I'm only human after all (part 1).

Whilst I'm not one to obsess over job titles, I must admit when people refer to me as the Human Resources Director, part of me cringes and dies inside. That's not because I'm not proud of what I do (I am immensely), it's because I don't want anyone to think I see our employees as merely just a "resource". People not just hipsters and millennials, want to be seen as individuals and not just some biological asset on the balance sheet. As HR Directors we are probably all guilty of using the phrase "our people are our greatest asset" without really thinking how de-humanising that phrase is to our fellow man. Of course, I could just change my job title to "People Director" and get over it but I know fundamentally I would be living a lie because my role would still involve managing people "as resources".

The definition of a resource is "an asset that can be drawn on by an organisation in order to function effectively". This definition pretty much sums up the traditional work of HR in that our job is to get people to function effectively in line with the needs of the business. Now I'm not proposing some utopian fantasy whereby organisations should exist to serve their employees but there is perhaps a middle ground that has yet to be fully explored.

What I am referring to is a symbiotic relationship where the needs of the organisation are carefully balanced with the needs of its employees. I'm not talking about achieving a work-life balance I'm talking about a employer-employee balance which is very different. For this to work we need to see people as human beings and not human resources. Now some organisations with fancy chill-out areas, staff ping-pong tables and free M&M's might claim to already treat people in a human way but if they are honest with themselves they have provided those things to drive engagement, ie get more discretionary effort out of their employees without directly paying for it. When you think of engagement in these terms then it starts to feel like an exploitative practice in which clearly the organisation benefits more than the employees they engage.

From employee satisfaction to employee engagement

Before engagement we were happy to have "employee satisfaction" however, we soon realised that a satisfied employee was not always the best to have around the workplace. Lots of satisfied employees were coming to work, doing the minimum job and going home on time happy that they had done a days work for a days pay. An employee could be satisfied because they had an easy life or simply because they were paid more than they would be elsewhere. They were satisfied to have the odd sick day but not satisfied enough to stop them looking for other jobs that might satisfy them more. Along came "employee engagement" the pancea for everything wrong with our organisations, now we wanted employees to not only be satisfied but motivated to go the extra mile and give a little more effort. Engagement all of a sudden was a powerful and mystifying force that could cut absence rates, boost productivity, drive retention and increase profits. Of course, engagement can do all of those things once you work out which particular workplace drivers impact engagement. However, this is where we hit our first major problem. Whilst human beings share 99.5% of the same genes with each other, that 0.5% means that we are all uniquely different. Different people want different things, in fact sometimes the same person wants different things on different days. This makes identifying a common set of drivers that we can focus our business practices on near impossible, although we will probably all admit to trying just that,

Drivers aside, the second problem is that at the heart of employee engagement is the question, "what can I do to make you work harder without paying you more or driving you away?" When you put engagement in those terms you can clearly see that its the organisation that benefits the most from employee engagement which brings us full circle to treating people like non-functioning "resources".

From employee engagement to employee fulfilment

Now this is where we get into the subtleties of creating a balance of needs. In our ideal organisation, we want employees and employers to benefit, more or less equally from their relationship. Ultimately this means organisations have to be prepared to ask this question, "what can I do to make your life here, as a human being, more fufilled so that you want to give us your best work?" As I said the difference is subtle but in this scenario we are not looking for a set of universal drivers to make someone work harder, instead we are looking at what will fufill the employee to make them want to give their best to their employer. This could mean them doing the bare minimum but to the best possible standards. On the positive side, there is an argument that by giving more and not expecting more in return an employee is even less likely to want to leave or throw a sick day so the benefits to the employer are still very positve.

You could argue that employee fufilment is closer to employee satisfaction than it is to employee engagement and you would be right. Although a fulfilled employee is much more likely to perform better than one that is merely satisfied if placed side-by-side.

So where does employee fufilemnt start?

The path to employee fufilment starts with understanding what the individual needs and wants to make them feel fulfilled. This will be different for everyone so before we go any further we need to start viewing our peope as unique human beings not homogenous human resources. We need to view them as human beings at every stage of the employment cycle, something which is easier to say than to do in practice,. For instance, not many employers would be prepared to let candidates choose how they apply for a job beyond the usual CV or application form options. Of course, if I feel as a human being that sending the recruiting manager a link to a video of my greatest achievements is the best way to get to know me then it creates an interesting challenge. Issues of equaliy, fairness and standardisation aside, creating a human friendly application process is just one of the challenges in trying to treat people like human beings and not as human resources.

In part-2 of this journey I am going to talk about what employers can specifically do to be human-friendly throughout the employee cycle so the employee fufilement might be fully achieved (I promise that at no point will I suggest you buying a ping-pong table). If all goes well this time next year we could all be calling ourselves Directors of Human Fufilment.....

Part 2, coming early October, feel free to follow me to read it first. If you have an example of human-friendly practices please share them in the comments.

#everythinghuman