Hal's Corner
Serving in the Gray Areas
I once consulted with a university with significant service issues. During the review a senior university official informed me, “We used to send out a customer service survey, but we didn’t like what people were telling us so we stopped.”
After taking a moment to recover, I asked what types of comments he had received. “Mostly negative. People told us all we ever did was enforce policies. That’s why we stopped sending out the survey. It’s our job to make sure the rules are followed.”
It concerns me that managers at many government agencies view their jobs in this same fashion – their only job is to make and enforce policy. The employees who work for these managers are told to check their brains at the door when they come in each morning, only expected to insure transactions fall within accepted guidelines. Compliance, not customer service, is the overarching goal.
We fight that view in human resources. When telling a new acquaintance I work in human resources, the person on the receiving end of this information often shuffles off quickly – as if human resources is an illness which might be catching. Or worse yet, I might be from the HR police looking to bust someone for a minor policy infraction.
Are we the policy enforcer or are we a customer service organization? To be of strategic value to the institution, we must be both. To excel in our jobs in human resources, we must learn to operate in the gray areas – where policy informs us but our creativity, professionalism, and caring allow us to develop workable solutions for our employees and departments.
We are in the people business and no policy book ever written could possibly conceive the complex issues we face with you on a regular basis. Customer service is more solutions oriented – a commitment to organizational excellence which requires us to listen to our customers and engage our minds in working out tough issues.
But that is only half the job…Awash in state and federal guidelines, we must protect the university by taking a compliance approach at times. Organizational scholar Henry Mintzberg describes our role as “professional administrators”, serving key roles at the boundary of the organization to keep the institution out of trouble. Keeping the routine truly routine is a critical part of our job.
We are interested in how you think we are performing our job in human resources. A random number of you will receive a customer service survey inviting you to express your opinion about human resources. The only way we will get better is to know what you think about us.
We have to operate at different levels - from the routine and transactional to the creative and strategic. We look forward to hearing from you and delivering increasingly higher levels of service. And if we don’t like what we hear, we promise we won’t stop asking! We will take what we learn and work to get better.
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About Hal Irvin
Hal Irvin has been Virginia Tech's associate vice president for human resources since March 2008.
Before coming to Virginia Tech, Hal worked for 14 years at Georgia Tech. In his last assignment, he served as executive director of organizational development – reporting to the executive vice president for administration and finance and was responsible for employee learning, change management, and internal consulting services. He played a central role in Georgia Tech’s successful efforts to improve administrative services and transform its service culture.