CHAPTER 2

Why HR Needs to Change?

Since the management thinking of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, lifestyles, businesses, technology, and people themselves have changed, yet our ways of working have not. Since starting my career in HR in the late 1990s, we have changed our designation—Personnel, HR, and now, we are starting to move into the designation “People,” and even—as I saw recently—Head of Employee Happiness. Yet, with these name changes and new buzzwords such as “Employee Engagement,” for the most part, we still recruit, induct, train, develop, pay, and promote our people in much the same way.

And it is simply not working.

Treating employees as individuals is a big part of AGILE HR also, yet we continue to create one-size-fits-all approaches to managing and developing our people.

People want to work with more flexibility, more autonomy; they want to be creative and recognized for their hard work and efforts. They want to be thanked for doing a good job and have goals and objectives that are relevant. They do not want to fear being disciplined or dismissed for making a mistake, but be given the opportunity and support to learn from these. Our people want to be treated like people, not numbers, and they want us to care.

And yet, our policies—from dress code, to working from home (WFH), to how to book and take your annual leave, how to record sickness absence, and how you will rate on your performance review—are not what people want.

Will some employees push the boundaries as much as possible if you are more lenient, or if you trust them more, or give them greater accountability?

Possibly, yes.

But, we have to give it a try.

I know people that string work out all of the time to make it last as long as possible, who arrive late, always take their hour for lunch, and then, leave early all of the time, who want to do the bare minimum, day in and day out. These people will not last long in my organization or under my leadership because that is not the way we do things around here.

And if you have these people in your organization, then what is needed is more effective adult-to-adult conversations that take place on a regular basis, or bigger projects, or tighter deadlines, and certainly, more effective management if this style of working bothers you.

What is needed is more effective management, and more effective leadership and HR processes, policies, and procedures that support the leadership of the organization. A new HR policy is not the answer to someone becoming more effective at work.

What we can do is make sure that our HR practices are not pages and pages and pages of jargon and micromanagement guidelines that set boundaries so tight that people cannot breathe; they need to be simple and easy to digest.

I started a new position with a company where all of the policies were so long and complicated that even with over 10 years of experience, I could neither understand the steps that had already been taken nor advise them on what to do next. In my first week, I was handed a complex employee relations case; it had everything in it from performance issues, complaints, harassment, bullying, fraud and conspiracy allegations and had been going on for months. The people who had been dealing with it previously had left and I was asked to pick up the pieces. It was a minefield. I met with the people concerned, and started the process again. It was resolved quickly, and while not to everyone’s satisfaction, it came to a conclusion, but I had to practically ignore the policy in order to make things happen.

As we move to more or even totally online working, we can work from anywhere, literally anywhere, and as long as we get the job done, what does it matter what is in a policy? Yet, I have seen so many WFH policies that make me shudder, that the thought of WFH would terrify me into going into the office every day, where I can hot-desk at the same desk that I have always used, not really engage with anyone, and then, go home again.

Organizations are always looking for ways to do more for less, to save costs and drive efficiencies. Technology has changed the way we work, live, and think, and who knows what the future political landscape will look like and how it will impact businesses and our people?

But even with all of this change and uncertainty going on in the world in which we live and work, HR has changed very little, and if we do not change, I do not believe we have a future.

Radical change—and some of what we will cover will sound radical—or even any change, for that matter, does not happen overnight; it will take time. You are likely to be challenged (a lot), possibly even have your ideas rubbished because they have not been proven elsewhere, and of course, there is going to be a risk involved with presenting something new in the first place, but also, in the design, implementation, and then, sustaining the change.

Most, or at least some of the managers and leaders, in your organization will welcome the changes, and may even wonder why you did not implement them years ago; others will fight against you as it is not “the way we do things,” but what may be your biggest challenge is changing your own mindset and that of your team, because after all, the policies, procedures, processes, and policing are our creation. The HR profession has taught us that this is the way we have to do things and we risk being taken to court if anything goes wrong or people get upset, and we would not have created all of this paperwork, and processes, and policies, and procedures if they were not needed, right?

Wrong.

Most of what we have designed has come from an outdated HR model, and when I say outdated, I am not talking 30 years ago. Even some of the research carried out in 2008 is no longer relevant for HR, and yet, we still use it.

To add to this, new employment legislation that comes into force because one company treated someone badly, or was accused and lost the case despite not doing anything wrong, causes us to write yet another policy, and tighten up even more on the way we lead, manage, and engage our people.

