Every mattress I’ve owned has arrived with a small white tag stitched into one seam, warning in capital letters that it must not be removed under penalty of law. For years I left those tags alone, as did nearly everyone I know, because the wording carried enough menace to discourage any further inquiry. Only much later did I learn that the warning was aimed at manufacturers and retailers, and that I, the person who had paid for the mattress and slept on it every night, was free to snip the thing off whenever I liked.
The phrase “best practice” works on HR people in much the same way. It sounds official, it discourages follow-up questions, and very few of us could tell you who decided it or whom it was meant to govern. So when someone asks me which HR best practice I think is nonsense (and someone always does), I find I can’t answer without first taking issue with the premise.
A Conduit to Conformity
In Real HR I wrote that best practices are a conduit to conformity, and I haven’t changed my mind. At their most useful, they’re a starting point for thinking, but far more often they become a way for HR to borrow someone else’s answer without doing the work of understanding our own question. A practice that works beautifully at a 40,000-person manufacturer was built around that company’s history, its workforce, and its particular dysfunctions, so when we lift it wholesale and drop it into a 200-person software firm, we shouldn’t be surprised when it lands with a thud.
Part of the problem is that HR has been conditioned to reach for the template. Understandably so, since we’re asked to move fast, do more with less, and avoid risk at every turn — and a downloadable or borrowed-from-a-friend best practice promises all three at once. But replication isn’t strategy, and what we frequently end up copying is the homework of a classmate who also got a C, since many of the organizations whose practices we borrow aren’t executing them particularly well themselves.
I’d much rather HR professionals think of themselves as artists working with the materials in front of them than as lab technicians faithfully replicating someone else’s experiment. Nothing at all against lab techs — I used to hire them — but those are very different jobs.
Still, for purposes of this blog post, I’ll play along and pick a few of the most ridiculous best practices, provided you keep the premise at arm’s length while I do.
Longevity Masquerading as Evidence
The annual performance review earned its best-practice status largely through longevity. We keep doing it because everyone else keeps doing it, and everyone else keeps doing it because we do. When Deloitte tallied the cost of its own process roughly a decade ago, the firm found it was spending close to two million hours a year on forms, meetings, and ratings, and it redesigned the whole thing from the ground up.
The more instructive part of the story is what happened next. Deloitte’s shift, along with Adobe’s earlier decision to abandon annual ratings, was promptly written up, packaged, and circulated as the new best practice, to be adopted by organizations whose problems bore little resemblance to either company’s.
In the years since, and in true HR fashion, we’ve managed to turn a rejection of conformity into a fresh opportunity to conform, except that we now do it through quarterly check-ins and an annual sync-up conducted from our phones.
A Peculiar Welcome
The 90-day introductory period is another best practice that’s treated as sacred in employee handbooks across the country, even though in an at-will environment it offers little in the way of legal cover and, if it’s worded carelessly, can imply that anyone who survives the first three months has earned a form of job security the organization never intended to promise. Mostly, though, it signals to new hires that they’re on some sort of provisional trial, which strikes me as an odd and faintly unwelcoming way to greet people we’ve spent months (and a fair amount of money) persuading to join us.
Naturally, the evaluation of a new hire happens whether there’s a policy or not, and as most of us have learned, the ones we should keep an eye on rarely wait for day 89 to reveal themselves.
Doors and Hallways
Then we have the open-door policy, which declares that any employee may walk into any leader’s office at any time to raise a concern. We adopt it because we like to think we’re transparent (we often aren’t) and that our leaders are friendly and approachable (they often aren’t). It also reads well in the handbook even though it bears little resemblance to calendars booked solid for weeks, or to the career consequences that everyone understands come with going over your manager’s head.
As I noted a few weeks back when writing about workplace nostalgia, the person most fond of the open door is very often the one sitting behind it, at the far end of a vestibule guarded by an executive assistant, with the door itself closed more often than not. And anyone who has spent time working in an organization knows that even if the door is open, the hallway leading to it is often a minefield.
Feelings, Annually
And finally, the much-dreaded annual engagement survey, in which we ask people how they feel once a year, spend three months analyzing the results, and then roll out an action plan to a workforce whose feelings have long since moved on to something else. The survey itself isn’t the trouble so much as the cadence, which treats employee sentiment as though it were a fiscal-year metric rather than something that shifts every time a manager leaves, a reorg lands, or the parking lot gets repaved.
Leaving the Tag On
I’ll grant that not every inherited practice is decorative. As I wrote recently about the rules nobody remembers writing, some of them exist for sound reasons that simply went unrecorded, and telling the structural from the ornamental takes more effort than we usually budget for.
But I suspect the deeper appeal of a best practice has less to do with its results than with the protection it provides. A borrowed practice comes with built-in cover — if it fails, we can point out that we did what everyone else does — whereas a practice we designed ourselves fails with our name attached. That’s a considerable comfort, and it may explain why so many of us leave the tag stitched in place long after learning we’re free to remove it. What I can’t quite work out is whether we’d make better decisions with the tag cut off, or simply more visible ones.
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I was thinking about best practices last night because the topic was front and center on Q Chat yesterday. Come join us one of these weeks!
