RH Chairs

27 July, 2010

There’s an old saying from Peter Drucker, the guru of management gurus, that what gets measured gets managed. It is an eternal management truism that helps to explain a great deal about the way we live and work. It is also an essential filter for us when we come to look at specific management issues, helping us to understand that the measurement of certain things at the expense of others can distort the way professionals see their world.

For example a 2009 report from Talent Q showed that over 80 per cent of human resources departments do not measure the return on investment of their practices, although all routinely measure absenteeism. What this means in practice is that the focus of human resources teams naturally sways towards reducing absenteeism rather than improving performance.

Both are important of course but one reflects an essentially negative mindset characterised by the idea that ‘we need to reduce the harm that the workplace can do to people’ and the other by the significantly more positive idea that ‘we need to ensure that people can perform to the best of their ability and enjoy what they do’.

The same distinctions are evident in health and safety thinking. When it was established in 1977, the then Health and Safety Commission’s report stated that its ‘overriding concern is to stimulate awareness of risks and encourage the joint participation of workers and management in efforts to eliminate them.’ Its thinking over the thirty odd years since may have grown in sophistication, but at heart it is still based on minimizing risk, rather than promoting wellbeing.

This is a missed opportunity because we now have the information and the examples we need to take this whole debate to the next level. We understand how the workplace and its culture can be used to not only reduce risk and absenteeism but also to make people happier, healthier and more productive. The difficulty is how to measure these notoriously intransigent factors so that we can begin to manage them more effectively.

It is here I believe that facilities managers have a role to play as part of a broad based approach that involves managers from a number of disciplines. It is an idea worth pursuing because although absenteeism can be a serious issue for many organisations, it is in my view less important from a business perspective than helping people to enjoy their work more and perform better.

For more information about RH Chairs go to www.rhchairs.co.uk