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The issue that prompted most comments online was the reported threat by chief treasury secretary Danny Alexander to appeal directly to employees affected by the reform of public-sector pensions, thus going over the heads of union leaders.

Some of your comments:

• Chris T: As someone who has worked a total of nine years in the public sector and 31 in the private, I feel well qualified to observe that there aren’t significant differences in pay in the middle of such organisations. But there are differences in pace and security. The private sector has a greater sense of urgency and the imperative to survive market conditions is keenly felt. The sense of entitlement to index-linked, defined-benefit, final salary pension plans that prevails in the public sector is no longer appropriate. A lot of people realise this and the government is right to appeal directly to them.

• Tony O: I am a public-sector worker and a member of a union. However, I just do not see a 22 per cent vote in favour of strike action in a turnout of less than 30 per cent as anything like a mandate. Maybe union leaders need to be bypassed if they plan on pressing ahead. Don’t low turnouts tend to suggest that people really aren’t that passionate about the subject?

• Paul M: I am a civil servant, working in a small office with three others. All of us have changed our minds so many times over the past week or so as to whether we will strike on 30 November. I voted against the strike and want to go into work. But we have been told that if we attend work, we can be moved to fill the post of a striking worker. If we fail to do so, then disciplinary action will be taken. I’m happy to do my job, but not that of someone else on strike. The only solution is to stay out. It seems to me that both management and the four of us are shooting ourselves in our combined feet!

• Mara Thorne: I’ve been a trustee of private-sector final salary pension schemes in two companies. In the last one, when staff were faced with the choice of paying more to keep the scheme going, keeping contributions the same in return for lower accruals, or leaving the scheme, nobody left, and only half a dozen people froze their contribution rate. Everybody else understood the value of the final salary pension, took a deep breath and paid more in. Contributions went up over a period of six years from 4 per cent to 7 per cent of salary. In the end, the scheme closed anyway. As trustees, we argued for staff to be given the choice to pay in even more to keep it going, but the company didn’t give us the option. That’s the reality these days. It’s tough for everybody.

For the original news story and more comments on it: bit.ly/unionbypass

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Defining the case for investing in skills is one of the core functions of HR professionals. That’s true whether one works at the level of a business unit, an organisation, an industry or in a national policy role. A number of articles in this issue highlight just how challenging this process can be – even for the most capable.

One reason is, of course, logistical complexity – which applies to many business situations, but is most dramatically illustrated in a major infrastructure project such as London’s new Crossrail link. Some 70,000 people will be employed throughout the supply chain at some stage, involving a wide range of engineering and construction trades. Crossrail has even teamed up with the Skills Funding Agency to set up a new academy to prepare skilled tradespeople for working underground.

In another respect, the Crossrail project is relatively simple because it has a fixed budget and timetable. The cost/benefit sums get more complicated when the impact of investing in skills also depends on future market prices and government policy. Firms in the offshore wind power industry know they will need more skilled workers, but cannot make sensible investment decisions until questions about the national power strategy, investment incentives, connection costs to the National Grid, and guaranteed minimum power prices are resolved.

At least, in both of these industries, it’s relatively straightforward to scope out most of the skills that will be needed ­– to achieve quality standards, meet safety legislation, and to compete with best-in-class globally. These provide a helpful framework to focus action. But in fast-changing and knowledge-intensive industries, and in management and leadership roles, skills are yet more difficult to map and evaluate.

Reading Jerry Connor’s article on learning agility, I’m struck by a different sort of challenge. At the leading edge of L&D, it’s not only a matter of being clear about what’s necessary – in this case, to reduce the haemorrhaging of talent from the top leadership pipeline ­– but also what’s possible. Developing the sort of “disruptive” techniques used by Cadbury and Bridge to stimulate mindset shifts and prepare managers for working at ever-greater levels of complexity, requires a deep psychological understanding of the potential of human beings to change and grow.

This experience and insight is too often absent from organisations. If it were more common, leadership programmes would be producing more rounded and resilient leaders. Come to think of it, we might also see a lot more quiet rooms provided in workplaces. So much of our working day is focused on the relentless stuff that needs to be done now. Having a peaceful space to go and think in, from time to time, can increase our capacity to be more self-aware and to see the bigger picture. Those are skills every organisation should consider a worthwhile investment.

