Play At Work

Sex, Lies and Statistics: Is Diversity In Greater Decline Than Ever?

February 4, 2016

I think I first became aware of politics in the Spring of 1982. My father was painting the bathroom and had a portable radio in there with him for company, and I remember crossing the landing from my bedroom and hearing the announcer stating that we were now at war with Argentina.

I was seven. I clearly, already, had a notion of war from watching TV – war looked like the Blitz, war looked like gas masks and bunkers in the garden. I can remember being absolutely terrified by hearing this announcement and being calmed by my parents with the help of a globe and the reassurance we were unlikely to be on rationing any time soon.

By seven, the world, and its wars, had come crashing in across the airwaves. I found myself, now, watching the news. I wanted this war to be over. I wanted to know what was going on.

But what’s really interesting to note, thanks to this Falklands flashback promoted in my mind by the political flashbacks we’re currently experiencing in British politics (banning the bomb and the deeply-disturbing TV series Threads soon eclipsed the Falklands conflict in my mind – the eighties really were a scary time to be a kid for many reasons, not least the outfits), what really got me thinking, though, was who I saw, back then, aged seven, running the world.

In 1982, in the UK, I lived in a country ruled by a woman, run by a woman and totally obsessed with a woman. Liz, Maggie and Di were the news.

At home, my mother seemed to run the show (my father worked long hours and was away quite a bit); at school, my teacher and headteacher were both women (in fact, there wasn’t a male teacher present at all); and, whether presented as stoical, strident or simply stylish, when I turned on the news, women were centre stage.

By the mid-80s, even more sisters were doing it for themselves; we had Alexis Colby-Carrington-Dexter, Madonna, Janet ‘Miss Jackson if you’re nasty’ Jackson; Baby Boom and Working Girl. The post women’s liberation movement seemed to have come of age. Equality, though by no means a universal reality, seemed not just an attainable aspiration but, ultimately, an inevitability.

So what happened?

That dawning of consciousness as to the ways of the world around me then implied that, while it might still be a man’s, man’s world, that wasn’t a state of affairs that was expected to last very long.

Third-odd years later, the likelihood of Diane Keaton or Sigourney Weaver (let alone Melanie Griffiths) being in the boardroom in the first place looks slimmer than ever.

The Green Park Leadership Report 2015, focused on the FTSE 100, states there are 5% female CEOs and 3% female chairs, with 62% of boards showing no minority presence at all (the race stats are just as, if not more, damning – but I’ll save that for another post).

Even pulling out every possible ‘reasonable’ explanation you can think of – woman aren’t as hungry for recognition, women don’t need the top job status to be effective, women are more likely to have more balanced priorities when it comes to home and work, it’s the deficit of female role models – none of these things can possibly explain it.

I’ve done graduate recruitment campaigns for nearly 20 years – and, generally, in general programmes, in ‘general’ businesses (not so much, admittedly, in trad-male sectors like engineering) the intake has been, generally, 50/50 (or thereabouts).

So what happened to those women I seduced into joining FTSEs 20 years ago with the promise of no glass ceilings? Did they find one – or just decide there was more to life anyway?

One of the biggest problems in this area is the lack of transparency and honesty (it’s amazing, in this age of transparency, how much, despite all our data, is still so obscured).

I remember having a conversation with a woman who had organised a very ‘high profile’ women’s networking event in the city, with an impressive panel of women leaders.

“The thing is,” she confided in me, “they were all up there telling the room they could all have it all, and, because I know them, I know that’s just not the case. Of the four women on the panel, one was single, two were childless, and the two with kids had stay-at-home husbands. Their lives aren’t like my life. It wasn’t an accurate picture. They didn’t tell the room what they had sacrificed or why – that’s the story young women need to hear. And young men. There’s always a sacrifice to be made somewhere, for somebody. I don’t think anybody really ever has it all.”

Before the recession, I had a lot of meetings with Diversity and Inclusion departments. Like so many ‘nice to haves’, post-recession, not so much.

The real shame in this is that, done well, and done truly inclusively (i.e. also involving the pale, male, stale guys too), D&I initiatives can encourage everyone to talk about their biases, their conditioning, the dynamics of their individual lives. They can encourage people to have the difficult conversations – with ‘difficult’ so often being defined as honest.

