By Jack Cumming
In my long life, I’ve had only one job where I had to punch a clock. I was a high school student and took a summer job in a screen-printing factory. We punched in and punched out. I lasted three weeks until I found something better … a job with purpose beyond hours.
My next encounter with a time clock came when I moved into senior living. The lower-level employees had to clock in and clock out. That surprised me. I would have thought that people working in a people-serving business like senior housing would have more agency to please the residents.
As I had learned years earlier while screen printing, people who work on a clock are clock watchers. They care more about doing time than they do about pride in doing a good job. I had not thought that a not-for-profit public benefit corporation would be that insensitive toward its employees.
The Nature of Caregiving
I can think of no more people-sensitive undertaking than the role of caregiver. Most caregivers in America are family members who care for a loved one part-time. They address needs. Family caregivers come to know their loved ones intimately. They know what their loved one’s critical care needs are, and they make sure those needs are met. The caregivers may even juggle responses to those needs with an outside job to help make ends meet.
Caregiving is very different for institutional paid caregivers. They are typically paid by the hour, and they are expected to clock in and clock out as a reminder that Big Daddy is watching. Caregivers who work for agencies have to be trusted to work unobserved alone in a home with only an elderly patient. Their sense of accomplishment comes from the amelioration they bring to hapless old people, not from the number of hours they clock.
How issues like clocking in and out, low wages, trust expectations, and more are handled contributes to employee reliability or apathy. Most CEOs and their boards look to HR, human resources, to maintain employee standards. Still, employees are people. They’re not resources like disposable gloves, monitors, or prepackaged meals.
Originally, the term “human resources” was used to alert executives and boards that employees were as much important business assets as any other aspect of the enterprise. Today, the term “resources” is unfortunate and detracts from the humanity of employees. A solid HR partnership begins with this understanding.
My Story
When I was in my mid-20s, Texaco was one of my clients. The CEO was Gus Long, who had an office in NYC’s Chrysler Building. Texaco is now part of Chevron. One thing I admired about Texaco was that they didn’t have a “Personnel Department” (this was in the days before “Human Resources” became common usage). Instead, they had a staff unit archaically called “Employe Relations.”
That simple semantic step put employees on the same level as customers, for whom there was “Customer Relations,” or investors, who were served by “Investor Relations.” In fact, the strange, old-fashioned spelling drew attention to the distinction. As I recall, employee relations were excellent, and Texaco was considered a generous employer.
HR Can Make the Difference
This story shows how readily a creative HR advisor can help an enterprise improve its people profile, whether the people involved are customers, residents, employees, or investors. Of course, you expect your HR operations to ensure compliance with laws, whether the laws are reasonable or not, and whether the laws protect employees or not.
This begins to illustrate how complicated HR can be. There’s a legal compliance aspect that may be beyond the know-how of the Legal Department. There’s a people aspect to which those organizing and managing workers need to be sensitive. Employees are watching you and may not voice to you what they’re thinking and experiencing.
Then, there’s the overall perception of how employees feel that the company treats them. As one employee who just left a key job with a major senior housing enterprise said to me, “I don’t feel needed here.” HR requires perceptive, creative expertise like that provided by an HR partner enterprise.
People Are the Keystone
Step back for a moment and think of what Employee, Customer, Resident, and Investor Relations have in common. Obviously, they all involve people. The key to financial and market success is to engage people. Satisfied people will celebrate your success. That does not mean keeping the best and discarding the rest, as some executives do when they keep high-occupancy communities and sell off the rest. It requires insight, sensitivity, and common sense.
When HR is truly People Relations in substance beyond merely a felicitous name, it becomes the beating human heart that powers the business. It’s not just about shareholder value, though that’s important. If you are clear-headed and put people first, shareholder value will take care of itself.
America’s best-known shareholder, Warren Buffett, maintains that central to leadership is integrity, which, he sagely suggests, is more important than intelligence, initiative, or talent. Success begins and ends with people, and HR ingenuity is central to that key ingredient. Let’s put the humans first and celebrate their humanity.