Straight talking
We all know what can happen when a manager and employee avoid talking about the tensions between them. How many tribunal cases could have been avoided if problems had been discussed frankly at an early stage? Critics of business secretary Vince Cable’s proposal to introduce “protected conversations” into law are missing the point. The sad fact is that protected conversations wouldn’t be necessary if performance management was more effective. But often it isn’t. Cable’s idea may help to focus more attention and support where it’s needed.

Festive fare
Tidings of comfort and joy will arrive for thousands of agency workers on 24 December, when they become the first tranche to have 12 weeks working under the new regulations – and thus entitled to the same pay and conditions as permanent workers. If you’re having a company Christmas do this year, the serving staff could be among them.

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Yesterday, we saw a model of leadership being demonstrated at this conference that is likely, as the 21st century goes on, to kick most of the egotistical autocrats into oblivion – but if you weren't concentrating, you might have missed it.

Everyone knows that Terry Leahy turned Tesco into one of the UK's most successful businesses despite having a famously low-profile personality. What stood out during Leahy's opening plenary presentation was his clarity and the force of his belief in two things: Tesco's values, and its people.

For the man who was arguably Britain's most successful-ever chief executive until he retired in March, the goal of good leadership is to inspire trust and confidence. Most people, he said, are not naturally confident. They need inspiring and encouraging. "That's mainly all I did – make the people in the organisation feel better about themselves and able to take on new challenges," he said.

A still more forceful statement of these enabling principles came from the second ceo of the day – masterclass speaker William Rogers of commercial radio operator UKRD, which leapt to national attention when employees voted it Sunday Times Best Company to Work For 2011.

Rogers is even less the charismatic leader than Leahy. In fact, he started out as an insurance broker. But he has a passionate belief in the need for a values-based approach to business, and an impressive commercial track record of growth in a very competitive market to back it up.

Rogers brought in external facilitators to involve all staff in an exercise "to distill down what they most wanted in their working environment". The only stipulation: express it in single words, and no more than six. The values that emerged were: honest, open, fair, fun, professional, unconventional.

Since then, he said, "everything we do is filtered through these values". Each one of them, he emphasised, has its tough commercial side as well as its supportive people side. For example, everyone in the company has a day's training a year in how to initiate "courageous conversations" with colleagues – including their boss, if necessary – to sort out problems.

Leaders "have to be a walking, talking ambassador for the culture and values of the business," said Rogers. He and Leahy are ambassadors extraordinary for an approach to business that brings out the leader in every employee.

Comments [0] It’s hard to think of an individual who has influenced my life – in a practical and an aesthetic sense – more than Steve Jobs. Every day I speak, check email or browse the web on my iPhone, my MacBook laptop, or both. I might also listen to music or a podcast on my iPod. In the office we depend on the Mac operating system to view our creative work on PM at its best, and there’s an iPad on hand to check the magazine’s iPad app. And an iPad of my own is the Christmas present I hope for most.

Little wonder then, that many millions of Apple users felt almost a personal sense of loss at the passing of the company’s co-founder and creative genius. Since Steve Jobs’ death, an enormous amount has been written about his impact – on technology, design, business and culture. For a change, it hasn’t seemed like hyperbole to hear someone of our own time compared not only to the greatest business leaders of any age, but also to John Ruskin, William Morris, and even Leonardo da Vinci.

But Jobs was also a controversial character. Few could have been unmoved by the excerpts replayed from his address to students graduating from Stanford University in 2005, in which he spoke of the importance of learning from one’s failures, rejecting received wisdom, and listening to one’s “inner voice”. Alongside this strong sense of values went a fierce self-belief. Stories are legion of his autocratic management style. At Apple, things were done his way or not at all.

Yet by all accounts, Apple’s employees are as loyal and enthusiastic as its consumers. This is perhaps troubling to a school of thought in HR that sees distributed leadership, empowerment, collaboration and bottom-up creativity as the key to competitive advantage. Naturally, it’s more complicated than that. The four enablers of employee engagement identified in the first MacLeod report (see our cover feature) are empowerment, voice, leadership and integrity. We can surmise that Steve Jobs was so strong on leadership and integrity that this more than made up for the relatively weak sense of empowerment and employee voice at Apple.

