HR are often change victims, rather than champions

HR people are often asked to lead change, but lack the traction - and the tools - to do so. In consequence, they often end up victims of the change process themselves.

Just had a fascinating conversation with a prospective client who was asking my opinion about managing 'cross-cultural' issues and the role of HR in dealing with them. I had thought my answer would be too provocative for her, but strangely enough we had a meeting of minds.

The company provides a range of customer services through an international service chain. They have had tremendous problems ensuring that the customer gets the same high standard of experience regardless of the location providing the service. In fact, when customers complain about the experience, the primary cause of the complaint is less to do with poor service as it is to do with inconsistent service.

The task of fixing this has been given to a team led by Human Resources, and they have been working on it for more than six months - running education sessions, doing a lot of employee communications and ensuring that there is alignment of pay and performance systems against customer service criteria in each location.

All worthy stuff. What difference has it made? As far as the volume and nature of customer complaints are concerned - absolutely none.

When I heard the problem and their solution, I was not at all surprised at the result. In just about every case that I have seen where HR has been given responsibility for dealing with cross-cultural issues, it has been a signal failure, for three reasons.

First, as soon as we begin to label or discuss issues as "cross-cultural" we are moving away from the real issue, which is: what performance (behaviour / language) do we want to see, and what do we have in place in the business to ensure that we get it?

Almost always, the answer to this question lies in treating it as an operational issue, not an HR issue. If we need people to perform, we need to set standards for performance (this has to be an operational issue) and create performance environments (workflow, priorities, skills, triggers, short and long-term consequence systems, feedback) that make these standards possible. Again, almost all of these need to be set and managed at operational level, consistently.

Second, HR in many organisations lacks operational credibility. They are heard to speak a different language (Human Capital Management, anyone?) and often are seen as detached from the business. So their ability to influence real behaviour on the ground is very limited, especially when compared with the influence of operational line management.

Third, HR don't usually feel the pain. Their performance measurement and rewards tend not to suffer when cross-cultural issues affect business performance. Their priorities, attention and sense of urgency tend not to be same as those directly in the business. So while HR people often suffer stress and frustration, it is more often because they have been asked to fix something outside their control than feeling the operational pain directly.

This is not to say that HR cannot add huge value to any cross-cultural activity - facilitating the introduction of common ways of working, creating infrastructure for performance measurement, ensuring alignment of standards, and helping handle the fall out when things go wrong are all examples of what they can do. But to have them lead the resolution of cross-cultural issues is, in my experience, an invitation into a World of Pain -for them and for the company

So what are we do? First thing is to enable the managers who feel the operational pain to fix the problems. We do so by helping them work out where things can be changed to make things better; we show them what needs to change for this to work; we guide them to understand how to implement this change, and we support them to put the change in and make it stick.

And we do so with the support of HR - but we don't ask them to lead what they can't change...

Mike