Research,the application of ideas from the literature, problem solving and critical analysis (REPORT)

Human Resource Management International Digest Emerald Article: Interview with Richard Donkin, author of The Future of Work Interview by Gareth Bell

Article information:

To cite this document: Interview by Gareth Bell, (2012),"Interview with Richard Donkin, author of The Future of Work", Human Resource Management International Digest, Vol. 20 Iss: 3 pp. 38 - 41

Permanent link to this document: http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/09670731211224384

Downloaded on: 26-10-2012

To copy this document: [email protected]

Users who downloaded this Article also downloaded: *

Peter Reilly, (2012),"HR's future in a global setting", Human Resource Management International Digest, Vol. 20 Iss: 3 pp. 3 - 5 http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/09670731211224285

Guy Millar, (2012),"Employee engagement - a new paradigm", Human Resource Management International Digest, Vol. 20 Iss: 2 pp. 3 - 5 http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/09670731211208085

Jan Hills, (2012),"Neuroscience and talent: How neuroscience can increase successful execution of talent strategy", Human Resource Management International Digest, Vol. 20 Iss: 3 pp. 34 - 37 http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/09670731211224375

Access to this document was granted through an Emerald subscription provided by VICTORIA UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY

For Authors: If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service. Information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information.

About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.com With over forty years' experience, Emerald Group Publishing is a leading independent publisher of global research with impact in business, society, public policy and education. In total, Emerald publishes over 275 journals and more than 130 book series, as well as an extensive range of online products and services. Emerald is both COUNTER 3 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation.

*Related content and download information correct at time of download.

Interview with Richard Donkin, author of The Future of Work

Interview by Gareth Bell

R ichard Donkin is an award-winning author and columnist based in Woking, UK. He

wrote a popular column around the topic of work for the Financial Times from 1994 to

2008. His latest book, The Future of Work, won the inaugural Chartered Management

Institute’s management book of the year award in the digital books category (2011), and has

met critical acclaim both in the USA and the UK.

Richard was a panelist at the Guardian newspaper’s Future of HR Summit, London, in

December 2011, where he spoke insightfully about the ways in which the HR function must

adapt in order to keep pace with the ever-evolving world of work. In this interview he expands

on those issues, and some of the points raised in his book, The Future of Work.

Would you mind telling me a bit about your background, how you came to write The Future of Work, and your current pursuit of free agency?

For most of my career I was a full-time journalist, joining the Financial Times in 1987, working

initially on financial investigations before I joined the employment reporting team and began

to write the FT employment column. From the off I expanded it to include all aspects of work

from psychometrics to management. In 1994 when I took over the column HR was still more

readily identified as Personnel Management in the UK.

I became interested in concepts such as Portfolio Working (as described by Charles

Handy), tele-working and free agency but what really led me to pursue this lifestyle was my

first book, The History of Work (first published as Blood, Sweat and Tears: The Evolution of

Work). I thought that work was so central to the human condition that it demanded its own

history and I couldn’t find one anywhere. It seemed that the time was ripe to undertake such

a book since work seemed to be undergoing another great sea-change as significant as the

industrial revolution. I asked the editor of the FT if I could take a year of unpaid leave to

research and write the book and he agreed.

Researching and writing that book was probably the best year of my life, exploring the realities

of self-management. Some people assumed it would take a lot of discipline but good

organization was the key, breaking the book down in to a series of research and writing tasks.

I was asked to go back to the FT in to a new role creating an online start up business within

the company looking after recruitment. I was editor in charge of content and all things

editorial, creating something entirely new. The launch coincided with a downturn in the

fortunes of FT.com and a decision to close most of these small start-up ventures. I had the

option to return to editorial but instead negotiated a leaving package that included the

promise that I could continue writing my column on a freelance basis. So this is what I did

and I added presenting and column writing for other clients in to the portfolio.

I’d intended to write a book on the future of work but did not begin until I was approached by

Palgrave Macmillan who had seen the project mentioned on my website and said they were

PAGE 38 j HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT INTERNATIONAL DIGEST j VOL. 20 NO. 3 2012, pp. 38-41, Q Emerald Group Publishing Limited, ISSN 0967-0734 DOI 10.1108/09670731211224384

Richard Donkin

interested in publishing it. I shook hands on a deal, wondering how I would be able to fit it in

with my journalism. But the very next week I heard that my FT column was being scrapped as

a cost-saving exercise. This was a big blow to my regular income-earning but it did give me

space to pursue a book-writing career which had been my intention when I’d left in 2002.

