Stop wasting your line managers’ time

It might seem like a really simple thing, but the conversations we have with line managers during our regular check-ins are an opportunity for us as HR professionals to either make an impact or simply reinforce the stereotypes that already exist about HR.

What do I mean by that?

I was always told I needed to have regular check-ins with the line managers I supported from an HR perspective, so that I was always in the loop about what was going on and what support they needed. But I never did know what was going on, because I always took an HR mindset and an HR agenda to those meetings.

It doesn't have to be as blatant as having a written agenda, although I'll be completely honest, I did do that sometimes. I would have headers such as "recruitment", "training needs", "updates on open vacancies", "ER issues", or I would suggest that we talk through the team one person at a time and discuss their performance, any development needed, that kind of thing.

It took me way too long to realise that this is essentially forcing a line manager into an HR conversation that they don't always want to have.

When I say they don't want to have it, please don't get me wrong - if they are a good line manager, of course they're going to care about resolving ER issues and the development of their team and making sure that their recruitment is up to speed. But not only could all of that be done on email, it doesn't need to be a meeting. Meetings like the ones I used to have leave them feeling that they are serving our agenda, completing a tick box exercise for HR. Because when you frame it like that, these are all just "HR issues" to a line manager.

It's not always easy for managers to connect the HR work we're asking them to do with the people challenges they're actually facing in their team. When something feels administrative, it's not obvious how completing it is going to fix the problem sitting in front of them. That's how the distance gets created between the intent or purpose of something like a performance review and the way it feels to managers and their teams.

How many times have you heard people in your organisation say that they have to complete their performance review to keep HR happy? There is a distance that has been created between the actual purpose of the performance review - to ensure that every employee in the organisation is receiving feedback, being productive, working to the best of their ability, meeting their goals, and being recognised for that — and what it has been reduced to: an administrative HR tick box exercise.

That has happened because we have, for so long, been the guardians and gatekeepers of performance reviews. We ask managers to send them all back to HR. That was certainly the case in every organisation I worked for, and we'd often have somebody in HR chasing them to make sure they got done.

I adopted a fairly radical approach to this in my more senior roles, which was simply: if they don't want to do them, that's on them. When I became a Global Head of HR, I stopped my team from chasing performance reviews because they're not ours.

I don't care. Well, of course I care that people are doing a good job and I care that they are receiving feedback about their work and performance. I don't care if I get a piece of paper back, and I don't care how it's completed, because all of that information is only ever used administratively to either grade people or be used for future redundancy selection.

The only benefit to having a performance review is if the employee goes away with constructive feedback and guidance on where they can improve or how they could do better, or if the manager goes away knowing they've been able to get across anything they're concerned about and anything they're genuinely pleased about. It's between the manager and the employee.

We can create guidance on how to have a good performance conversation. We can create a structure for those conversations if people really want it, but I'm very anti-forms and very anti HR owning that process, because again, it just becomes an HR process.

When we have these meetings with line managers and we're just talking about what they see as HR processes, it holds no value for them. It took someone actually saying to me "these meetings are a complete waste of my time, why do we have them?" for me to start thinking about what I was doing wrong.

I still talk to HR professionals constantly who get frustrated because managers don't turn up for their check-ins, or they cancel them at the last minute, or they just aren't interested when they're in the meeting. Someone recently told me they had a manager who just carried on typing and didn't even look up from their screen. Others just sit there and grunt or look at their phones.

If that isn't a clear sign that the person doesn't want to be in the meeting, I don't know what is. They don't want to be in the meeting because they cannot see how the conversation adds any value to them. It's just something taking them away from work that could actually be useful.

So what do we do about it?

We stop talking about HR. That's what we do about it. This is something I've spent a fair amount of time on, practised, got right and got wrong. When you flip your conversations and start just talking about what is going on in the manager's world, the difference it makes is remarkable.

This gets met with cynicism and the odd raised eyebrow when I suggest it. But I always insist people just try it. One question to start the conversation differently and see where it takes you.

The question I start any manager conversation with is simply: "How is everything going with you and your team right now?" or "How is business right now?" With a question like that, you're firmly putting the ball in their court to talk about what is going on for them.

Sometimes they seem a little surprised, especially the first time, and they often start reverting back to talking about HR issues. You can stop them and say, no, that's not what we're talking about today — I want to know what's going on for you. Someone recently tried this with a particularly difficult manager and said that after months of five minute catch-ups where he looked bored to tears and claimed he had nothing to talk about, she asked that question and he talked for forty-five minutes straight. She had to cancel her next meeting so they could carry on.

It really can make that much of a difference, even with the managers that feel impossible to reach.

If you want to be taken seriously as someone who contributes in a business sense rather than just going through box-ticking exercises, try that question in your next manager meeting. Then come back and tell me what happened — I'd genuinely love to hear how it goes.

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