By coincidence, another article in this issue – from no other than Apple’s arch-rival, Microsoft – throws helpful light on this topic. Reporting on major research, it identifies five different types of organisation “best placed to thrive in uncertain times”. One of these is the “People first” model, where supporting the needs of the workforce is paramount. Another is “Follow me”, where change is signalled by boardroom action.

Perhaps part of the legacy of Steve Jobs is to remind us that there are different routes to engagement, and different styles of leadership can achieve outstanding success in different contexts. HR professionals need to question all received wisdoms, and cultivate an intense curiosity – and Jobs would have been delighted to hear it.Comments [0]

If nothing else, the News of the World debacle highlights the difficulties HR can face when it comes to influencing business culture

If you think HR has kept a low profile in the unravelling News International scandal, then consider this. At some point it is quite possible that an HR director will be required, under oath and in front of TV cameras, to answer questions from Lord Justice Leveson’s committee of inquiry into the extent of illegal phone hacking at the now-defunct News of the World.

Compared with the great political drama of last week’s inquisition of media moguls, former police chiefs and former newspaper editors by MPs, this may appear to be a sideshow. But it will go to the heart of whether there was a cover-up within News International, and also of a vexed question often asked much more widely: to what extent should and can HR professionals influence the culture of an organisation, and challenge colleagues when it goes off the rails?
 
Back in 2007, when the News of the World’s royal editor, Clive Goodman, and investigator Glen Mulcaire were jailed for phone hacking, Daniel Cloke was group HR director of News International (he moved to Vodafone as HR director in January 2011). He was also a member of the company’s internal inquiry in 2007, set up to see if there was any evidence of illegal practice by other journalists on the paper. The inquiry team also included the paper’s then editor, plus News International’s executive chairman and its head of legal affairs, and was supported by an external law firm, Harbottle & Lewis.

The internal inquiry looked at 2,500 staff emails and concluded there was no evidence of wider malpractice. Then, just over a month ago, some of the emails from the 2007 inquiry were passed by Harbottle & Lewis to police, who came to a very different conclusion. From this, the subsequent scandal has quickly unfurled.

It may be surmised that senior executives on the internal inquiry would have been unlikely to read the emails themselves – unless worrying examples had been brought to their attention. No doubt the police investigation and the Leveson inquiry will delve deeper. The more interesting question is: how hard were they looking?

Whether or not any of these executives knew about wider phone hacking, they most certainly did know that the corporate culture on the News of the World was ruthlessly dedicated to success, and intolerant of anyone questioning that ethos. If even prime ministers and police chiefs behaved obsequiously to Rupert Murdoch and his top management team, one can only imagine how difficult it would be for anyone inside the company to raise matters of conscience.

By preventing the BSkyB takeover, this scandal has already seriously damaged the Murdoch empire. That should underline the importance, in any organisation, of creating a culture in which integrity is valued, and senior executives feel able to speak truth to power.

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Some time ago, I started to cringe inwardly whenever I heard the phrase: "I'm passionate about…" Passion has become fashionable, incorporated into management-speak, co-opted and devalued by people who aren't passionate about anything and don't realise how hollow they sound.

So it was a totally unexpected surprise to find myself listening to an HR director at the CIPD conference today talking about passion, and meaning it, and entirely justifying his use of this dangerous word.

Anand Pillai was actually standing in for his boss Vineet Nayar, chief executive of the India-based global company HCL Technologies, who had to deal with urgent business at the last minute. Playing substitute to someone who's been billed to give a "masterclass" might seem a daunting prospect.

But Pillai, whose formal title is senior vice-president and global head of "talent transformation and intrapreneurship development" at HCL Technologies – a title that speaks volumes about the values of his company – gave a masterful performance.

HCL is famous for its business transformation since 2005, when Nayar adopted his "employees first customers second' (EFCS) philosophy. Since then it has achieved increases in turnover, profit, and customer and employee satisfaction that has left most rivals standing.

The company attributes this success to changing the role of management to one of "enabling, engaging and empowering front-line employees". Clearly, this opens up enormous space for HR people to be creative and business-focused in new ways. Pillai ranged far and wide, talking about HCL's programmes and techniques.