The next big gamble was to write a novel and it’s one so far that has not paid off. Writing

fiction was a much tougher switch than I’d expected. But that first novel is finished and I’m

awaiting some feedback from a literary consultant. Now, only this week, I have started work

on a second novel. But I am also considering another book in the management sphere,

looking at the difficulties managements and companies are having embracing the full

implications of the digital age.

Earlier in this issue, Peter Reilly, Director of HR Research and Consultancy at IES, argues that HR departments across large companies need to be afforded the autonomy to adapt to their social, cultural and geographical environment, as opposed to a standardized set of ‘‘best practices’’. Do you agree with this? Or is there an argument for consistency of approach?

I not only agree, I think it’s vital for HR if it is not to be seen as a systemized discipline,

performing specific functions rather like a component of a vehicle. If this is the case,

employers might well ask why they simply don’t buy in their HR like an off-the-peg suit. The

commoditization of employment is happening everywhere and it follows, therefore, that there

can be commoditization of HR. Some employers seem to like that but you can’t expect a

company that treats its functions and people as commodities to be capable of differentiating

itself in the marketplace.

In your book, The Future of Work, you stress the significance of diversification – in terms of gender, ethnicity, age and geography – in shaping how businesses will operate in the future. What issues does this raise for HRM, and how can HR professionals adapt?

The challenge it raises for HR is to understand what diversity means. To date diversity tends

to be approached in a legalistic way, i.e. what must the organization do to comply with

discrimination legislation? There was a kind of pecking order in this approach – women,

ethnic minorities, gays, disabled people, older people, in roughly that order. This is still the

case although the best companies do at least try to reflect their customer base in their

diversity policies. But companies need to stand back from diversity and ask themselves:

why is this important? Why is it important to employ older people, young mothers, people

with all kinds of disabilities (including those with learning difficulties)? Once you do that you

begin to understand the company in a social sense rather than merely as a profit hub. This is

pretty radical because it’s asking the investment community to back away from the ‘‘war for

talent’’ dogma that describes business as an eternal struggle for dominance. But that is to

apply the wrong interpretation of Darwinian principles, defining ‘‘survival of the fittest’’ as

survival of the strongest. Darwin didn’t see it that way. He understood that diversity allowed

the survival of those that were most fitted to their environment. Companies should be seeking

to be the most fitted to their business environment and that’s why understanding diversity is

key. All of us live in a community and it’s important that we relate to the needs of that

community when doing business. You don’t do that by creating corporate clones.

There is much legislation, past, present, and proposed, that intends to be inclusionary – the abolition of the compulsory retirement age, ‘‘positive action’’ allowed under the Equality Act – encouraging workplace demography to be reflective of society. Do you see such policy as entirely positive? Is a more organic approach possible?

Legislation is usually introduced when a voluntary approach has been ignored. If castor oil is

good for you but you don’t want to take it, then someone has to come along, nip your nose

VOL. 20 NO. 3 2012 jHUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT INTERNATIONAL DIGESTj PAGE 39

and shove the spoon in. In those circumstances, the best companies will research the merits

of castor oil.

Nearly all these policies are more complex than they are framed. It’s no good telling

employers that they must employ more older people when those same employers have been

trying to rid themselves of older workers for one reason, and it has nothing to do with the work

ethic, and everything to do with expense. The final salary pension was a great deal when it

was funded by expanding workforces but it simply can’t work with a contracting workforce

so that needs to change. People need to get used to the idea that their pay may not go up if

they are in a job where younger people, just as able, are doing the same job for far less

money. Why should an employer keep on older heads who may have become a tad cynical

since they have seen it all before, when there are young thrusters keen to do everything? The

answer is to manage age like you manage everything else. If those older workers have seen

it all before, shouldn’t they be explaining that to managements who come up with a ‘‘new’’

old idea? Suggestions schemes for example, old hat, but they became fashionable a while

back, for a while. On the other hand maybe this process of renewal and decay is as it should

be.

