Partner Article

The Problem with HR

It’s HR focus week at Bdaily. Here, CEO Lawrence Jones explains why conventional HR practices have been shunned at his internet hosting firm UKFast.

As with many things, a “one size fits all” approach is unlikely to yield the best results and, when it comes to HR, I think more and more companies are realising this.

There’s not a magic formula for business success – only guidelines – and it’s up to each company to decide what works for them. It starts with identifying your core values. Which attributes are most important to you?

These values will form your company’s culture; the backbone of the business.

This is where traditional HR methods fall short. At UKFast, we value people who are dynamic, innovative, passionate, professional and supportive, and we recruit on this rather than skillset or academic credentials! We keep recruitment in house with our Dreams Team who use a range of methods, including psychometric testing to ensure a cultural match.

We also take new starters down to our outward bounds centre in Wales to climb Mount Snowdon. It seems extreme but it’s only when you take people out of their comfort zones and out of the workplace that you get to understand who they really are, how they work with others and what makes them tick.

Conventional hierarchical management structures can do more harm than good for some companies, too, especially if you have recruited people who enjoy innovating and want to take responsibility for their work. Micromanagement simply wouldn’t work at UKFast so we give every employee responsibility over their part of the business and empower them to make decisions.

Employees work in ‘pods’ and there are never more than six people on each one. This way, the manager can spread their attention evenly across the team so everyone feels looked after and supported. The type of people who achieve management roles have, what we refer to as, a “supportive gene.”

People need hugs, not HR. Criticism demotivates people. At UKFast, when someone makes a mistake, we know that they are the type of person who can identify and correct it without a management style one-to-one. How do we know this? Because we hired them based on our core values.

HR is nearly always a policing role and I think that if you’re running your company well, you don’t need it. Our personal development manager is also a personal trainer, which works for us because sport is part of our culture. It makes sense that he is responsible for not only health and wellbeing (helping people to set personal and fitness goals) but also professional and career development. The two are strongly linked and it really works for us.

There’s something just a little regimented; a little bit beaurocratic about conventional HR that doesn’t fit at UKFast, and probably many other creative companies. We don’t use the term HR at UKFast because we only recruit superstars, and they’re people, not resources.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Lawrence Jones .