Pop goes HR #2
Pharrell's happy tune about engagement best practice
Last month we wrote a silly article about the relationship between Taylor Swift and strengths-based theory.
Our tongue was so firmly plugged in our cheek we were practically asphyxiating ourselves. But the readership figures were high, so we feel commercially obliged to develop the absurd notion into a series.
Thankfully, the denizens of popland are queuing up to out-Ulrich Ulrich when it comes to lyricising HR.
Instance: you only need to listen to the chorus of Pharrell Williams’ Happy to realise that rather than being a wafer-thin toe-tapper, it’s actually an astute mirroring of all the latest notions in engagement.
If you don’t know the song, you can remind yourself of it by watching the video below. Although if you really don’t know it, the likelihood is that you’ve been shut up in the backroom of a university studying the efficacy of noise-cancelling headphones for the last four years, so are probably on the wrong site anyway.
The lyrics to that catchy chorus are:
Because I’m happy
Clap along if you feel like a room without a roof
Because I’m happy
Clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth
Because I’m happy
Clap along if you know what happiness is to you
Because I’m happy
Clap along if you feel like that’s what you wanna do
So we’ll briskly take this apart and peer at its innards. To begin with, one is apparently happy if one feels like a room without a roof.
This is a wildly senseless simile unless, of course, you understand the huge importance that training and development has on engagement.
A room without a (glass?) roof is a place in which vertical progression isn’t just possible – it’s practically expected. Bestselling US author Kevin Sheridan puts it this way:
Career development opportunities are an essential part of employee engagement. In fact, key driver analyses consistently show that career development is the second most impactful way of increasing employee engagement, after recognition.
Yep – Pharrell and Sheridan must have been talking. But what on earth is Pharrell talking about when he says happiness is the truth?
Well, knock us down with a rolled-up copy of Personnel Today if he isn’t talking about how truth-talking has a fundamental bearing on whether employees trust their organisations.
As Dale Carnegie Training’s Mahan Tavakoli wrote only this year, ‘a supervisor who communicates openly and honestly with employees is more likely to have an engaged and productive team,’ and if that’s what Mahan thinks then it’s good enough for us.
Second-to-lastly, we hear Clap along if you know what happiness means to you. Well, you wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t recognise that as one of the immoveable pillars of engagement: developing a line of sight between the individual’s actions and the ultimate organisational purpose is critical for any engagement project looking to get airborne.
Finally, there’s clap along if you feel like that’s what you wanna do. Here, we’re doubtless talking about whether the individual wants to become engaged: that is, whether the opportunity is consistent with personal values and whether or not the actual job satisfies or can be crafted in accordance with personal preferences.
Yes, that’s some dense reading right there. But that’s what you get when you enter the overlap in the Venn diagram of HR and poetry, eh kids?
Pharrell is, fascinatingly, delivering the keynote at this year’s CIPD conference in Manchester, entitled How Hellacious Hip Hop Helps HR.
That’s a bit weird because it’s the same night Peter Cheese is unveiled at Madison Square Garden as the new front man of N*E*R*D.
Next time, we focus on Michael Jackson’s Beat It as a harbinger of best practice in outplacement. See you then, pop-pickers.
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