Of which, here, I need mention only one – the ‘employee passion indicator’. HCL has created this instrument to establish what employees get most excited about. It might be financial reward, working with people, innovation, etc. Each employee gets a 'traffic lights' report showing green, orange or red for the fit between their own motivational factors and the requirements of their role. This helps them and the company to find the best match.

Anand Pillai himself spoke with startling passion – and clarity. That is no doubt partly thanks to his experience speaking in business schools (HCL is a case study in 260 of them) and advising more than 50 companies worldwide on how to implement the EFCS philosophy.

His session also provided a glimpse of the future, where HR directors stride the stage with the strategic vision of a CEO, where global corporations based in India break the old paradigms, and several of the stars at the CIPD annual conference speak with Asian accents.

Fortunately, Pillai avoided the trap of saying "I'm passionate about…." But he did say he loves networking and interacting with people. Indeed, he confided: "I love my job so much that I'd do it even if my boss didn't pay me for it." That's the best definition of passion I've come across.

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Several recent books have posed the question of whether our increasing use of digital media is actually changing the wiring of our brains. It’s been suggested, for example, that we’re developing the skill to process data more quickly, but becoming less able to concentrate deeply or to reflect on our experience.

This isn’t just philosophical speculation. Such thoughts had a very practical edge as People Management’s editorial team finalised changes to the design and content of our latest magazine issue. It’s very clear that regular use of the internet is profoundly changing how all of us relate to magazines and what we expect from them.

From using the internet, we now expect to have all the relevant information at our fingertips; to be able to follow links and references instantly. Well, we can’t offer the one-click convenience of the web in a magazine just yet. But we’ve introduced a “Links & Notes” column on the right-hand margin of almost every spread in the magazine, listing your options for finding more information on websites (usually PM’s and the CIPD’s, of course, but also across the web).

And yes, I know that magazines like Wired and Vogue now offer or plan iPad editions, which will make it possible to enjoy the experience of reading magazine-style layouts and instantly click-through to other websites from within the page. But it’s likely to be a while before a large enough proportion of CIPD members have iPads or equivalent devices to justify PM going down this road too.

Obviously the digital world is becoming more diverse and creative all the time. Not only websites, but also email newsletters and the growing range of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter (where we already have a PM presence) or LinkedIn and YouTube (where we will appear soon) are also influencing expectations.

I could say a lot more about how we see PM’s website leading on all the latest news and blogs and the magazine being the place where we review key themes once a fortnight, and publish longer, more considered articles. But as you’re reading this on our website, I suspect your attention span is already stretched to its limit.

So here’s a final thought, obvious but worth restating. One of the most precious gifts of the internet is the way users can respond and contribute. So please, now tell us what you think.

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There are plenty of reasons to be concerned about the disastrous oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, but when President Obama raised the political temperature by pointedly referring to BP as “British Petroleum” – a moniker BP itself apparently dropped 10 years ago – did anyone else, like me, feel more personally involved?

I don’t just mean because a significant proportion of my pension fund is likely to be invested in BP shares, which is alarming enough. Just as important: what about the damage being done to the “British” brand?

Maybe I’m feeling especially sensitive because of what’s happened recently to another brand I’m associated with. Remember how solid the “Scottish” reputation was for being financially prudent and trustworthy, and how that attracted dividends, investment and jobs to Scotland?

There’s a small town called Beauly, just north of Inverness, that I know well. Two of its most solid and proud buildings, opposite each other right in the middle of the main street, are the Bank of Scotland and the Royal Bank of Scotland. They are a symbol of a once-great industry that grew organically out of the Scots character.

That hard-earned Scottish brand – built up over centuries – has been left in tatters in only a few years by the sudden reckless behaviour of RBS and HBOS – the two banks that overstretched most, and had to be bailed out most by the taxpayer (with the Bank of Scotland having been taken over by Halifax to make HBOS, then HBOS being taken over by Lloyds). How many finance sector firms that might have started up, moved to or invested in Scotland will never now do so?

That’s why I’m queasy about people playing fast and loose with the "British" brand too. Not so long ago, British Petroleum was known as the most dynamic oil giant, British Airways the premium global airline; and many others – with or without British in their title – also benefit from the elan of being British abroad.

That’s an important asset for this country. If the British brand gets dragged through the mud from the world’s biggest oil slick, we will all suffer.

