Uncommon sense: The steady hand on the helm is HR's

I have always admired those who study for a profession. Formal qualifications are not compulsory in journalism but there is a useful study programme for a proficiency test run by the National Council for the Training of Journalists.

It's a long time since I took that but the memories came flooding back recently when I enrolled on a nine-day course to obtain a yacht skippering qualification. I thought it would be a breeze but the navigational work involved some tricky mathematics and we had to sit an exam on the theory. I am not an advocate of formal examination in continuing professional development (CPD) but there is no doubt raising the stakes is effective in concentrating the mind. I worked on into the evenings just to scrape a pass.

Five days were spent at sea in stormy conditions. One of the most impressive students in the theory class was a company director. But at the helm in heavy seas he went to pieces, issuing unnecessary orders, worrying about minutiae and panicking in conditions that required a calm head.

"I'd never sailed in those conditions," he confessed afterwards. I wonder how many company heads and managers are having a similar experience in a recession, the depth of which they have never encountered previously.

Some HR directors may be equally new to recession but I'd like to think they are capable of steadying the ship by looking to the long term. They cannot expect their colleagues in finance and operations to have their eyes on anything other than the next set of sales figures.

Moreover, it is the HR policies adopted today that will determine the readiness of a business to bounce back when the bad times are over. The first thing HR must do is to hold on to the good things in the face of pressure from finance directors to pare everything to the bone.

It might be difficult to defend an annual staff satisfaction questionnaire but this is the sort of survey that can deliver rich information about management standards and employee engagement.

It might be equally difficult to resist demands for a recruitment freeze, but the search for new talent must remain a constant and that includes the recruitment of graduates and young people entering work for the first time. Employers must retain a diversity of age to ensure they will have people capable of filling future management and specialist roles. Cutting out an age cohort in a knee-jerk graduate hiring freeze is storing up problems for the future.

But HR can make economies. The first places to look are those one-off training days designed to inspire creativity. Does a team that spends an afternoon playing percussion instruments return full of gusto for the task ahead? Training is important but it should be focused on the practical needs of the workplace. In the past I have been attracted to sail training as a way of encouraging good team skills. I still think the teamwork involved in sailing a yacht is difficult to match in the workplace. But it doesn't easily replicate to the kind of work that is encountered in an office.

The mechanics of sailing a crewed yacht are more akin to those of military drill where the more you practise the better you get. But yacht skippering calls for a different set of skills.

In business, HR professionals need to be good navigators, testing the weather, understanding the potential hazards that can wreck the best laid plans and ensuring people are doing the jobs where they are needed most. One tip I was given was to get the best people in the most crucial roles.

When it came to my turn as skipper, the company director had lost the confidence of fellow crew members so he didn't get near the helm. The sea is a great leveller and we all learned a lot, not least how much more there is to learn. On reflection that wasn't a bad lesson for business.

- Richard Donkin is author of 'Blood, Sweat and Tears' and 'The Evolution of Work'. richard.donkin@haymarket.com.