Tight briefs (no, nothing unseemly...)

(Nothing unseemly, but there's no way I'm letting AI choose the image for this post...)

Anyway. Take your minds out the gutter. I'm not talking about the other sort of briefs.

There's a famous quote from legendary copywriter and superstar ad-man David Ogilvy: "Give me the freedom of a tight brief."

Leaving aside the fact that this sentence alone is a masterful piece of copy in its own right, it's also absolutely true.

And it's true beyond the world of advertising and copywriting. Way, way, beyond.

Welcome to HR

No, we're not back to the other type of briefs again, or discussing that unfortunate incident when I turned up at the office Christmas party in a kilt.

Twice in the past few months (once for a client, once to help a friend out) I was asked to "cast an eye over" a couple of proposed HR policy manuals.

They were both about 80 pages long. And if I say they droned on at some length about inanities, I'm probably overselling how interesting they were to read. (And I say that as someone who does double-entry bookkeeping for a living, so it takes a lot to shatter my boredom threshold...)

In both cases, I told the people who asked me to take a look that I'd be astounded if 1% of their employees would ever read the thing. Most people would continue doing whatever they were doing before unless and until someone senior to them in the organisation pulled them up for some very specific misdemeanour.

So, if the object of the exercise was to change behaviours and ensure improved compliance with company policies, all they'd really done was pour a few grand into the pockets of the HR consultant who wrote the manuals in the first place.

(I say "wrote". I suspect "plagiarised from ChatGPT" was probably closer to the truth. Good heavens, they were dull.)

The value in your values

Even though I am a curmudgeonly accountant, I'm not saying this just because I'm a curmudgeonly accountant.

There are immense benefits - both financial and non-financial - to your business in having clear values which govern how it operates, and in getting the people who work for you behind those values, supporting them, delivering them.

However 80-page manuals written by ChatGPT (allegedly) isn't the way to achieve that.

The most you can hope for is some form of surface-level procedural compliance, and there's almost zero value in that. Certainly a lot less than the ￡000s it costs to get an HR consultant to write the manual in the first place.

I'm not questioning the good intentions of the people who asked me to take a look at their HR manuals, or even the good intentions of the people who wrote them.

But it was a lot of effort for very little return which, by and large, is the sort of outcome you want to avoid in business.

Back to the briefs

(Yes, the David Ogilvy type...)

The common problem with both the weighty documents I was asked to look at...and, in fairness, a common problem for just about every organisation I've ever worked for...is that nobody had a tight brief to work to.

What could have been two sides of A4 turns into 80 pages of vague, meandering generalities.

It's the same with all sorts of company documentation, procedure manuals, guidance notes and goodness knows what else.

The amount of time, effort and money they take up is immense. The benefits they bring are slim-to-none.

My favourite example is the line in every HR manual I've ever read - that one of the company's values is "being honest".

Unless you're setting up a drugs ring inside a prison, I don't think many people would expect your core values to embrace dishonesty as a lifestyle choice.

It's equally no surprise that procedure manuals want us to work together as a team and be focused on delivering results.

There's nothing wrong with any of those principles. Of course, they are to be encouraged.

But, if I'm already an honest person, I probably don't need to be told I should be honest. Like most of the population, I already am, and might feel slightly insulted that you've implied otherwise by feeling the need to tell me that honesty is important to you.

And a dishonest person is probably going to keep on being dishonest, no matter what the HR manual says, because that's just who they are. An 80-page procedure manual is unlikely to spark a Damascene conversion in the soul of a habitual criminal.

What are you really trying to achieve?

So if a document is unnecessary for the people who don't need it because they are already demonstrating the qualities you want, and won't have any attention paid to it by the people for whom it is necessary, what's the point?

Well, this isn't just an HR issue. It's an issue for all sorts of other departments too. Including, on occasion...erm...Finance.

Whichever department is behind those 80-page manuals, as far as I can see, the underlying objective for producing one tends to be one of these:

• We're doing this because the lawyers said we had to
• People need to know how to book their holidays or process expense claims
• We want to change the company culture

Please note, I said "one of these". No single document can fulfil all three aspects well...which is where a lot of the problems start in 80-page procedure manuals start. People have been set an impossible brief.

The lawyers said we had to...

If you produced an 80-page document because your lawyers said you had to, even though you don't actually have a problem with any of your people, then just load up your policies on your intranet, or a special section on OneDrive, or somewhere easily accessible and send round a one-line email to distribute the link in case anyone wants to read them.

Nobody is going to do anything different to what they're doing now anyway, so do it in whatever way represents the minimum amount of time and effort for everyone, including the 1000s of hours of productive time you're expecting your staff to spend reading all 80 pages...FRONT AND BACK...(that's specially for any Friends fans who might be reading this...)

People need to book holidays and claim expenses...

Similarly if you just want people to book their holidays or process an expense claim properly, an 80-page procedure manual isn't where I'd start.