And if your organization has been threatened with or lost an Employment Tribunal case, then the chances are the HR function is seen as one internal police force ensuring that every single conversation is documented and signed by both parties and that no manager or employee has any wiggle room at all when it comes to speaking with one another.

So, this has to change. And the good news is, when it is changed and it is working well, it is amazing!

I am involved in many online HR communities and some face-to-face groups, many of which are challenging the old-school styles of HR and thinking outside the box. But so, so many continue to focus on complicated, outdated policies with no relevance in the world of work as it is today. And, I am sad to say, most of this comes down to leaders asking for more and more policies because of one issue that is happening in the workplace, and rather than manage this appropriately, they insist on a new policy being written and implemented to tar everyone with the same brush.

And HR do not question this. We do not appear to be pushing back, or asking why this policy is needed, or finding another, better way to handle things. We run off to write a policy, asking others in our networks if they have one we can borrow, piece something together, and implement, either in isolation or through our employee forums.

And what is more, when the wider workforce ask why this is needed, we give the one example of where it has happened, and say it is needed to prevent anything similar from happening again.

The policies I have seen—and my sincere apologies for some of the ones my teams and I have written—do not allow people to feel empowered, valued, and trusted.

For those of you reading this that are parents, can you imagine punishing your child each time they tried something new? Or disciplining them each time they fell off their bike, or tried to walk, or spilled food, or made a mess, or did not come first in their race? Yet, this is what we do in the workplace.

And we think that because we are paying people, we have control over everything they do, and limit them doing anything that is not in a policy or procedure.

I read just this week that one of my previous CEOs has resigned from his position. The reasons given in the two press releases that I saw related to incomplete work, issues with finances, and a lack of challenge at the Board level, meaning it was his word only. He led with everything needing to be done his way. When a colleague and I challenged him once on the way employees were being treated, we were both told that we were “HR professionals with ideas above their remit who should just do what we were told as we had no idea about business.” I have proved that statement wrong on many occasions, but sadly, this is how HR are seen.

We have to change this if we want the profession—whatever we decide to call ourselves—to have a future.

I know that when we pay attention to the needs of the business, and the needs of the people in the business, that HR can add value, bucketloads of it; it is time we started to prove this on a global scale.

Before we go into the detail of the book and help you understand more of the neuroscience behind our thought patterns, why we find change difficult and how fear is created, we discuss mindset in this next part so that you can start to see what you need to do personally to start changing mindsets—your own and of those around you, especially of the leaders in your organization.

2.1 An Introduction to Mindset

How the Brain Works and Why We Think and Feel the Way We Do

Before we go into some of the specifics about how to change the way we design and deliver HR solutions, let us start with a bit more of the science behind why our people can feel the way they do.

As you read through this part of the book, consider these three questions:

• Do your existing HR practices instill fear?
• Do your existing HR practices encourage social interaction?
• Do your existing HR practices encourage the feeling of reward?

Ok, so let us start by understanding how the brain works; how we create feelings of doubt, fear, stress, anxiety, lack of confidence, and phobic responses; how the interference comes and goes and what we can do about it; and why some existing working practices and management practices do not encourage the feeling of happiness at work or get the best out of your people.

If we imagine our brain to be the shape of a rugby ball, the very tip at the front of the ball is called the prefrontal cortex—this is to the bit you know as YOU.

It is your conscious part, the part that interacts with the world; the part we are using to be aware of our interactions together. At the moment, it is attached to a vast intellectual resource, the intellectual mind (the top part of the ball). This part, we do not share with other animals.

Now, when we operate from the intellectual part of the brain, we generally get things right in life. It will always come up with answers based on a proper assessment of the situation and is generally very positive.

There is another part of the brain. This part is the original primitive part (the bottom of the ball). The central and influential part of this brain is the amygdala. This is generally referred to as the fight/flight/depression area of the brain and is associated with two other very primitive parts—the hippocampus, which holds all our primitive, and sometimes, inappropriate behavioral experiences and patterns, and the hypothalamus, which regulates chemical responses in the body and mind.

So, let us imagine that when you leave the room you are sat in today, you run into a polar bear.

What would happen?

Your anxiety would go up. You would lose intellectual control and move from the top part of the brain (the intellectual brain) to the bottom part of the brain (the primitive emotional brain), go “sweaty,” increasing the heartbeat, churning the stomach, and you would be off like a shot.

In the circumstances, this response would be entirely appropriate and you would be pleased.

Unfortunately, it is the same in life. When our anxiety goes up—and it can be a gradual process—we lose intellectual control and to a greater or lesser extent, the primitive mind takes over and this mind always operates within the primitive parameters of depression, anxiety, and anger, or a combination of all three.

