Building an adult-to-adult culture

Dress codes, return to work interviews, mandatory training, appraisal forms, emergency time off approvals, and back to the office mandates .. just a few of the ways we let our people know that we don’t trust them and that we need to treat them like naughty children. Of course, it’s only really a few bad apples, but we often design our approach to HR around the lowest common denominator, creating frustration and a poor experience for the majority who have no intention of behaving badly. Fortunately, we are seeing a shift towards treating people like grown-ups; starting from a position of trust and encouraging managers to use their judgement. But how do you go about making this shift?

Go low risk

Moving to an adult culture involves giving away power and this can be scary. So, it makes sense to always try stuff out first in an area where, if it goes wrong, it isn’t going to cause a lot of damage. For example, don’t start with health and safety! But maybe you could try a policy area such as bereavement leave that (hopefully) won’t impact too many people. Priskjat, the price comparison site has moved away from listing the number of days you get for grieving based on your relationship to the deceased – you know the sort of thing – three days for a parent, one day for a cousin – to one that says simply ‘Sometimes we need help. We’ve got your back. Take the time you need’. This is a low-risk area to start experimenting with. The numbers are low and managers should be able to differentiate between the person who genuinely needs more time and the one who has lost his grandad for the third time that year! To help you decide whether an area is low risk or not, have a look back at the number of people who abused it, to get a scale of the risk you might run if the process was taken away. Virgin Atlantic, for example, found that out of 10,000 staff, an average of only two people a year failed their probationary period, giving them the confidence to make changes.

Take a fresh look at your policies

It’s rare for companies to take a step back and look at the experience they’re creating through their suite of policies. Typically, we just keep adding to them and don’t appreciate the impact of them holistically. Standard Chartered sat down and went through every one of theirs, with a fresh lens of ‘does this create an experience of feeling included and does it encourage innovation?’ This exercise highlighted those policies that were out of step with the experience they had pledged to create. It might be worth doing the same thing. Ask yourself, ‘do these policies create an environment where people feel trusted?’ If not, you know where to start.

Ask your people

We’re often reluctant to ask our people which policies they don’t like because we might not like the answer. But that reluctance to engage is precisely the kind of the parent-child behaviour that we’re trying to tackle! It’s all about how you frame the question. TD Bank ask their people ‘which policies or processes get in the way of you doing your best work?’ Just asking the question is a great way of re-setting the relationship to one where you treat them like grown-ups, but you also get a wealth of data that will show you where to start making changes.

Build your managers’ capabilities and confidence

As much as it can make us feel great having a manager coming to us for all the answers, ultimately, if we are going to raise our game in HR, we need to stop doing the basics for them. We need to help build their capabilities and confidence so they can make decisions and have conversations themselves. This can take time, but it’s so worth it. You can use the technique called ‘scaffolding’ where you break it down into stages’ letting them experiment in a safe space before letting them loose on real people! A big media company did this with encouraging managers to own pay and bonus decisions. First step was to give them a theoretical budget and a pretend team. They had to allocate the money and HR then challenged them about different outcomes such as ‘this person is very unhappy about your decision. How will you handle that?’ They then progressed with small budgets and a few team members until they had the capability and the confidence to own it like the grown-ups they were!

So why not try some of these steps out with a few of your more open managers? Moving to adult to adult from a very parental culture is not going to be quick. But you’ll be creating an environment and experience that will make you more innovative, more productive and more engaging. So it’s worth playing the long game.