Institutionally Posh

It’s satisfying when something you’ve been whanging on about for a while gets forthright backing. I’m talking about the report on elitism at top law, accountancy and financial firms, where disproportionate numbers of jobs go to applicants from the higher socio-economic classes. Here it is.

 

It certainly produced an initial burst of articles that got the point. HR Magazine, The Guardian, even The Daily Mail – although they did maintain editorial standards by somewhat missing the point and going for an angle about accents.

Here’s a few of the things that (in the Executive summary for England) the report talks about:

·         “… typically forty to fifty percent of applicants have been educated at a Russell Group university. These Russell Group applicants receive between sixty and seventy percent of all job offers. The high proportion of applicants from these universities is a direct result of elite firms’ recruitment and attraction strategies, which comprise a variety of campus visits and targeted advertising specifically devised with this aim in mind.”

·         “The educational and socioeconomic background of Russell Group students is not representative of the UK as a whole nor within higher education.”

·         “…candidates from favoured Russell Group universities have a significantly higher conversion rate from application to job offer compared to peers educated elsewhere.”

·         “Attraction strategies devised by elite firms therefore also play an important role, since elite firms offer students at these institutions coaching and advice sessions on the application and interview process.”

·         “…because some of the activities conducted during campus visits may reinforce elite firms’ image of exclusivity”

·         “[firms seek] the capacity to present a “polished” appearance, display strong communication and debating skills, and act in a confident manner at interview … Russell Group universities are successful in providing them with high numbers of talented candidates according to this definition.”

·         “… the current definition of talent may disadvantage talented students who have not benefited from similar educational advantages or been socialised in a middle-class context…”

·         “… that new entrants to elite firms who come from non-traditional class and/or ethnic backgrounds may feel relatively isolated but simultaneously more visible and therefore exposed as they start their career.”

Or, to summarise: These firms have a particular definition of talent. They set out to seek them, support them and design their selection processes to advantage them. But that definition of talent overlaps with the most privileged in society. If the Met Police were “institutionally racist”, then here’s a good argument that these firms are “institutionally posh”.

To an extent they acknowledge this, but they also acknowledge their problem:

·         “Many participants acknowledged that social inclusion could be improved should firms seek different ways to measure potential, which might also deliver new professionals with a wider range of skills and abilities. However, doing so is considered expensive, difficult and high risk”

·         “For many firms, making the significant changes to recruitment and selection processes which would genuinely open access is not then currently a commercial priority. Whilst efforts to improve social inclusion are often presented by firms in relation to the business case for talent, most of our participants considered that given high volumes of suitable applicants, this business case is not currently compelling”

Their entire business strategy relies on them recruiting large numbers of graduates every year: 1,200 for PWC and Deloitte. And those graduates must be business-ready. Commercially, that strategy works for them right now; if it didn’t, they’d have already changed. And when students at the most elite universities get asked where the best opportunities are – they believe it’s at these firms, and the cycle is maintained.

I’ve been involved in many research projects that advise all types of employers how to recruit graduates – often looking for greater diversity in graduates. This underlines that to open up to all parts of society, the changes and recommendations are going to have to be wider-ranging to have real impact. They’ll need to decide if they are genuinely serious about this, or are merely tinkering at the edges.

Better work, not more work

Your engagement strategy isn’t an engagement strategy. Or at least it shouldn’t be. I was reminded of that when reading the CIPD Employee Outlook Spring 2015. There’s some really good stuff in there, and some good insight into what people want from work.

But this stuck out for me. When measuring Employee Engagement, under “Going the extra mile” the two questions are:

• I will often take on more work to help relieve my colleagues’ workloads
• I will often work for more hours than those I am paid or contracted to do

I’ve got some concerns about those as markers of engagement.

It’s the same qualm that I share with this Engage for Success video. I really like E4S’s work, but just 40-odd seconds into this they’re talking about an engaged employee as “…the one that stays late when it really counts…”

That might be part of engagement, but it’s a small part. And there’s a risk too. Because if this idea...

...takes hold in your workforce, then any engagement strategy is sunk.

Now, for me, the solution to that is not talking about engagement. It isn’t an “engagement strategy”; it’s a “being-a-better-employer” strategy. But more than that, it’s about not taking a narrow view of the results of engagement. For me, an engaged employee is going to apply themselves more, but because they will enjoy and be satisfied by that greater application. That’s going to make for better work, not just more work.

Arguably, an office full of people staying late is a sign of disengagement. I mean, they don’t look very happy, do they? And maybe they need better support, and want a better work-life balance, And, just maybe, if they were a bit more engaged, they’d have got the work done in the working day. They’d have seen the issue more clearly, they’d have made fewer errors, they’d have brought more people with them.

If your people should have gone home for their tea, what does it really say?

Can you put a figure on engagement?

I don’t want to come over as a nay-sayer, fault-finder or nit-picker. But do you know what I don’t believe in? Comparing engagement between different companies

Look at these two surveys one from Gallup and this in conjunction with CIPD. The former has “not engaged” globally at 63% and “actively disengaged” at 24%; the latter “disengaged” in the UK at 3%. It’s perfectly evident that they’re measuring different things. And I think that’s because there isn’t a very reliable definition of engagement, and where the boundaries are to job satisfaction, motivation, advocacy etc etc and so on. So comparisons are bound to be hard. I also think that engagement in one company could well look quite different from engagement in the next - so it'll score differently.

And when Gallup further report that in the US the figure is 51% “not engaged”, what does this tell us? Is the US doing things much better than the rest of the world? Or are there so many cultural and environmental differences that comparison is hard? Or, again, are they measuring different things in different ways?

Credit where it’s due of course. And in the same research there’s a lot of extremely valuable insight. Read the CIPD one in particular. They cover a lot of people and they’re able to repeat the research year-on-year, deepening the insight.

And I like a survey as much as the next man. Probably more in fact. I really do like a survey. But I wonder whether it’s really possible to understand engagement through a simple survey. It’s a complex area. Even if you agree the constituent parts, how each person interprets the question (In my team or my department? Right now or ever? Does it have to happen continuously or just sometimes?) leaves a large margin of error.

But what I do think a survey can do is perform a really good triage: what’s good, what’s not so good, what’s a bit meh. Followed up with a deeper dive, then I believe you can build a really good picture of engagement in your company. You can create your own definition in fact. And then use surveys – frequently – to keep testing your solutions and programs. You just don’t need to waste energy keeping up with Jones Ltd.