Sure, you might have one of those on your intranet somewhere (see above). But it's more likely that you just need to make what you're doing now simple enough for everyone to understand.

If what you want to happen isn't already happening, there's a better-than-even chance that your internal procedures are terribly designed, which is why so many people can't complete them as you would wish.

Here I'd like to give a special shout-out to a former employer of mine which required eight...yes eight...separate handwritten forms of byzantine complexity to get permission to take an overseas business trip, all of which were mutually exclusive and all of which went to different people to approve different bits of it.

The chances of anybody getting all of that right on the first attempt was negligible. But the problem here wasn't the people filling the forms in. It was the people who took their inspiration in creating corporate bureaucracy from whoever designed Hampton Court Maze.

The solution here isn't an 80-page procedure manual. It's fixing a broken, not fit-for-purpose carbuncle of bureaucracy. Do that, and the problem of someone having to sort out the incorrect paperwork solves itself.

By all means, record a step-by-step video, perhaps, for people to look at the first few times they need to fill in a new-style expense claim. Or write up a one-page step-by-step guide to help.

If what you designed is easy to understand, that should be all you need.

And if you haven't designed something that's easy to understand, an 80-page procedure manual is unlikely to help.

Changing the company culture

Finally, if you're trying to change the company culture, you need to identify what it is now and what you'd like it to be in the future.

But the first step in that journey is deciding what behaviours you want to change - what is it you want people to do in the future that they don't do now.

And be very specific about it.

David Ogilvy's background was in direct marketing. He knew his writing had to get someone to take action, to actually do something, such as buying the product he was selling.

This is where a lot of those well-intentioned corporate manuals fall down for me.

If you're not already employing people who are honest, show integrity, work as a team, and respect people who don't look like they do, or share their beliefs, then your HR department has probably failed.

Dishonest people who lack integrity should never have been recruited in the first place, or if, by some sleight of hand, a couple of bad apples had made it through the recruitment net, they should have been shown the door pretty quickly. Either way, your HR department is to blame.

There's certainly no harm in having a one-page document somewhere to list your company values (honesty, integrity, etc) and set the tone.

But whether it's one page or 80, if your goal is to change behaviours, you need to be really clear about what you want people to do in the future that they're not doing now, and tell them to do whatever that is instead.

If you say to people "be honest" and their internal monologue goes "that's OK, I already am", the whole exercise has been something of a waste of time. Nobody is going to change if they think they are already doing what you asked them to do.

On the other hand, if you say "here are five examples of things we don't think are honest, so don't do any of these", then people can calibrate their view of what honest means against what your view of honest might be and decide whether they already live up to those standards or need to (and want to) change.

It also means you're able to give specific feedback to transgressors: yes, it was OK to say your boss's new haircut was lovely even though you thought it was ugly, but no, it wasn't OK to transfer company funds into your personal bank account without permission.

Your feedback has to be about the specific behaviours you want someone to change. You're wasting everyone's time if you tell someone they're not being "honest enough", they ask you to give an example of what they've done wrong, and you can't give them one.

As a general rule if you can't think of 5 specific things which have happened in the last 12 months in your business that you would want people to stop doing, then you don't need an 80-page manual to tell them not to do those things in vague, meandering, non-specific terms.

And if you can think of 50 examples of things you want to change, pick the top 5 to start with, then work down the list until everyone is doing them all.

People can't remember 50 things at the same time, so if you're serious about change, start with 5. Get them sorted first.

After all, if you can't get the first 5 sorted, you'll never fix the other 45.

The bottom line

The bottom line is that it's very expensive to work in vague generalities.

Spending several ￡000s with a consultant to prepare an 80-page document that won't change a thing about how your business operates day-to-day is an expensive, and likely unnecessary, luxury.

To borrow another well-used expression from the world of advertising, if you're trying to appeal to everyone, you appeal to no-one.

For real change inside your business, you need a tight brief.

You need to give a specific message to a specific group of people about what specific thing you want them to do differently, then check back on whether or not the behaviour you wanted to see is now happening on a regular basis.

Whether it's David Ogilvy writing advertising copy or your HR Department getting someone to write a procedure manual, you get the best results with a tight brief.

That gives you a set of specific outcomes to measure (more customers buying your product, or Gary in the admin office not nicking company pens, or whatever it may be).

The only measure that matters is whether or not your business spends less money on pens in the 12 months after someone has had a quiet word with Gary than it did last year.

What's more:

Cost of a quiet word with Gary: almost nothing.

Impact: either Gary stops nicking pens himself or he gets fired. Either way, problem solved.

Cost of an 80-page manual: ￡000s

Impact: likely nothing at all, as Gary fell asleep on page 2

Very few organisations need an 80-page procedure manual.

Almost every organisation needs a tight brief when it comes to managing internal processes and procedures.

In conclusion, I'd like to acknowledge the irony in taking 2200 words to tell people to be brief and specific in what they write. Although feel free to drop appropriately witty comments below.