Last week the HR Directors Business Summit 2015 was held in Birmingham and comprised the UK’s largest gathering of senior HR professionals with over 100 talks from CEOs, Chief HR Officers, Authors and HR Expert Dave Ulrich. Many of you will already know Ulrich, but if you don’t, he defined the strategic framework for HR Functions which led to the HR Model that businesses use all around the globe today.

This year’s event covered pressing HR issues including how to create a social recruitment strategy underpinned by robust technology, with Tim Potten’s, Global Head of Talent Acquisition at Emerson, keynote presentation explaining why 60% of all its job applicants now come from social.

But to bring about positive change to a recruitment strategy as demonstrated by Emerson and across the business, organisational change must be carefully planned, directed and rolled out to ensure employee buy-in. This was the focus and summary of the online Tweet Chat that took place ahead of the event, which saw industry influencers debate how HR leaders can implement change to deliver skills to the front line more quickly than ever before.

Here’s a summary of the key points made:

@liggyw issued a call to action for all to embrace organisational change: “We need to tackle some of the toxic organisational doom-goblins to effectively embrace change.”

While @MervynDinnen highlighted the importance of ensuring employee buy-in for change: “People are okay with change but not okay with change that’s forced on them.”

As the conversation moved on, it leaned towards just how change should be messaged to employees and why involving them from the start can help to align future skills with real need.

I suggested that: “HR should have an honest dialogue with employees to align skill needs with L&D and strategic goals.”

@liggyw offered 3 rules for change:

1.      “Explain why it’s happening”

2.      “Demonstrate managerial empathy”

3.      “Support a positive and inclusive culture”

@AndrewFit4Work  brought a case study to the mix, demonstrating how to manage change through looking after employee wellbeing: “We are doing our best in Leicestershire to champion workplace wellbeing. Others, such as @lindonaldson responded by rallying to the cause of looking after the individual: “Agree, duty of care to the individual but also essential to organisations ability to respond.

There’s clearly much to debate and much to respond to, and as ever the key is to attempt change and learn through your own change process.