And, for me, honesty is always the way to make progress (however challenging the ride might be). We all need to be a lot more honest about what’s really going on here. The world looks so different to how my seven-year-old self imagined it would be.
Reach Out and Touch Somebody’s Hand (if you dare): The Perils and Power of Touch at Work

January 28, 2016

Some years ago, I was invited to attend an ‘experience’ day for a rather well known fast-food chain. The idea was to get a ‘fly-on-the-wall’ perspective of the operation, and involved donning the uniform, taking a tour, and being instructed on some of the tasks that go on in the kitchens behind the counter (I wasn’t allowed to be on the counter – quite rightly, too, as I’m not sure I could have processed even the simplest order).

This was my first experience of being behind the scenes in a restaurant. Though I had quite a few part-time jobs as a student, none of them involved food or drink, so it was a truly eye-opening experience. And one incident, in particular, still sticks in my mind.

Shortly after I’d arrived, I was placed in the basement staff room to await my uniform (unfortunately, when it did arrive, I was too long in the body for it, so the overall look was slightly crop-top – not a good look, but there we go).

As I was sitting there, a group of people came in who were about to start their shifts – four guys and one girl. They clearly knew each other very well; there was lots of laughter and banter and “what happened about X” conversations.

What really surprised me, though, was when the girl pulled off her top, and stood, in her bra, chatting away very merrily to the other guys, as if nothing was unusual about this.

It was all done very casually, naturally. There was nothing, apparently, sexualised about this – for her, I’m sure, it was like getting changed in front of a brother. No one batted an eyelid (expect me, who didn’t quite know where to look).

It wasn’t as if there was no where else to change. Had she been of a more modest persuasion, she could have gone into one of the rest rooms, but this was, clearly, no big deal to her or anyone else.

I couldn’t help wondering how many women would feel comfortable conversing with their male colleagues in their bra in the place where I worked at the time. I suspected not many. Not even one, in fact. And, for that matter, I didn’t think many of the guys in the office would feel comfortable publicly going topless either (okay, there’s always a gym bunny who’ll strip at any given opportunity, but these guys are few and far between).

So what was this? Was this a youth thing, a culture thing; a very individualist, slightly exhibitionistic thing? I was a bit puzzled – and then I was taken up to the shop floor, and a few things feel into place for me.

I couldn’t believe how confined the space was in the kitchens. Moving around these rabbit-warren runs, you were constantly brushing past one person or another, or gently shifting them out of your way. What I noticed with the whole of the team working there was how comfortable they seemed to be with this tactility. They were all high-fiving, leaning on each other, hugging each other. It was a total love-in.

There were strong bonds here, that was clear, and I wondered whether those bonds were kind of enforced by the structure of the physical environment: in other words, when you’re all forced into physical intimacy, does that expedite the social contact all primates use for social cohesion (I felt sure if there were fleas to pick off of each other, this lot would have no problem with that)?

Of course, taken into the office environment, it’s a hard to thing to transpose. There is space (hopefully). At the very least, you can probably move around without having to touch someone. Any physical contact, therefore, is somewhat premeditated, as it were; you have to actively reach out and touch someone (I hear the echo of a song somewhere in that…).

Mmm. And this is where it all (far from being an automatic, natural, human response) gets a little tricky.

From the ‘simple’ handshake to social kissing to celebratory hugging, touch, in the office, is an area fraught with danger.

There’s no such thing as even a simple handshake: is it the bone-crusher, the lingerer, the overly-emphatic, the wet fish?

Is it one kiss or two; to the flesh or to the air; the preserve of women, gay men and ‘continentals’ or okay for everybody? Okay on greeting but unnecessary on departing, or only for leaving, or only for leaving for work-social occasions?

And hugging! When is that appropriate (and not in danger of being condescending, forced, uncomfortable or borderline harassment)?

Of course, as with so much in life, it’s all about context. Even the ‘Safeguarding in Schools’ advice (school being the starting point of our constructed relationship with touch) doesn’t really provide any greater clarity:

It is not possible to be specific about the appropriateness of each physical contact, since an action that is appropriate with one pupil, in one set of circumstances, may be inappropriate in another, or with a different child.

But we still hear the stories about teachers who can no longer hug a child in tears or hold a hand without consulting a parent first, with the threat of litigation, of something being seen as untoward, tying our hands behind our backs in spite of our most natural human instincts.

As with so much in life, sometimes the evils of a tiny minority end up terrorising us all.

Though adult-child physical interactions are understandably, and rightly, held under close scrutiny (and, likewise, those with vulnerable adults), surely when it’s a case of “We’re all adults here,” everyone should be perfectly fine to rub along together, right?

Well, as I’ve listed above, sadly, this isn’t so; even the most basic physical interactions can cause anxiety. Which is such a shame, as there’s a lot to be said for the power of touch.

