HR Africa conference presentation, Johannesburg 2013, paper on how HR has lost its moral compass

1. The essence of
transformative HR
practices
Dr. Shane Hodgson
Enterprise Transformation Consulting, Centurion, South Africa
HR Africa Conference, November 2013

2. Outline
This presentation looks at what is required of the HR
discipline today in terms of organisational transformation,
what we as HR practitioners need to do to ensure that
we regain our moral position in the organisation and how
we can move away from being simply a compliancedriven and spreadsheet-heavy overhead to true value
providers.
Often HR ends up as guardians of the status quo, and
defenders of erratic management and poor strategic
decisions. We have become the last choice for genuinely
transformative activity.

3. Firstly - What is the HR Function Really Good At?
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4. Where are we focusing our time
right now?
1. Translating corporate strategy into people strategy,
usually enabling organisational cost cutting and driving
shareholder value
2. Retaining and developing Talent - focusing our L&D
spend on those we define as the best and brightest
3. Compliance-driven training and employment equity
number-crunching
4. Human Resources Administration and record-keeping
5. Compensation and wage bargaining

5. And Yet – is HR Valued?
(Thanks to Scott Adams, Certified Genius)
Many thanks to the genius of Scott Adams

6. What should we be doing?
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Emphasising Workplace Ethics
Promoting Corporate Social Entrepreneurship
Building Capacity in the Ecosystem
Managing Diversity to create value
Challenging wrong decisions and promoting
organisational justice.

7. Chartered Management Institute Report on
Workplace Ethics 2013

8. What is HR’s Role in Ethics?
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We have to ask ourselves a more basic question: to what extent in the HR
arena is legal compliance a sufficient standard for ethical
behavior? (O’Toole, 2012)
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Given the lack of credibility that still taints the HR function and its
incumbents in many South African organisations. HR practitioners may
therefore perceive themselves as unable to “enforce ethical business
behaviour” (Van Vuuren and Eiselen, 2006)
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http://www.scu.edu/ethics/practicing/focusareas/business/ethics-human-resources.html)

9. SHRM Code of Ethics – Guidelines on
Fairness and Justice
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Respect the uniqueness and intrinsic worth of every individual.
Treat people with dignity, respect and compassion to foster a trusting work
environment free of harassment, intimidation, and unlawful discrimination.
Ensure that everyone has the opportunity to develop their skills and new
competencies.
Assure an environment of inclusiveness and a commitment to diversity in
the organizations we serve.
Develop, administer and advocate policies and procedures that foster fair,
consistent and equitable treatment for all
http://www.shrm.org/about/Pages/code-of-ethics.aspx

10. HR is about Doing the Right Thing
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HR is central to creating more successful, inclusive and morally defensible
working practices, according to leading management thinkers Rob Goffee and
Gareth Jones in the opening keynote address of the CIPD Annual Conference
in Manchester, November 2013.
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But though the pair satirised HR as the “Department of Rules” with an
“insatiable desire to wrap a process around everything,” they concluded its
role in building a strong social architecture could be one of the defining tenets
of organisational effectiveness in the years ahead: “HR is about doing the
right thing.”
http://www.cipd.co.uk/pm/peoplemanagement/b/weblog/archive/2013/11/06/goffee-and-jones-39-hr-is-about-doing-theright-thing-39.aspx

11. Promoting Corporate Social Entrepreneurship
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“There is a longing for a sense of meaning with many executives,” Filipe
Santos, at the 2013 INSEAD Global Business Leaders Conference in Abu
Dhabi.
“They are told to run a company for profit but now they’re thinking. ‘I want to
go beyond that, I want to have impact in society which is sustainable and
makes a difference.’”
This leaves companies with the choice. Either they increase the
opportunities for very highly skilled employees to engage with societal
issues or they don’t, and are likely to find many of their best people leave
the organisation to find one that meets their expectations.
Read more at http://knowledge.insead.edu/social-entrepreneurship/the-rise-of-the-social-intrapreneur2961#CbgFpuWel30cX4zE.99

12. Building Capacity in the Ecosystem
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Does South Africa invest enough in education and training? South
Africa spent 4.8% of its annual income on education in 2009, compared to
the OECD average of 6.2%.
How smooth is the transition from school to work for South Africa’s
youth? In 2012, the unemployment rate of South Africa’s youth was 49.2%,
a high rate compared with the OECD average of 17.1%
Is there scope to improve skill utilisation among South Africa’s youth?
The participation rate for youth (aged 15/16-24) was 26% in 2011. In 2009,
the rate of South Africa’s youth neither in employment nor in education or
training (NEET) was 32.8%, nearly double the OECD average of 18.6%.
To what extent are South Africa’s older workers supplying their skills
to the labour market? In 2011, only 40% of people aged 55 to 64 were in
the labour force, compared to an OECD average of 58%
http://skills.oecd.org/informationbycountry/southafrica.html

