Oh, how I laughed!
I know it dates me, but one of my abiding memories from school is haircut inspections, when prefects – those privileged elite empowered to enforce the rules – checked our hair. No, not for lice! They were checking to ensure that it wasn’t too long!
So you can imagine how funny I found it when I learned a few years ago that prefects are still conducting hair inspections. Only now they are checking that hair is not too short! (Don’t ask; I have no idea how they are expected to enforce that! In my day they could insist you had a hair-cut; but what do they do now – insist that you wear hair-extensions?) Well, traditions have been maintained! But if anything ever proved the inanity of rules for rules’ sake this has to be it!
One has to laugh. Yet I remember this whenever I think of HR and the administration of work-force attendance. Ever since I can remember they have been focusing on efforts to reduce absenteeism and the lost productivity it causes. And here you cannot say the pendulum has swung, because they are still grappling with this problem. However, industry is also struggling to manage the opposite problem – presenteeism: people coming to work when they really are not well enough to do so, and thus presenting a health hazard to themselves and their fellow-workers.
So how do you manage two diametrically opposite actions? I know that if I were an HR Manager, I would throw my hands up in horror at being expected to do the seemingly impossible. But it is not only an HR problem; it affects all managers and leaders. So what are you doing about it?
Hopefully you are doing what most sensible people do when confronted with a challenge; looking behind the problem. Amusing though my analogy may be it highlights how easy it is to get caught up with the superficial. The fact is that it doesn’t matter whether you are dealing with something as inane as the length of hair or something far more important, you are ultimately dealing with behaviour. Consequently you need to look at what you can do to remodel behaviour, not to reinforce rules.
And shaping behaviour is about leadership. That is why I found my friend Steve Roesler’s blog “Leadership: It’s about you” so interesting. I particularly enjoyed his Peter Drucker quote, ”Look over your shoulder. If you don’t see anyone you’re not leading.” If you put that in context, if people are not behaving in the way that you want them to, it is because you haven’t convinced them of the need.
Take the absenteeism/presenteeism issue. For starters, do you really have the ability to (always) tell whether an employee’s absence is justified or not? So why get into that territory? If you have people who don’t care enough about their work to pitch up when they need to or who are so afraid of the consequences if they fail to pitch up when they know they really shouldn’t, you don’t have a rule-enforcement problem. You have an employee engagement problem.
And that being the case, what you need to do is create an environment where the individual has enough integrity to make that call for themselves and you and his colleagues have enough trust to respect their decision. That is about creating shared values and not rules. And that is the ultimate in leadership.
Of course, if you are looking for an ideal mechanism to prove your leadership and create those shared values, you don’t need to look any further than an effective, equitable employee-ownership scheme. If the employee has a stake in the business and how it performs, they will be far more likely to make the decision that is best for both them and the business, because the two are aligned.
So this might just help you do the impossible! It is only a catalyst, but it will embed the ethics you want and engender the employee engagement that will ensure you get better results, whilst also taking away so much of the pain, frustration and wasted effort you currently put into trying to manage your people. It offers a win-win for everyone.