It’s not a manager’s job to fix people
TV’s Dr Alex George told the conference managers should not be given the huge responsibility to fix ‘people’. Too often managers take on this role when they are ill equipped to do so. He pointed to the four million ‘accidental managers’ that come to the role with no training to cope with the responsibilities of doing so.
‘Whitewashing’ policies that implement quick fixes, including gym membership and yoga lessons, don’t work, he said. George advocated two steps: building a better workplace environment, including the need for natural sunlight. “We can’t feel well when we are in a box,” he said. The second step is offering access to support; this, he explained, should be matched with the number of physical first aiders that a business has, meaning in today’s world there should be equal numbers of mental health supporters too. Head and body should not be treated as unequal partners, said George.
L&D must stop being party planners
Andrew Lax, group head of L&D at Yeo Valley, said L&D teams needed to stop being reactive ‘party planners’ and instead move towards building strategic plans that align with the business. Delegates at the interactive workshop agreed that often in smaller businesses learning and development needs are more reactive and handed out to those that ‘shout the loudest’. In bigger businesses, Lax said L&D cannot always be devolved from the centre either but may be more effective if they are performed and managed by specific business departments that are closer to the individual KPIs, processes and particular change management strategies. He said it was crucial to align with HR business partners that are on the frontline of operational strategy.
HR needs to look beyond slogans to deal with mental health
Azeem Rafiq, ex-cricketer and author of It’s not Banter, It’s Racism, told the conference that there was a “mental health emergency” in workplaces, pointing out: “We are in a world where people with severe mental health challenges in the workplace are not able to find solutions.”
He said this problem has occurred because HR’s response to mental ill-health is “comms-led” and that people are “led by what looks like the right thing to do”, causing a “snowball effect” where the problem is allowed to grow.
“We’ve got slogans, tags […] but actually when you do end up speaking or sharing how you’re feeling, the responses and solutions are just not there,” said Rafiq.
Also speaking as part of the panel discussion, Laura Mohomed, global health and wellbeing manager at Tetra Pak, pointed out that language can pose a “barrier” to open discussion and help create “stigma”.
“I think some people attempt to talk about this topic and then don’t because they fear they might say the wrong thing,” she said. “So language is hugely important, but I think the best thing we can do is just try and talk about it, try and be open.”
The dangers of ‘analysis paralysis’ means professionals often ‘miss the boat’
The decision-making paradox for many professionals is real – some make decisions swiftly; others wait until they have the right data in front of them. Mark Leisegang, practice lead for education at Insights, told delegates that there are several dangers of standing still: indecision and delayed action, increased costs and resource wasting, reduced productivity and efficiency and the negative impact on morale and team dynamics.
Leisegang said that, on the flip side, hasty decisions can also be dangerous because they don’t delve into the problem effectively and decisions can head down a tunnel which then needs to be ‘unhooked’. He added that leaders have a role in influencing the paradox, which includes modelling behaviour and communicating values and priorities.
Effective strategies to balance decision action and information gathering centre upon four pillars, he said: “Encouraging a learning culture, promoting diverse perspectives and collaboration, implementing decision-making frameworks and balancing authority and empowerment.”
Treat poor behaviour like health and safety
Scott Solder, co-founder at The Active Bystander Training Company, advised delegates to treat poor behaviour as a health and safety issue, highlighting the need to take action. “If you normalise poor behaviour, it will get worse,” he warned.
Being the first to call out questionable behaviour can take courage, and for many they are unlikely to take that first step until someone else does, he said. It’s the domino impact of the #MeToo movement in which it is easier to follow than be the trailblazer.
But the danger of turning a blind eye to poor behaviour and making it acceptable is that it will get worse, Solder said. He highlighted the four Ds of action:
- Direction action – do something now
- Distraction – take the sting out of the situation
- Delegation – tell someone with a view of them helping
- Delay – pluck up the courage when confidence strikes
Why play is the key to unlocking interest in AI
The best way to get people professionals interested in the potential of generative AI is to let them play with the technology, according to Andy Headworth, talent acquisition director at HMRC.
Speaking as part of a panel on supporting employees to use AI at work, Headworth explained how his own efforts were turbocharged when he asked his 65-strong team to create arresting pictures on a given theme using AI software. “It got them buzzing and talking to other people,” he told delegates. “They realised ‘we can do things [with this], we can make presentations’. Over the course of the following weeks we transitioned to work things – how to engage people, how to manage candidate experience.”