13. An Example – Apprenticeships
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Barclays UK recently opened the door to its 1,000th apprentice , just over a
year since the launch of the programme. This follows a commitment earlier
this year to double the figure to 2,000 by 2015, with a continued focus on
specifically targeting young people aged 16-24 not in education,
employment or training (NEET).
The 1,000 new apprenticeships will include roles in parts of the business
that have typically focused on recruiting graduates, with 12 places in the
Corporate and Investment businesses set to become available from the
start of July. There will also be six roles in digital marketing and a host of
opportunities in branches, customer support and technology, spread across
the UK.
Similar schemes are in operation with UK companies like AON, AVIVA,
Boots, Deloitte, EY, HSBC, KPMG, PWC, Logica and many more.

14. True Diversity Management – HP Model
“At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by
no extraordinary chance will such a marvellously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is,
ever be put together a second time.” F. Nietzsche

15. Befehl ist Befehl – Challenging Wrong
Decisions
Nuremberg Principle IV states: "The fact that a person acted pursuant to order
of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility
under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.“
Doctors of the Dark Side – a hard-hitting video about the participation by
doctors and psychologists in torture of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, is worth
watching. It leads us to the question: “At what point does the HR practitioner
or industrial psychologist stand up and challenge a decision on hiring, firing,
making redundant?”

16. Promoting Organisational Fairness
Fairness is considered to be one of the necessary conditions leading to
trust (Beugré,1998), which is essential for employee engagement. Equity,
and in essence - fairness, is a key driver of employee engagement
(Kontakos, 2007). Fairness is composed of:
1.
Distributive Justice – the distribution of outcomes is fair
2.
Procedural Justice – the procedure used to determine the
distribution of outcomes is fair
3.
Interpersonal Justice - Treatment with politeness, dignity, and
respect by those who execute procedures or determine outcomes
4.
Informational Justice - The explanations of why procedures were
used in a certain way or outcomes were distributed in a certain
fashion

17. What Demands Does the HR
Department Make?
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While one might expect, for example, a marketing director to argue for a
bigger marketing budget or an IT manager to lobby for new computers, it is
more difficult to imagine HR managers calling for measures that would lift
employee morale or improve working conditions, such as a pay rise or
increased holiday entitlement.
This perhaps reflects the extent to which HR departments operate as a tool of
senior management for imposing their will on the workforce, rather than as a
medium for genuine dialogue with the aim of engaging and motivating
employees.
http://highpaycentre.org/blog/how-should-hr-be-more-involved-in-high-pay-decisions

18. Does HR Deservedly Have a Bad
Reputation?
Many thanks to the genius of Scott Adams

19. In Summary - Employees Want DREAMS
Goffee and Jones (2013) believe that employees want these things, in their dreams:
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- Difference. Not just diversity, but a chance to be different, to celebrate difference.
Cohesion without homogenisation.
- Radical honesty. To know what is really going on. No spin. No sanitisation. Share
information, don’t hoard it. Tell the truth before someone else does.
- Extra value. To be able to work in an organisation in which your strengths are
magnified. Employers and employees adding value to each other. Letting people grow
through what they do.
- Authenticity. To know what the organisation stands for. Not a wordy mission statement
sitting unread on the corporate intranet but a real sense of where the company has
come from and where it is going.
- Meaning. To do work that really means something. Meaning comes from many
sources; connections, community, cause.
- Simple rules. To work somewhere free from stupid rules. Have good rules. Simple and
agreed ones that make sense to people, and feel fair.
http://hrgem.wordpress.com/2013/11/06/creating -the-best-workplace-on-earth/ (Gemma Reucrof t 2013)

20. So What’s Stopping Us?
As HR professionals, our new mantra should be “ Everyone has talent;
employees are still part of our community even after they leave us; we need to
develop the entire ecosystem in which we operate and not just those parts that
are immediately useful to us; and we need to open our doors and resources to
the community at large.”
The proverb says ‘Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man
how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime’. However, true sustainability is not
about learning ‘how to fish’ but about understanding what the fish itself needs to
grow and reproduce itself – and to make sure that these conditions are
sustained.
(Ehnert and Harry, management revue, 23(3), 21-238)
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