FUTURE TALENT November - January 2019/2020 | Page 28

O
ON TOPIC
E
fficiency, optimisation, lean working.
However we describe it, we can all recognise
the well-established concept of working
efficiently, being part of that well-oiled
machine that’s doing the most it can with the minimum
resource. And, when times are tough, as the austerity
of recent years has shown, operating efficiently can
assume an even greater importance.
Organisations have certainly been under pressure
to achieve more with less in recent years. At the same
time, workplaces have, in many ways, become more
complex. Gone are the days of a dedicated workforce,
on site from 9am till 5pm each day, labouring at a job
for life. Instead, welcome to the world of flexible and
remote working, fixed-term contracts and contractors,
work-life balance and job hopping. Workplace cultures
are unrecognisable, with an ever-increasing emphasis
on diversity and inclusion (D&I), meaningful work and
workplace wellbeing.
It’s no surprise, then, that HR directors have
embraced tools and techniques that enable them to
manage this complexity as efficiently as possible.
Policies and rulebooks abound in an effort to manage
risk and influence workplace behaviours. Swathes of
HR tech are deployed to automate and streamline
traditional HR functions. Tech companies promote
services that claim to enhance not only productivity
and performance, but employee engagement and
retention. There seems to be no limit to the potential
offered by rule-bound and data-driven solutions to
attract, monitor, manage and retain an organisation’s
human capital.
But does this obsession with optimising efficiency
come at a price? Criticism of business efficiency has
a long history. Victorian polymath John Ruskin famously
believed that ‘impersonal’ efficiency threatened to
strip labour of its meaning. In an age of seemingly
A risk-based
approach to
management can
backfire, fuelling
disengagement and
stifling individual
responsibility
28 // Future Talent
unbridled technological change, he championed
instead the importance of meaning as a motivator.
Sound familiar? More than a century later, we need
to ask ourselves whether the drive towards efficiency
in how we manage people at work is in danger of
creating unintended consequences; and at a time
when our colleagues are increasingly looking for their
own meaning and purpose at work, and when we need
to create work cultures fit for the challenges of change
and disruption.
At an organisational level, these challenges are akin
to Clayton Christensen’s famous ‘innovator’s dilemma’:
how to manage the day to day while also innovating
for the future. It’s a tricky balance at the heart of all
organisational strategy and culture, with HR teams
often at the chalk face when it comes to enabling
cultures, structures and processes that facilitate both.
In a 2004 Harvard Business Review article, Charles
A. O’Reilly and Michael L. Tushman introduced the
concept of the ‘ambidextrous’ organisation; businesses
successful at both “exploiting the present and exploring
the future”. Crucially, their research showed that, while
ambidexterity assumed separate, forward-looking
business units unencumbered by the demands
of business as usual, the key to success was
ambidextrous senior teams and managers able to lead
and co-ordinate across organisations, “combining the
attributes of rigorous cost cutters and free-thinking
entrepreneurs while maintaining the objectivity
required to make difficult trade-offs”.
It’s still all about the people. The question is: how to
create ambidextrous organisations driven by
ambidextrous leaders.
E
ven the most entrepreneurial-minded
organisations need some rules to provide
a framework for getting things done and,
crucially, clear guidelines for how employees
will be treated, and treat each other. And it’s certainly
tempting, in a time of change and complexity, to try
to codify the behaviours we want to see from the
people in our organisations. It’s both prudent and
efficient, showing that an organisation is alert to risk
and able to communicate expectations clearly, right?
Take, for example, the proliferation of policies which
attempt to manage employees’ use of social media
at work, or to ensure they dress appropriately. Creating
and implementing these policies and processes usually
sits with HR, which can easily find itself presiding over
spiralling employee handbooks that try to cover every
eventuality and minimise every risk.
The danger is that this risk-based approach to
management can backfire, fuelling disengagement,
stifling individual responsibility and reinforcing
behaviours those policies were designed to address.
And do we really want leaders spending valuable time
enforcing complex policies when, in many cases, a
healthy dose of common sense might do the trick?
This is the approach taken by General Motors’ CEO,
Mary Barra, who has gone on record as having a
management philosophy epitomised by their two-word