Some people do it very well and very naturally. I’ve worked with a couple of ‘universally-tactile’ people over the years who were able to give anyone a quick back rub in a totally non-creepy and non-intrusive way.

I’ve also worked with a couple of people who you felt were invading your body space while standing six feet away.

Like I said, it’s tricky, and very individual – which is always the hardest thing to legislate for. So we stay away from it, in our offices, in our cubicles, touching screens instead of people.

I got thinking about this again as, last week, I had the privilege of visiting a residential centre for people with severe learning disabilities. When interviewing one of the support workers there, he told me about a particularly challenging resident who was prone to getting physically violent at times:

“The thing is, when you’ve worked closely with her and can start to identify some of the triggers, you can, sometimes, stop her having a total meltdown. I’ve learned that if you sit with her, and just very slowly and gently rub your finger on her hand like that, it really settles her. She starts to breathe, calms down and goes off into a bit of a dream. It’s just the simplest little thing, but it works.”

The power of touch.
Hung Up: The Telephone Interview

January 11, 2016

My nephew has been having a few telephone interviews for his university applications and asked for my advice on them – I thought I’d share what I told him…

Top Tips for Telephone Interviews

Be Engaged

Not literally. Keep the phone line clear if it’s an incoming call – don’t even text! Tell everyone in your vicinity to shut the F up – no background music, vacuuming, all local dogs tranquillized etc. – and be somewhere quiet and alone. If you’re making the call, be precise on the time.

But the bigger point is that this call is your opportunity to sell yourself, to find out if the offer is worth buying, to get a sense of the kind of people they get to interview someone (telling in itself), and to potentially start to build a relationship with someone you may come into contact with again.

Sound lively and awake, appreciative of their interest. This is not a chore, you’re glad the call came in – you haven’t been dreading it (or worrying about it) at all! It’s exciting.

Don’t overdo it (unless the call is about becoming a cheerleader), but there’s nothing worse than interviewing someone over the phone who sounds like they just want to wrap it up and hang up. The person the other end is probably doing a lot of these interviews, make it an engaging conversation and they’ll thank you for it.

Be Prepared

Read and re-read your personal statement and any other paperwork they have had to prompt their call. Ideally, have it printed out and in front of you so you can refer to it during the call if you need to (or at least, open on a screen – not the same one you’re making the call on, obv. – and on that note, never advisable to be on speaker phone unless you’re in a hermetically sealed, soundproofed environment; someone calling down the stairs “We’re out of bog roll,” in the background never makes a great impression).

Have a pen and some paper to hand, and a bottle of water in case you get dry mouth! Don’t drink too much ahead of the call so that you need to pee, however.

Know the name of the person calling if this is possible. If they give it, try to write it down – you might not need it, and you don’t want to be all overly familiar and “Hey Jane!”, or be too stuffy and “Thank you Mr Punch,” at the end of the call, but you might want (or need) to refer to it again.

During the conversation itself, I always try to avoid using people’s names unless I have to (“Thank you so much for asking me that question Tallulah…” – it’s a bit tacky and unnatural).

Additional, general, point – if you will need the caller’s name again and don’t catch it the first time, ask them to spell it for you. If you suspect it was something like Smith you could say “Sorry, could you repeat that please, I didn’t catch that.” I’ve come unstuck writing down an approximated guess and then struggling to find someone when calling back.

But the bigger point here is your mental preparation. What do YOU want out of this call? What do you want them to know about you, what should they know about you? They should want you, right, they’re going to be lucky to have you, so what’s going to clinch the deal? And, just as important, what are YOU going to bring to their party? What’s going to float their boat?

Universities and colleges want people who really like to get stuck in and involved in everything – inside the institution and in the wider community (it makes them look good). You read up on all the things you can do there, show that in the interview, show you’ve done your research, that you’re really excited about the chance to do X or Y or meet so-and-so or experience the new Blah facility or potentially go on that LaLa Exchange.

Be Curious

All of the above is all just common sense and you have plenty of it, so no worries. Also, you’re one of the few people in the world where the advice “Just be yourself,” is actually good advice.

But my final pointer is a real bugbear of mine and it happens in interviews all the time. I always find it dispiriting as, as an interviewer, I also always try to be engaging, respectful of people’s nerves and clear it’s a two-way purchase. But nothing is so irritating as coming to the point in the interview where you, as the interviewer, say “So, have you got any questions?” and the interviewee says ‘No.”