If our primitive mind thinks that, for one reason or another, our life is in some sort of crisis or emergency, it will step in generally to help.

Depression, anxiety, and anger are all primitive opt-out clauses.

When the caveman looked out of the cave and there was snow, or ice, or danger, and he could not go out to hunt, he pulled the rug over his head and did not interact until the situation changed. We have adapted this to all the modern-day symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress, and in a work context, this is what we might call a “duvet day” or when people throw a “sickie.”

If we were in the jungle in those days, I doubt very much if we would be too far away from our panic button at any given time.

And anger is merely a primitive way of increasing our strength to defend ourselves against wild animals and other wild tribesmen, and in many cases, it is this increase in anxiety that creates our thoughts of fear, stress, self-doubt, or phobias.

But there is more.

The primitive mind is a negative mind. It will always see things from the worst possible perspective. If you think about it, it has to for your self-preservation. When you run into the polar bear, your mind will not say, “Ah, it has probably eaten.” No, quite rightly, it will say, “It will snaffle you.”

This response is great when we run into polar bears, but not so good when the bank statement arrives, or we are facing redundancy, or we have had an argument, and so on.

It is an obsessional mind. If you did have a polar bear in the back garden, you would be reminded of it constantly. You would keep checking.

It is a vigilant mind. If the perception is that danger is all around, then it is wise to stay on red alert.

And, because the primitive brain is not an intellectual one, it cannot be innovative. It has to refer to previous patterns of behavior. If what we did yesterday ensured our survival, then we are encouraged to do it again.

So, think about your workplace.

Are you encouraging a stressful place to work in? Do your people understand what is required of them? Are they supported during change? Do your managers and leaders lead from a place of fear, where every action they take is under scrutiny, and it is only a matter of time before you are telling them, “You’re fired”?

How do we create this anxiety that causes us to move from the intellectual, sensible part of the brain to the angry, anxious, and depressed part?

Well, anxiety is caused by negative thinking.

It is not the events in one’s lives that necessarily cause the perception of crisis. No, if that were so, everyone at university would be suffering from panic attacks, and we know that is not the case. So, it must be our thought patterns surrounding the events of our life.

Every negative thought we have is converted into anxiety. We can create anxiety by negatively forecasting the future, about big things—“We will never be able to afford that”, “I’ll never find another girlfriend,” “I’ll never have a baby,” and so on. It can be small things, like that meeting.

Here, we should remember that the mind cannot tell the difference between imagination and reality.

Intellectually, you know the meeting is going to go OK; they generally do, but being you, you start thinking about things going wrong.

You think about it 50 times?

The actual meeting goes quite well, but you have attended 51 meetings and 50 have been disasters.

We can negatively introspect about the past.

Now, within the primitive mind, there is a library of all the patterns of thought and patterns of behavior that help us to survive.

Some of them are instinctive, but a baby does not know where it is going to be born—the Antarctic, or the jungle, for example.

So, it needs to be able to learn automatic patterns of thought and behavior, based on its environment.

So, when a 3-year-old primitive is faced with a bear for the first time, he has to be able to learn that that bear is not something nice and big, fluffy to play with; the mind has to learn that that bear is going to eat the 3-year-old primitive unless he gets the hell out of there.

And it learns that because mum is screaming, “BEAR!!” The 3-year-old primitive child picks up the stress from mum, focuses on the bear, and forms that pattern in the primitive mind that says, “Bears are dangerous.”

So, next time he is out in the forest, he is keeping a look out for bears. If he spots one, the primitive mind refers to the pattern that says bears are dangerous, and gets him the hell out of there with the fight or flight response.

This releases adrenaline and cortisol into the bloodstream, which increases the heart rate and breathing rate and blood pressure to get oxygen to his muscles, which then enable him to escape as quickly as possible.

But sometimes, the subconscious gets it wrong.

You can imagine Daisy, aged 1, is playing with a spider on the carpet when mum walks in, who has always been terrified of spiders. Mum screams because Daisy’s eating the damn thing by this stage and Daisy forms that pattern that says, “Spiders are dangerous.”

Meanwhile, during these potentially dangerous situations, the logical rational mind gets blocked out—partly because the subconscious is trying to protect those patterns that it thinks are important for survival, and partly because logic is just too slow. If you meet a bear, the last thing you want is to rationally analyze what kind of a bear it is, whether it is dangerous, whether it is hungry, or whether you should freeze or run like hell.

