With Demos on social mobility

 

   This blog tends to deal with organisational social collaboration, and within this agenda, its main focus is often on social technologies.  That’s not actually my intent –I do want to focus more broadly on other aspects of being social in organisations eg social responsibility outside these organisations, as I do believe these issues all inter-relate, or at least require a similar perspective. 

Well yesterday morning I attended a roundtable on social mobility with political think tank, Demos.  With a few HRDs, journalists, researchers and parliamentary special advisors there, we had what I thought was a good discussion about this issue, a couple of points from which I summarise below:

• The concern is over relative social mobility (ensuring the low-skilled / paid can progress upwards – as well as the high skilled / paid downwards) rather than absolute mobility (increasing the standards of living for everyone).  [And people talk about HR-speak!  Unless I’m missing something, I interpret this as concern for social mobility over what you get at the bottom of society if there isn’t any mobility.]
• The government is struggling with challenges relating the open vs the big society (from an open society perspective, the big society’s focus on informal social networks is one of the main problems in society).
• Some organisations invest in supporting social mobility (apprentice programmes, paid interns, work experience programmes etc) for philanthropic reasons, some because they think there is a business case – even if it sounds to everyone else as if they’re just doing it because they think it’s the right thing to do.  Most don’t do very much at all.
• Individuals with ‘low social mobility’ ie crap jobs need to raise their aspirations – neither the government nor employing organisations can do this for them.

 

I didn’t get a chance to add to the debate yesterday, but the points I would have made are:

• There isn’t a solid enough business case to invest in social mobility at the moment, particularly when many of them are just trying to stay in business.  I agree that talent management professionals should have a longer-term focus but I don’t think this is the right time to ask.
• Having said that, there are some signs that focus in areas like social responsibility in increasing, and the government should obviously push the door when there’s an opportunity of it opening.  Organisations can sign up for the government’s social mobility contact here.  The most impactful thing I think organisations could do however, would be to start giving better feedback to job seekers, particularly those who have just left school or university, or are from disadvantaged backgrounds etc.
• But what’s really needed, I think, is for organisations to change the way they work, and be smarter in what they do - and doing this, might well provide a business case. One thing that would help would be switch in focus from always recruiting the best people to recruiting the most cost effective, eg someone from a lower status university who might not be quite as good (though there did seem to be fairly broad support at the roundtable is that what differentiates the high status Russell Group universities from the rest is the attendance of confident if incapable ‘Dim Tim’s).  But because there’s less competition for theses less attractive individuals they can be picked up without paying anything like so much (a bit like John Boudreau’s arguments for focusing on pivotal talent management perhaps).
• As another example, one of the speakers talked about PwC moving from recruiting graduates to school leavers.  Well I did this 15 years ago at Ernst & Young.  But the reason that we developed our Accounting Technician stream wasn’t about a philanthropic concern or even a business case for social mobility, it was because we’d redesigned the organisation and realised that not everything done by an auditor needed a chartered accountancy qualification.  So when Demos ask ‘how cna the government up-skill HR professionals to implement more effective social mobility strategies in the workplace’, I have to say 1, that they can’t, and 2, that it’s the wrong question anyway.  HR, and other business leaders, just need to be smarter at building their organisations differently (ie better).  If they did this, then work wouldn’t be so hour glass (or even squeezed toothpaste tube shaped.
• I’d also like to see organisations loosing some of their focus on individual talent management and putting a bit more effort into building collaborative organisations (ah, back to that again!).  I think social mobility, and just generally better performance, would be a natural consequence of this sort of shift as well. 

 

Picture credit: accent on eclectic

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MLab Management 2.0 conference

 

 

I've posted previously on management 2.0 and this week had an opportunity to attend a Management Innovation Lab event on the subject.

The video shows LBS Professor Julian Birkinshaw opening the event, and I'll be posting on some of the other sessions shortly.  It was a great event, so I've got a lot to reflect and then post upon.

My only criticism would be that the conference was delivered in a very 1.0 way, but then I suppose that suited the audience.  Even though these 200 people were there to learn about management 2.0 (which as Julian describes, is emerging as a result of changing workforce expectations, supported by Gen Y, and changing technological capabilities, ie web 2.0), only one other person other than me was tweating on the event.

 

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Unjust Rewards

 

Good session at the RSA last night looking at greed and inequality in Britain today.

The session was opened by Polly Toynbee, author of a long-term favourite text of mine, Hard Work: Life in Low-Pay Britain, and who has just co-authored Unjust Rewards with David Walker.

Among the various facts that Toynbee presented were that although half of earners earn under £23k, only 10% earn over £45k.  But these people still don't feel rich.

The reason seems to be the gap between most of these people and those at the very top, those who Avner Offer, author of The Challenge of Affluence, called the Masters of the Universe, and Will Hutton, author of The State We're In called the Have Yachts, or even the Have Lots of Yachts (in contrast to the Have's and the Have Not's).

And whilst the incomes of the people at the bottom are falling, the incomes of those at the very top are the ones that are growing most.

Remuneration committees have let FTSE CEO salaries spin out of control, and in fact, according to Patterson Associates, with the exception of LTIPs, CEO rewards don't even relate to the performance of their businesses.

Private equity boss, Jon Moulton argued that the high pay of CEOs doesn't matter as much as whether these packages are appropriate and useful: "We put ourselves at some peril if we attack the ludicrous amounts of money they are making.  It's not about justice, it's about about self-interest."

But Toynbee's argument is that this level of inequality is not just unfair and immoral but also dysfunctional.

Whether are not we are living in a broken society, there's an increasing dissonance between what people being told about the country's wealth and how they're feeling about their lives.  For example, fear of crime is increasing although actual crime levels are falling fast.

This has a serious impact.  Inequality has a serious impact on health and well-being as well as social cohesion and mobility.

And Hutton thought the fact that most Have Yachts aren't engaged in philanthropy, and don't understand how most people live, means that they have declared independence from the rest of us.  This breaks a fundamental principle of human association which is proportionality.

Have Yachts are being paid for beta, not alpha performance.  For being in the right place at the right time.

As David Willetts, MP, concluded, meritocracy is like tennis: "Just something the middle classes play with each other", but which isn't really available to the wider population.

But, in Toynbee's words: "It doesn't have to be this way.  We can shrug off our economic fatalism.  The way we choose to live is in our hands and we could do better."

One part of the solution is a more distributive tax system, but as Hutton commented, "it's a system wide issue" and I can't see how Toynbee's "mutual obligation to well being" will be created without some deeper changes in the way we think and act.

This then takes us back to the theme of earlier RSA event which concerned the need to change the way we think about ourselves.

In fact there have been quite a few good events at the RSA recently and the organisation seems to be really buzzing, although I'm a bit worried that another private equity boss and HR critic Luke Johnson will the society's next chair.

I wonder what he's been doing to reduce the CE / staff pay differential at Channel 4?

 

Please note, that with the exception of that last cheap shot, these notes attempt to summarise what was discussed in the event, rather than providing my own opinions on the justness of rewards.  Maybe it's just because I recently worked for a large, global reward consultancy where we deliberately avoided any discussion on fat cats et al, but I feel slightly uncomfortable discussing my personal views on these issues, so for example I deliberately refrained from posting on the arguments over non-doms earlier this year.

But given my allegiance to the RSA and the fact that I decided to post on this event, you can probably guess where I'm coming from!

 

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