What, nothing? You can’t think of one cotton-picking thing to ask me, after I’ve just gone through a load of questions with you, noted everything down, held my focus during your boring monologue on overcoming adversity and struggled to make sense of your mangled dialect and you can’t think of something, anything, to ask me?

And it always gives me the same sense of someone – you just want this to be over (understandable, maybe) but I question your stamina, and you didn’t prepare enough, or, if we really have covered everything, you can’t think on your feet – and I’ve always found people who get on well in life (and every university and employer wants people who get on well in life) tend to be people who are always prepared, are able to think on their feet and have plenty of stamina.

If you really want to be prepared, make a list of 5, even 10, questions ahead of the call – you don’t have to ask them all, many might be covered, but have at least one or two up your sleeve.

Part of being curious is also paying close attention to things. Listen to the questions. Maybe write a key word or two of each question down so, if you lose your thread, you can look back to what the initial question was: “Sorry, I’ve rambled a bit, let me come back to your original question…” – the audience always love the people on Question Time who do that.
Goodwill: A Mode for All Seasons?

January 6, 2016

In nature there’s no blemish but the mind.

None can be called deformed but the unkind.

Twelfth Night, William Shakespeare

I saw two random, Samaritan-like acts of goodwill over the festive season.

The first was a young guy in Shoreditch stopping to ask a blind man, who had frozen to the spot in the midst of a tide of people rushing towards him, if he was okay and needed any help. He did, and the young guy lead him across the street to an easy, less populated stretch of pavement.

The second was a young woman, stopping to ask an elderly man, laden with shopping bags, if he need any help carrying them to the train at London Bridge. He did, and she cheerfully grabbed two armfuls of carrier bags and helped him to the train.

Both were fleeting, fast, responsive acts of kindness. Both required our ‘Samaritans’ to look around to see the world in front of them (rather than a small screen in their palms). And both were anonymous, silent acts of kindness (these weren’t grand gestures, displayed for the public at large – and I’m doubtful my good-hearted fellow citizens then went on to tweet about how kind and noble they were that day).

I wonder if they’re always like that, my good-hearted fellow citizens. Do they do this kind of thing every day, or was it specifically the season of goodwill that induced their civic vigilance? Perhaps this is just the kind of thing people do when they’re not enslaved to a smart phone screen 24/7 (both seemed to be devoid of the demonic, and near universal, device-dependency clutch – rare beings indeed).

I’d like to think it wasn’t just the dictates of the season that prompted my protagonists into positive action. When you think about it, it’s potentially a rather sad indictment that we need to have a ‘season of goodwill’ at all – that we need to be reminded to play nice. Then again, at least we do (and we clearly do need reminding); looking back at 2015, there wasn’t that much evidence of much goodwill about.

From Twitter tackling trolls to the ‘Tatler Tory’ tragedy to reports of alarming rises in incidents of workplace bullying, 2015 wasn’t the year of playing nicely. We had gothic tales of hidden tears in the cubicles of Amazon; dystopian death threats (and threats of rape) made to those who believe women should be treated equally to men; and, of course, the medieval horrors of those who affiliate themselves to Daesh. All various gradients on the same scale – one of hate and anger.

In the workplace, often that hate and anger isn’t even directed in the right place. Many workplace bullies lash out at those alongside them or below them on the organogram because they can’t display it to those above them (who are often creating the conditions for their hatred and anger to breed in the first place).

That’s not to excuse these people – but it goes someway to help explain them. It’s the same in the playground – most often those who make others’ lives miserable at school do so because their own lives at home are less than ideal.

Most bullies are, misguidedly, looking for either power or attention (ideally both) as a result of their actions. For some, getting attention, for good or ill, is reason enough (as long as they’re getting it). Some are just outright nasty people. They enjoy seeing others squirm, or deflate, or bend to their will. Some might be programmed that way – others might think it’s how you need to be to get ahead.

The situational, ’reactive’ bully can be tackled. This is usually just a very unhappy person at work. Usually they need help – with workload, with people, with handling their anger. They need to feel listened to, and, most importantly, need to hear how they make other people feel too. Greater self-awareness is often the key.

The ‘pseudo’ bully, sometimes, can actually be an easier nut to crack (if you’ll forgive the expression). This often plays out with new joiners who are trying to be kick-ass and dynamic and establish themselves as a force to be reckoned with. Tell them you don’t have to play it that way here and you can often see a physical sense of relief, as if, just by saying that, you’re enabling them to take off the heavy armour they’ve placed on themselves. The shoulders drop, the body relaxes – and, hopefully, the mind opens too.

