MANAGERS ON MANAGEMENT:IN PRE-CELTIC Tiger Ireland, shop-floor cynics regularly summed up their employers' human resources strategies with the well-worn phrase: "Beatings will continue until morale improves." And they weren't always wrong.
The challenge then was to drag HR into the 20th century. The challenge for the past decade has been to find adequately trained staff and retain them.
The challenge now is to manage staff morale, redeployment and, sometimes, redundancies.
“My biggest fear in the current economic climate is that financial decisions may be taken in some companies without thinking at all about the ‘people’ implications,” says Joe Ungemah, managing consultant at SHL Ireland.
“There tends to be a lot of emotion swirling around as staff react to changes. And unless that emotion is approached and dealt with, it will be very difficult for those companies to adopt a positive business strategy for the future.”
Parsing emotion, in a sense, is what SHL is all about. It operates in 50 countries, providing occupational psychology advice on the selection, retention and development of staff.
Ungemah is a psychologist by training, currently completing his PhD. He also holds an MBA from Oxford.
“Because we’ve had such rapid and unprecedented growth, a lot of organisations never really found the time to tidy up their HR strategies, so to speak. Managers never asked themselves the basic questions: do we use our people to our – and their – best advantage? What are the key positions? Have we got clearly defined role profiles? Do staff understand where they can move within the organisation?
“What defines a poor HR strategy – in my opinion – is the absence of that underlying structure.
“So my key advice to managers is to use the economic downturn as a time to review all that and draw up a workable strategy. Because if they make fatal flaws now, they won’t come out of the downturn stronger – they may actually emerge weaker.”
Interestingly, Ungemah takes the view that, whereas in recent years the focus of HR has largely been on talent management in the upper echelons of organisations, circumstances are forcing that attitude to change.
“The squeeze is concentrating minds and making companies realise that there are many other positions which are creating value and generating revenue for the business – and I’m thinking here about sales people, in particular.
“Senior managers must realise that they need to keep staff with them through some very tough commercial decisions. Whether they are capable of doing that will decide whether redeployment, for example, will be a successful strategy or not.”
It’s also crucial, Ungemah advises, that managers don’t let their own anxiety about those tough decisions come across to staff.
“All this doom and gloom generates anxiety, so one of the biggest management challenges is to provide the kind of hope and direction that will keep people engaged.
“Because if those at the top do let their own concern show through, it will filter all the way down through the organisation.”
It is when a company is faced with redundancies that the internal credibility of the organisation and its managers is at stake.
“At that point, it goes back to the core values of the company, the core management values and the core values of HR, which should be fairness and justice,” he says.
“There has to be an objective and transparent process. There has to be a good and clear rationale as to why decisions are made.
“After that, managers have to make some tough choices – that’s part of their job as well.”
As to managers who take the attitude in a downturn that the staff who remain are of no account because they have nowhere else to go, Ungemah is scathing.
“Ask yourself what will happen when the economy picks up. Your staff will up and leave. People have long memories.
Next Week: Dr Eddie O’Connor, founder and CEO of Mainstream Renewable Power, on the role of the CEO as multi-faceted delivery boy.
Name:Joe Ungemah
Company:SHL Ireland
www.shl.com
Job:Managing consultant
Management advice:Avoid compounding economic difficulties with a poor HR strategy.