This is why Daisy, 20 years down the line, logically and rationally knows that spiders are not dangerous in this country—but that does not stop her primitive mind not letting her in the same room as a spider.

So, here is this distinction between what she logically and rationally knows to be the case and the behavior that the subconscious drives.

Now, imagine the spider is one of the managers in your workplace and you know that some of your people dread meeting with them. Or, it is the board meeting where you got shot down last time you made a suggestion and have not wanted to talk in the room since. Or, you have a group of people who are so terrified of speaking up and giving presentations because they forgot what they were saying last time or the presentation did not work for them!

Every negative thought that we have is accumulated and stored. We say it is stored in a stress bucket. Thankfully, we do have a method for emptying our bucket and it is known as REM sleep—rapid eye movement.

At night, we re-run events of the day and change them from being an emotional memory to a narrative memory, a memory that we have control over.

You are familiar with how REM works. Someone upsets you in the afternoon and you really are upset. You tell your partner and they say, “Forget about it,” but you really cannot. You are thinking about it when you go to bed.

During your REM sleep, you will re-run the event, either clearly or metaphorically (dreaming), and you will move it from the primitive brain to the intellectual brain, where you have control over it.

So, when you awaken in the morning, you might well have forgotten about the wretched person; or you might not, but you will certainly be saying something such as, “How do I allow these people to upset me so?”

I fondly imagine that I awaken each morning with my bucket emptied, so I can start the day without anxiety, anger, depression, or fear.

You do not. Why?

Well, here, depending on whether you have too much or too little REM sleep, there are two scenarios.

Scenario 1

For a start, you have been piling too much into your bucket. (Sometimes, it will overflow!) Sadly, for one reason or another, REM is restricted to about 20 percent of our sleep patterns.

If we try and overdo that, then the mind will wake you up. You know when it is your mind waking you up because you wake up wide awake, and often, feel quite miserable.

Often, we cannot get back to sleep again. You know the difference between that and the baby waking you up, for instance.

Now, we are in the grip of a bit of a vicious circle. The more you have in your bucket, the more time you will spend in your primitive brain, and the more you will be encouraged to be negative.

So, to get you back on top of things, you need to restrict the amount you are piling into your bucket, and get you concentrating on the positive things in your life.

You will know when you are doing this when you start sleeping better.

Scenario 2

You are still piling too much into your bucket and it takes a great deal of effort to attempt to empty it.

Sadly, REM is enervating. It has enormous energy in that effort to diffuse that anxiety.

Sometimes, we can overdo it and this exhausts us and makes us even more low, anxious, or fearful.

Now, we find ourselves in the grip of a vicious circle again.

In an attempt to empty our bucket in this scenario, we are encouraged to sleep more and more; sometimes all day, which makes our depression, anxiety, stress, or fear worse and worse.

So again, you need to restrict the amount you are piling into your bucket, and get yourself concentrating on the positive aspects in your life.

You need to reorganize your sleep patterns too.

On the Chrysalis Consulting website, under the Learning Lounge section, you will find an audio link for relaxation. You can use this once a day for the next few weeks, or as long as you like, perhaps just when needed, to help improve your sleep, increase your REM, and get you operating more effectively from the rational and logical part of your brain when fearful or stressful situations occur.

I just want to tell you about the physiology before we move on, about what happens in the brain when we suffer from anxiety disorders, depression, and fear.

Early men and early women were given quite definite rewards for carrying out certain evolutionary processes.

They got a reward when they hunted and gathered, and successfully supported themselves and their families.

We are better as a tribe rather than individuals, and they got rewarded when they interacted with others.

The reward they got were quite definitely recognized and scientists are adamant about this.

They felt motivated.

But most of all, it was a coping mechanism; it helped them cope with day-to-day activities, helped them cope better with physical fear, made them braver; it even helped them cope with physical pain.

No doubt they were pleased.

Now, we know what that reward is.

It is a chemical response in the brain that produces various neurotransmitters that act as catalysts for that sort of mentally healthy behavior.

And you know, the neurotransmitter we talk about most—simply because it is the most important—is serotonin, the happy hormone.

When we produce a constant flow of serotonin, we are nice, happy, coping, brave little souls!

So, we need to operate within these positive parameters like early man, and although we do not have to go out to hunt, we do have to interact in a positive way, be active in a positive way, and think in a positive way (the 3 Ps).

Because when we do, we produce patterns in the brain that give us that constant flow of serotonin.

Take some time now to consider patterns, and behaviors, or events that create a negative and physical reaction in you.