Of course, this can only happen if they don’t have to play things that way in your culture. It’s no good telling them to lighten up only to chastise them for not getting results three months later because no one pays any attention to what they say. If that’s the case, however, you’ve got a bigger problem on your hands than any one individual.

Then we have the real bullies. Far harder to tackle. The scariest ones for me are those where their actions seem completely subconscious. It’s one thing, by no means forgivable but perhaps more understandable, to be a conscious bully who is mean to people because it gets results. It’s another to be foul to all around you because of some deeper baggage, probably created way before even starting work, that you don’t even realise drives your actions.

And what’s an employer to do with this strain? Well, firstly, don’t promote them (ideally, don’t employ them – but we all make mistakes and few recruitment processes are designed to really weed out the inner demon/s).

If you claim your culture is one about getting results in the right way, not just getting results at any cost, no matter how effective your bully might be, they need to see it’s their actions to others that hold them back.

Make it clear to others you are open to listening to them – constantly justifying someone’s bad behaviour shuts down the dialogue, leaving others to suffer in silence.

This can be especially true of business leaders who may not be on the receiving end of a bullying culture that makes everyone below them scared of their own shadows – sometimes they can be in blissful oblivion of what’s really going on (how many times did we hear that in 2015, Amazon, VW etc.?)

Which kind of brings me full circle to my noble citizens at the start of this post. Whether it’s tackling bad behaviour or creating a culture of trans-seasonal goodwill in the workplace, those that really lead others, those that we really want to follow, look up, look around and notice what’s going on. They also reach out to those who need help.

It always seems one should link such an argument back to the commercials – and, indeed, there’s good reason to. Workplace bullying and poor people management costs – time, money and productivity. It also costs you your reputation. No matter how successful you might be, I’ve noticed that organisations with a reputation for being a bit of a shark tank don’t necessarily struggle to recruit – they just recruit more sharks (those that feel they’ve got what it takes to handle such a culture). That can sustain you in the short term, it can sustain you when things are going well, but the minute you’re not riding so high and those sharks smell blood, well, it’s rarely pretty.

At a conference I attended last year, one of the speakers mentioned a very successful CEO they knew. One of the things this CEO always wanted to know from their staff was “What’s the gossip, what are people talking about, complaining about. Who are they complaining about?”

Interesting when so many CEO’s just want to know the figures. But that’s the point. This CEO had made the connection that so many seem to struggle with: the thing about money is you can never take people out of the equation.

Businesses that run on goodwill – to each other, to their customers – are the businesses that cut it. Everyone else always gets found out in the end.
HR: the new Labour?

December 2, 2015

Is HR the Labour Party of the British workplace?

Divided and self-defeating; full of factions and in-fighting; losing a clear narrative; losing sight of the big picture; leaving people uncertain as to who they are and what they’re for.

You don’t have to make many leaps to see the parallels.

Is HR, as Labour was claimed to be last week, in a “terrible, terrible mess“?

You’d be forgiven for thinking so, particularly as some of the ‘only-just landed for many’ HR methodologies of the last decade (what we might call the cornerstones of ‘new labour/HR’ practice) have been sent down the river this autumn – namely, the Performance Appraisal at Accenture, and the Engagement Survey at KPMG.

Robert Bolton, Lead Partner of the HR Transformation Centre of Excellence at KPMG, makes some compelling points about the trouble with engagement surveys – and the trouble with HR in general, painting a picture of fad-grabbing trend setters who, as they keep changing the language of what they do, repeatedly defeat their message and, as a result, any sense of their meaning or worth (especially to those sat around the top table).

Peter Cheese, CEO of the CIPD, seemed equally as exasperated by the state of play for HR at this year’s Changeboard Future Talent Conference – stating how HR had to make its role clearer to the C-suite in order to be heard.

There are many others I could cite, lamenting the state and fate of HR in the contemporary workplace (but, in the interests of brevity, I won’t).

And you can’t really blame the C-suite, or anyone else in any organisation, for being a little uncertain as to the role of HR when HR itself is so often uncertain. Too often it’s too disparate – split as departments, with split, over-lapping responsibilities (and plenty of gaps to fall into or exploit), and comprised of split churches – the human, the data, the legal, the pipeline, the payroll, the performance, the brand, the culture; the need to pro-act, the need to respond.

It’s all a bit confusing – and leads many to ask “What does HR actually do?”

Unfair, yes. But, if you can’t get your story straight, you can’t really blame anyone for not understanding you.