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Here at PM we’ve been banging on about the benefits of flexible working for years. We also practice what we preach: most of our team do work full-time, but our legal editor does a four-day week and one of our sub-editors works two days. Both of these arrangements started because of their desire to balance work with childcare and the company’s desire to retain their skills.

More recently, I’ve also been working a four-day week. I choose to do so partly because, having entered my mid-50s, I’m at a stage of my life where I no longer need to maximise my earnings. I’ve just about finished part-funding my children through university and I have no desire for a bigger house or a more expensive car. I enjoy my job immensely, but don’t want to devote myself full-time to any job any more. And I have other interests I do want to give some time to.

The point is: my employer (Personnel Publications) and the CIPD, on whose behalf it publishes PM, both seem happy with this arrangement. Indeed, they profess to see advantages in it: I bring a wealth of experience, while they have to pay only 80 per cent of the salary I might take home from a full-time role.

So flexible working can maximise benefits and work beautifully for both employer and employee. Alas, because of the recession, many people who would like to work full-time have been forced to go part-time: more than a million, according to the Institute for Public Policy Research. Some actually volunteered for shorter working weeks on a temporary basis in order to minimise job losses.

The most famous example of this was at Big Four consultancy KPMG. We have an extended interview in the current (20 May) issue with Rachel Campbell, KPMG’s global head of HR, and it’s good to hear that no one at the firm is still on a four-day week owing to any sort of post-recession hangover. But Campbell herself works a four-day week for other reasons. Flexible working helps her to fulfil her parallel role as a mother. It will also help KPMG to retain her as a partner – and, hopefully, to redress the dearth of women at the top management level.

Also in the current issue, employment lawyer and diversity specialist Sandra Wallace reflects on a new reason for employers to be more open to flexible working: if the default retirement age is abolished, as seems likely, and there is greater uncertainty about when staff will retire, employers may find succession planning more difficult. But many older workers might welcome the option of moving into different roles in which they can gradually scale back their hours. Flexible working is likely to become much more routine. I’m convinced that, by the time I reach what will be the notional retirement age, everyone will be doing it. Meanwhile, I’m already looking forward to scaling back to a three-day week!

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Are we on the brink of the worst time ever for HR professionals working in the public sector – or the most exciting?

With the election campaign now underway, the politicians are arguing more loudly than ever about the possible scale and speed of public spending cuts, but it’s clear they agree on the need for drastic action. After 6 May, life for anyone working in the public sector may never be the same again.

HR departments will be fully stretched with implementing restructuring and redundancy programmes. But it’s also a political priority to reduce the impact of cuts on front-line services by making a major new push for efficiency savings in “back-office” operations. So HR will be under unprecedented pressure to do more with less.

At the same time, a debate is raging about how to reshape the bureaucratic, safety-first culture that still weighs down many public-service organisations. In part, that’s an inevitable result of having to operate in an uncertain employment law environment while being subject to close public scrutiny. Public-sector HR people have to be more risk-averse (for example, in tackling performance problems) lest an employment tribunal awards a hefty fine, or a newspaper story stirs up a political hornet’s nest.

As the head of HR professional services at Surrey Police, Nora Hutson, explains in a thoughtful letter to People Management, this results in a catch-22 situation: “We must deal with the costly effects of poor performance, but we can’t afford to expose ourselves to [the possibility of] huge costs at tribunal.”

The CBI has now echoed the CIPD in calling for a more effective approach to performance management throughout the public sector, and politicians of all parties are focusing on how to deliver more efficient public services. But it’s unlikely they will wish to strengthen the ability of line managers to manage more vigorously. In this context, Labour and Tory ideas for turning council and NHS services into co-operatives (welcome as they are) appear to deftly sidestep the key issue.

But there’s still an unknown ingredient in this story: the actual extent of the coming cuts. Possibly these will be so dramatic – and the worst predictions are cuts of up to a third in certain services – that all the old risk-averse behaviour will be swept away.

The post-election scene will present enormous challenges, but also great opportunities for HR professionals to help make public agencies more flexible, decentralised and responsive to consumers of services. Yes, it will be tough – but over the next few years, this is arguably the sector in which there is the potential to make the biggest difference.

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