How To Amplify The Effectiveness Of HR With An Organizational Ombuds

Forbes

6 days ago

Chuck Doran is an organizational ombuds and the executive director of MWI, a dispute resolution firm he founded in 1994.
For more than two decades, my work has focused on providing companies and universities with the unique benefits of an organizational ombuds. One common fear prevents some organizations from fully realizing these benefits: Will the ombuds undermine or replace formal channels like Human Resources, Legal, or Compliance? The answer is no. An organizational ombuds provides unique value as an informal channel, which supports the important work of an organization's formal channels.
Organizational ombuds amplify the effectiveness of formal channels by working together to help improve employee satisfaction, mitigate risk, promote transparency, and advance the organization's efficiency and effectiveness.
What is an organizational ombuds?
An organizational ombuds provides an independent, impartial, informal, and confidential space for employees to raise issues and gather options to address work-related concerns. Based on an employee's situation, the ombuds may provide a range of services, including assistance with navigating workplace benefits and policies, coaching employees to communicate their concerns, helping them to brainstorm options and strategies to overcome problems, and facilitating difficult or complex discussions. Organizational ombuds also provide leadership with anonymized feedback to identify systemic issues and opportunities for improvement.
How do organizational ombuds differ from formal channels?
There are a variety of formal channels that an organization may utilize to support its employees, each of which provides unique value. This includes departments tasked with managing employees' relationships with the organization and each other, including Human Resources, People, and Employee Relations. Other formal channels include departments that oversee employees' alignment with legal requirements or ethical expectations, including Compliance, Legal, and Ethics.
Formal channels act as agents of the organization, which requires them to protect the organization and take specific actions based on the information shared with them, such as launching a formal investigation or implementing corrective measures. In contrast, a properly chartered organizational ombuds resource provides employees with an informal channel to address their concerns, meaning that discussions with an organizational ombuds remain off the record and will not trigger formal procedures.
What unique value do organizational ombuds provide?
An ombuds can be a useful and necessary bridge between employee concerns and formal channels. However, the idea of a resource that invites employees to confidentially and informally share concerns can feel worrisome to an organization. Nonetheless, an organizational ombuds office's informality and confidentiality are the very same features that provide their unique value to employees and organizations by surfacing issues that may otherwise remain unspoken and unresolved.
Employees turn to an organizational ombuds when they feel stuck, uncertain, or unsafe when using formal channels. This is typically not the fault of any formal channel; rather, distrust is a common reaction employees have when they are in a tough spot. The employee may fear harm to their reputation or fear outright retaliation for raising concerns about a supervisor, colleague or leader through a formal channel.
Moreover, they may want to avoid subjecting anyone to corrective actions that they deem overly harsh. My colleague, Chuck Howard, former Executive Director of the International Ombuds Association, dubbed this 'the blue uniform problem' in his book, "A Practical Guide to Organizational Ombuds: How They Help People and Organizations." People generally have an aversion to 'tattling' on others and fear repercussions if they do. They avoid raising concerns to those in a position to take corrective action or implement formal punishments or reprimands. This leaves employees with a tough choice. Do they launch a formal process that could spin out of control, or keep their concerns to themselves?
Organizational ombuds offer employees another way to proceed. The informal nature of the organizational ombuds creates a safe, zero-barrier space for employees to brainstorm ways to balance their desire for resolution with their fears about speaking up. Organizational ombuds answer employees' questions, address their fears, help develop options to surface issues that may not reveal their identity, and support them as they navigate formal channels. This makes it more likely that an employee will utilize formal channels, since an ombuds can equip them with higher levels of knowledge, confidence and trust.
How can an organizational ombuds partner with formal channels?
Organizational ombuds cannot replace formal channels. However, they offer measurable value to formal channels by expanding the scope and volume of issues that are brought to formal channels, and through thoughtful partnership and collaboration with the formal channels.
As an informal function, organizational ombuds often have access to employees' unvarnished concerns, feelings, hopes and fears. While they cannot share information that would break an employee's confidentiality, organizational ombuds identify trends and provide data about their work through usage summaries they share with an organization's leadership. This provides formal channels with insights into employees' experiences that can help improve policies and their implementation. Empowered with these insights, a formal channel can modify policies, review internal procedures and educate employees on their processes or services.
Sometimes, employees raise serious issues with an organizational ombuds that require escalation. Organizational ombuds can break confidentiality if a situation poses an imminent risk of serious harm, and they need trusted partners in an organization, such as HR, Compliance and Legal, to address such situations swiftly and effectively.
Often, employees come to the ombuds simply seeking assistance navigating a large organization or identifying the best organizational resource to meet their needs. This can include an expecting parent wanting to maximize parental leave benefits, people unsure if they qualify for government protections such as the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) or employees clarifying updated vacation policies. Organizational ombuds partner with formal channels to update onboarding procedures that proactively address common questions about benefits and the appropriate internal resources to utilize to access those benefits. Ombuds also serve as a type of 'GPS' for employees to help direct them to relevant information or resources provided by HR, Compliance, Legal and other formal channels.
Another benefit of an organizational ombuds is that they provide a forum to address issues early, which enables formal channels to focus on the most serious issues.
In sum, organizational ombuds provide meaningful data about the employee experience, which helps formal channels champion meaningful change.
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