The engagement survey (that, interestingly, came into being around the same time as the New Labour project in the early 90s) has been a recurrent ‘fad’ for many organisations over the last decade. Throughout the time I’ve worked with them with numerous organisations, I’ve always advised assessing them with extreme caution and have long questioned the effectiveness of engagement data on a number of levels.

My first caution is the most obvious one – the notion of truth itself.

Just how honest are people prepared to be? No matter how much the confidential nature may be stressed, we all know anything we complete online can be traced back to the computer or email account we access it from – there’s not even any point going to an Internet Cafe to complete it (if you can find one, this is).

So let’s say a proportion might be tempted to sugar-coat it. A proportion might also think, well, you asked, so I’m gonna let you have it.

Either way, a slightly skewed response.

Of course, either way, that also depends on the kinds of questions people are being asked in the first place. There are huge limits to how the questions are framed, and, most of the time, little nuance in how you can answer, resulting in broad brushstrokes that don’t allow you to focus in on any finer details. It’s very easy to manipulate the data that way – and, most of the time, people are looking to accentuate the positive (and sweep any alarming negatives away).

Big mistake. Huge.

For me, gloomy soul I might be, but, on analysing any engagement data, I want to (quickly) know all the happy stuff, but I also really want to know (and dwell on) what’s getting in the way of happy.

That’s where action has to come from, essentially.

Action is, of course, the biggest challenge to any engagement survey. It’s one thing doing one. Something else to report thoroughly and honestly on the findings; and a whole other ball game making the culturally or operationally-driven actions that will result in tangible change.

You’re not even through then. If you’re to do it well, you then need to do both the ‘You said, we did’ communications – and, even more importantly, the ‘You said, and this is why we didn’t’ comms too.

Even then, it’s only a part of the picture. It can’t be the everything. The only thing. And you can’t just measure engagement with people or purpose either – you have to have people engaged with task too. I agree with the premise in Agnes King’s article that performance drives engagement – loving what you do first is essential, then loving who you do it with; for so many people, the people they do it with are the ‘compensation’ for the task itself – and that’s not the way to a fulfilling working life.

It’s in the intersection, of engagement with people and purpose, of engagement with task, where you have highly engaged and productive people, understanding what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, who they’re doing it for – and understanding each other, enabling them to work well together.

You only get this from constant dialogue, in organisations that listen and act on a daily basis. You shouldn’t need a survey to tell you if people are engaged and productive – everyone, and anyone, should be able to feel it when they come into contact with you; see it in action between your people in how they work together.

I’ve been in organisations where it is tangible, where pride and purpose and the clear desire in every individual to be really great at what they do, to do it well and do it with good grace, is present everywhere. These places are rare – increasingly, depressingly, rarer.

We keep breaking things up rather than putting things together.

(We’re back to the Labour party.)

I would urge, though, to resist the temptation to throw out the engagement survey altogether (particularly if you haven’t got the resources or scale of a KPMG). For an SME, indeed, for any business, it can be a useful starting point, the opener, not the answer, to a conversation.

Having digested hundreds of them, I must say the free text is always very enlightening and people (okay, it might just be one or two vocal, brave or foolish souls) really don’t hold back (whether they think they’re traceable or not).

The more bespoke the survey the better would also be my advice, and to work very closely with your survey provider to define the right brief to help with what you’re really trying to diagnose. I’d also advise (well, I would do, wouldn’t I?) always following this with focus groups conducted by an outsider (someone like me even!) – who is used to interpreting the data and honing in on what needs further investigation – and can ask the difficult questions without anyone getting too uncomfortable.

It’s amazing. I’d say, almost universally, a universal picture always emerges – and, very often, the tangled tendrils of tension that get in the way of engagement and productivity are felt by all, seen by all, and therefore ripe for cutting away.

Engagement isn’t the answer to productivity – but it is the answer to how people feel about working for you – or the start of an answer at least. That’s valuable. That’s a measure of whether your equity as an employer brand is high or low.

To diagnose productivity, I think you have to balance this up with deep insight around people’s tasks and interactions, the most important being the one with the line manager (data tells us over and over, people join organisations and leave managers).

Good management is the key to happy, productive people. It is that simple. If HR banged that drum alone, and modelled it, they might convince the C-suite to find a new working rhythm that really could get the best out of people. That might put the human back in HR – and put everyone in a higher gear.

Just like Labour, if HR doesn’t get its act together, it risks having no voice at the table at all.

That would be a terrible thing.