What is important is that any policy or legislation comes at the problem with eyes wide open,

seeing it as everyone sees it rather than the idealists. Bags of maternity leave might seem a

great idea, but what about the young women of child-bearing age who are refused work in

small companies because the owner can’t afford to lose them for months on end. That’s

discrimination under the law, yes, and it happens all the time. The same happens with older

people – very hard to detect. Employers and legislators should put all their cards on the

table and thrash out the issues instead of pretending that some things don’t happen. And

those campaigning for equality should take a long hard look and explore the underlying

fairness of their campaign and the consequences of winning. Too often we see the

consequences framed in career terms – promotion and pay rather than life outcomes – is

this going to deliver happier lives for those involved? I know a lot of career women who

despair at the tensions between bringing up families and pursuing their careers. I know men

too who think they must work until they drop, providing for their families. Legislation and

policies must be designed to attack these damaging life-path distortions. People need to be

able to find the space to pursue fulfilling careers alongside the joys and demands of raising

families, so they need choices over part-time and freelance working. Some legislation has

provided important rights to ask for part-time work that employers must learn to deal with

because ultimately it will be good for them. Flexibility implies elasticity at both ends of the

chord.

In your book there is a sense that you feel working environments have become cluttered with empty ‘‘reward’’ schemes, and HR-introduced bureaucracy. Would you say that is a fair assessment? If so, how can HR departments modify their approach to the benefit of the workplace?

Yes to the first question. The answer to the second question is to be more imaginative. Sadly

if you’re looking for imagination in HR you’re paddling in the shallows. How can they change

that impression? They need to kick out some of the process. But how can they do that when

legislation demands their presence? One way is to keep the compliance stuff and kick out

the rest. Another is to change the way they work with their business-facing colleagues and

become business and results-focused too.

Here’s an example. Managers should have the discretion to hire the people they want to hire.

HR people should be there as consultants, ensuring that discrimination legislation is

complied with, but they should not be the centralised gatekeepers of recruitment. That

needs to be devolved. So HR should be there to keep managers honest, to ask tough

questions and sometimes, literally, to lay down the law.

Time and time again I’ve heard experienced managers say they have a desperate need for

someone, they know someone who has the right skills but they can’t hire them because

there’s a process and often a lengthy one at that. By the time the role is filled a great business

PAGE 40jHUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT INTERNATIONAL DIGESTj VOL. 20 NO. 3 2012

opportunity might have been lost. The manager should have the facility to call HR and say

‘‘I’m thinking of hiring so-and-so, is there any reason why not?’’ A good HR professional

would be out finding one or two more candidates fast to give that manager a choice. But it

doesn’t work like that because HR people don’t see themselves as head-hunters for the

good reason that most of them don’t have a clue about the talent needed and where to find it.

That needs to change if they are to win the respect of departmental managers. They need to

examine where they really add value to the business and where they might be

entrepreneurial – now that’s a word that HR people might learn to use and understand.

Finally they need to get rid of the appalling title – human resources. It is demeaning to the

people and colleagues who they serve. In 50 years from now people will be shocked that

companies ever used this dehumanizing term.

You were involved in the formation of the Human Capital Standards Group back in 2005. What were the significant findings from this, and how can HCM be incorporated into HR practice?

I’ve outlined the findings in the book. It’s important to understand that I never envisaged the

HCS Group as a research group. I wanted it to be a campaigning group. I don’t think that

suited everyone who came along to the meetings. The investment bodies got it but there

were a few people intent on finding proofs that measuring this produced that. I don’t think

this is the most important aspect of measurement. Measurement is about meaningful

comparison, hence a foot is roughly the length of someone’s foot. Anyone can understand

that. Even the metric system corresponds to very human understandings of measurement.

The Roman mile corresponded to 1,000 paces, each pace, two steps of a Roman soldier. To

have any power, measurements have to carry meaning and that has to be a common

meaning. So the most important thing about measurements in HR (or anywhere) is that they

are generic and that is why I was trying to muster support around standards. Unfortunately in

the measurement of engagement there were at least two strong vested interests among

consultants that prevented consensus. Finally the legislation around which the campaign

was rallying – the OFR in company reports – was pulled by Gordon Brown.

What projects are you currently working on?

I am writing an historical novel about an event in the North of England. I have just completed

a futuristic novel using some of the ideas I discussed in chapter 12 of The Future of Work. A

consulting editor is looking at the book just now and, depending on his recommendations, I

will then begin to seek an agent/publisher.

Keywords:

Human resources,

Human resource

management,

Diversity,

Employee engagement,

Legislation,

Human capital

management

VOL. 20 NO. 3 2012 jHUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT INTERNATIONAL DIGESTj PAGE 41

To purchase reprints of this article please e-mail: [email protected]

Or visit our web site for further details: www.emeraldinsight.com/reprints