Today, Headworth explained, AI helps make the people function “more efficient” and has been particularly useful in reducing the amount of time and input required from managers during the recruitment process.
It’s better to spend money on improving culture than bananas and yoga
There is a danger of losing sight of the importance of preventative interventions on organisational wellbeing, given ‘the industry’ that has sprung up offering solutions to problems once they’ve happened, agreed a panel entitled: ‘Putting your people first – why health and wellbeing in the workplace is central to everything that a successful organisation does.’
Chair Paul Devoy, CEO of Investors in People, pointed out: “There is now a whole industry that has been created to service the fact we didn’t have a wellbeing culture to start with. That money could be spent on more productive things than dealing with the symptoms.”
Matt Holt-Rogers, director and head of wellbeing at Wellbeing4business, highlighted the phrase ‘you can’t put a clean fish back in a dirty tank’. “We can provide all these solutions to all these symptoms we’re seeing but, if we place someone back in the same environment, we’ll see the symptoms again,” he said.
He added that which data you look at to assess the wellbeing of any given organisation – and interventions needed – will be key to whether your wellbeing strategy is proactive or reactive: “We’ve got to move away from relying on just one source of data – being too focused on absence, for example. That will only represent a small number of people in your organisation [those who are already unwell]. We can’t ignore the 95 per cent.”
It’s important to acknowledge generational bias
When looking at benefits to aid employee wellbeing, HR needs to recognise its “unconscious bias” towards different generations in the workplace and how that may influence decision making, said Clare Dare, head of large corporate consulting at PIB Employee Benefits.
She showed delegates that Google will predict people will ask the questions ‘why do baby boomers love work?’ and ‘why does Gen Z hate work?’, demonstrating the prevalence of these stereotypes.
In order to counteract this bias against the “TikTok generation”, Dare said employers should ensure “strategies are informed by data” and “objective”, noting that younger generations were more likely to struggle with personal finances and work-life balance.
One approach businesses could take is to trust employees to work at the times they find they are the most creative and productive, she said, adding that they value their ‘5-9’ outside of work, as well as the ‘9-5’.
Myth busters around success profiles revealed
Identifying leaders best placed for success is more complex than it was 10-15 years ago, said Jacques Quinio, leadership solutions director at Right Management. With success not just being about capabilities the waters have become further muddied. Leaders are in the middle of paradoxical expectations too and are struggling to understand what is expected of them, he said.
The risks of not having a success profile, however, include:
- Leaders leading according to their own belief systems
- The workforce observing very different and inconsistent ways of leading
- The reputation of the organisation being impacted
Culture matters too, said Quino, who believes that if you want to transform culture it starts with leaders. Concluding, he said that leaders’ success profiles do matter, telling delegates that for success profiles to make sense L&D needed to keep the end in mind, focusing either on potential or effectiveness, making them simple but not simplistic, using up-to-date research and deploying valid and reliable measurements.
Strengths are not role agnostic
Why should we focus on building a learning culture based on strengths? Scott Christie, head of training and integration at Strengthscope, said strength means the underlying qualities that energise us. With IBM research showing that 40 per cent of the workforce will need to reskill as a result of implementing AI and automation over the next three years, businesses, said Christie, need to work out what the skills of the future are going to be. The interactive poll highlighted that most delegates identified admin, research and data analysis skills as being under threat of AI replacement.
In a further study by The Open University, 58 per cent of organisational leaders reported a mismatch between young people’s skill levels and employer expectations. With these findings in mind, Christie pointed to the benefits that strengths development can offer, with a key plus being that it doesn’t provide a pass or fail like competency-based training. He said strengths use was personal and contextual, with awareness being the first step. Viewpoints, he said, needed to be beyond a binary choice with culture supporting a growth mindset too.
Developing these peak performance teams in AI-driven, remote-first workplaces is often about creating a tribe, not a cult, that makes room for individual preferences and strengths, Christie explained. With a further study by Gartner being cited, in which HR expressed that leadership development approaches do not prepare leaders for the future of work, the benefits of boosting strengths is apparent and is an issue that is not role agnostic, he said.
