The complete reliance on oversimplified reward systems to “engage” workers is silly. That we haven’t had an advancement in my lifetime is tragically stupid. 

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