Now, go back to three questions I asked you to consider at the beginning of this section:

• Do your existing HR practices instil fear?
• Do your existing HR practices encourage social interaction?
• Do your existing HR practices encourage the feeling of reward?

Right from when we are at school, we are taught that competing with others is what we need to do in order to survive, and this is played out even more in the workplace. Collaboration and social interaction is not seen as a great way to build businesses, and yet, they are a huge part of what we need as people, and do encourage productivity.

Many HR, management, and leadership practices, though, do all they can to divide and conquer. You will only get your bonus if you are better than everyone else. You will only get the job if you can talk about your own successes and ignore how you led, motivated, and engaged your team. You will only get your pay increase if you can demonstrate how well you have performed. You will only get your promotion if you can prove just how determined you are to succeed and you do not care how many people you have to trample on along the way.

This type of fear-driven leadership is no longer effective in the workplace, and yet, so many of our HR practices still drive this type of behavior, and then, talk about the importance of employee well-being and employee engagement in another policy. The two do not gel particularly well and it is no wonder so many of our employees are confused and live the repeated weekly cycle of Monday-to-Friday dying syndrome.

2.2 Masculine and Feminine Leadership Traits

I mentioned earlier that much of the way we design and deliver HR solutions remains embedded still in the management thinking of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, and that this is no longer sustainable.

The world of business is changing, the world is changing, and if you tap into what all of the spiritualists are telling us, we are moving into the age of the feminine.

John Gerzema completed some research and included the findings of this in his book “The Athena Doctrine: How Women (And The Men Who Think Like Them) Will rule the future,” and this showed that many of the leadership traits that we still encourage in organizations are masculine leadership traits. In order for business and people to thrive in the current world and in the future, it was found that we need to adopt more of the feminine leadership traits.

I include this thinking in the book because I believe we need a blend of both masculine and feminine thinking, planning, and execution in order to live a balanced life, be happy in our work, and run successful organizations that focus, first and foremost, on how they lead, manage, and engage their people, and HR has a huge and vital role in driving this change forward.

The Athena Doctrine provides a lot of in-depth research and thinking, demonstrating that businesses and leaders need to be more feminine in order for businesses to succeed (I will leave you to make your own mind up on that). It is not about men or women being better than one another, but about the traits that need to be developed and more visible in business.

What I know is that men started many big companies with billions of pounds of income each year many years ago. I also know that when people try to railroad me or bully me, or undermine me at work, both men or women, I do not take kindly to this.

So, you will find the following table outlining the “traits” of the masculine and feminine, and I know I have a blend of the two. I am not going to go into too much detail on this as you will know the traits you have in order to live the life you want and to develop your career and your HR functions.

For example, I am very imaginative and creative, but if all I do is imagine and create without a plan or an outcome in mind, how will I generate income? I do work I truly love, but I have to keep a constant reality check going to make sure I am on the right path, even though I live my life largely by intuition.

 

 

As I touched on briefly earlier, I believe a blend is important, balance is key, and as we see in Yin and Yang, we cannot solely have one thing without a small proportion of the other.

But if you think about the HR practices, policies, and procedures that are in your organization, which side of the previous table do they tend to focus on?

If I were to hazard a guess, I would say mostly the masculine side. How is that working for your people? For your business success? How many employee relations issues are you currently dealing with? How much sickness absence are you currently operating with? Is stress high at work? Do your people love working with you? Would they recommend your organization as a great place to work in? What about your retention?

Monday-to-Friday dying syndrome, anyone?

Now, of course, passion is great, but if nobody is making any decisions, that is not great for business of your people. Someone will, of course, also need to be analyzing the data, but if overanalyzing and never making a decision stops you from being flexible and planning for the future, then it is unlikely that your business will survive.

Before we start to look at the AGILE approach to HR, take some time now and consider the type of organization you want to create and how HR can help shape, inform, and lead on doing things differently. Consider things such as how your people will feel, how they will interact with one another, how the leaders and managers engage with their people, how people feel when they enter the building and say good morning to each other.

On the Chrysalis Consulting website, you will find a guided visualization, “The Perfect Organisation,” to help you with this activity, if needed.

When finished, keep this in mind as you work through the rest of the book to find the solutions that are right for your people, your leaders and your organization through the AGILE approach to HR.

Additional points to consider:

• Know what it takes to make your HR function work.
• Know what your customers need.
• Know where you need to adapt and grow—Take steps to make it happen.
• Identify where you need help—and then, get it.