It is a Friday morning and all week I struggled on how to advise a client who’s in a delicate position like all of us are at some point in time. He is my main point of contact with a company client and is occupying the role of HR Director. We met almost 10 years ago and worked together on different projects for a long time while he was in different companies, so we developed a personal-professional relationship. We often change opinions, share knowledge or simply discuss the state of the world or simply the business we are into. We previously worked together in his current company on delivering some workshops and recently he came to me with a new project, to support them to update and optimize some people processes, among them the Recruiting, Onboarding, and Termination and to document all in related procedures.
The experience so far was very good and the work was productive, we met the main stakeholders and people involved in managing these processes, mapped the “To be” desired state, came up with solutions for the bottlenecks in the processes, and reached the point to draft out the procedures. The previous versions of the documents weren’t exactly policies but mostly graphic visualizations of the processes and some sort of templates they were using, so this would be the first time when they actually have a document describing everything, with annexed templates, forms, checklists, additional useful documents, implementation guidelines, presentations and so on.
As I delivered the first draft of these procedures, my client calls me and asks me apologetically to please make the procedures in Excel. I had annexes in Excel, but the main documents were written on good-old-Word, soon to become final version .pdf, so I asked why? “Our CEO asks all our procedures to be in Excel. I know it is uncommon and inefficient and not practical, but please, can you do it?” What was I to answer?
I invited my longtime client and dear professional friend to meet me for a coffee, partly for giving him the opportunity to share his thoughts on the matter at hand, partly because I wanted to understand where does this unusual request come from and 1. see if I can change it and 2. learn how to find a way to accept it. So, we met.
Little did I know that what he allowed me to see was a very small part of his struggle. The “procedures written and delivered in excel” were just a very small part of the issues he had to deal with in his current professional journey. During the entire discussion, I couldn’t not feel his wish to talk more, to open up, to share all those small issues that apparently you can get through, but once they pile up, you feel swamped.
While I felt the discussion came to an end, although we kept it strictly professional, I had to add to my friend “If you don’t like where you are professionally and what you do, move! you are not a tree!” I did not expect his answer to be “I can’t!”
So we kept on talking, it seems he chose this job coming from a period of struggles with a close member of the family, with difficult health issues that drained the entire family of all the savings, so money at this point was extremely important. I understood then that at some point we are all trees, sometimes we can not move, sometimes we’re just stuck and in the position to ask our vendors to deliver our procedures in excel.
