What does it take to be a courageous leader?
ThoughtWorks recently developed the first-ever report on ‘courageous leadership’ among successful C-Suite executives, in partnership with global insights consultancy Northstar, to explore how certain traits and leadership styles can contribute to business and workplace success. Below, Managing Director UK at ThoughtWorks, Ruth Harrison, explores what it takes to be a courageous executive, what it is […]
Implementation tasks: documents and discovery
In our 12-part series, Kate Wadia – Managing Director at Phase 3 Consulting – guides the HR professional through how to navigate, succeed and lead with HR tech project-work. From the inception of the business case to the handover into BAU, we’ll follow an indicative project timeframe to explain the way and the why of a project […]
Reality v aspiration: women in senior roles
The poet W.H. Auden once wrote that civilizations should be reassured by “the degree of diversity attained and the degree of unity retained.” The same could be said of boardrooms and executive leadership teams. Today, the importance of boardroom and top tier executive diversity is universally acknowledged. However, there remains a gap between aspiration and […]
System selection: creating the right process
In our 12-part series, Kate Wadia – Managing Director at Phase 3 Consulting – guides the HR professional through how to navigate, succeed and lead with HR tech project-work. From the inception of the business case to the handover into BAU, we’ll follow an indicative project timeframe to explain the way and the why of a project […]
Is there a limit to creativity?
Creativity is a big thing in organisations – it influences, apparently, everything from individual productivity to product innovation, from financial performance to competitive edge. It’s widely seen as a driver for growth and development, enabling companies to thrive in dynamic environments. Without it, technology companies in particular would be out of business in no time. […]
HR challenges for 2017 – and beyond
The Hackett Group’s 2017 HR Key Issues report had much to reveal about the state of the profession – and the challenges and opportunities it faces in the near future. Based on a survey of executives from more than 180 large international companies, the report paints a picture of HR at a turning point in its […]
HR technology: Is early adoption the key to success?
As with any industry, the impact of technology is being felt acutely across the employer provided benefits and pensions landscape. This raises a conundrum for employers of how to distinguish admin-cutting technology which facilitates streamlined best practice, from flash-in-the-pan gimmicks that will soon be superseded by more efficient innovation. Being an early adopter allows you to […]
Taylor Review analysis: The future of work is already here
The future of work is not a destination we’re heading towards. It’s somewhere we’ve already arrived at. Everything we’ve taken for granted about work is changing; the ways in which we forge a career, commute and learn, who we work with and how long we work for are all being transformed. What we want from […]
“I usually choose one day a week where I make it my goal to only focus on one task at a time.”
We’re always curious to hear how our members and contributors tackle the challenges that the ever-changing world of HR throws at them. We’ve got a wealth of experience and knowledge across the site, and what better way to showcase the diversity of our community than to get them to walk us through an average day? Want to […]
Why is financial wellbeing growing and what are employers doing?
Jamie Lawrence, Editor, HRZone: Why are so many organisations focusing on financial wellbeing now? What’s the imperative? Tom O’Byrne, CEO, Great Place to Work: There are a number of factors driving it – social, economic, political, cultural. For example, many younger people coming into the workforce have little financial education or experience around things like […]
Are we nearly there yet? Measuring progress on your journey to agile performance management
For managers, one of the comforts of traditional performance management is that it is a well-understood process, it’s formal and orchestrated, and once it’s done, there is a whole year (or at least 6 months) before HR bother managers about it again. Such comfort is one of the main obstacles preventing the shift to adoption of […]
“We use data insights to inform priorities in our people and talent agenda,” says law firm HR Director
Chris Oglethorpe is HR Director at law firm Gowling WLG. He was previously an HR Director at RBS. Gowling WLG was ranked 27th in the ‘Large category’ (organisations with 500+ employees) in the annual Best Workplaces. The organisation has been ranked since the awards began in 2001 and their 2017 result is three places ahead of […]
Organisation design: it’s time to disrupt our approaches
Today, organisations are subject to unprecedented levels of fast-paced change driven by external as well as internal forces, often unpredictable. This scale of change throws into question the merits of the usual intensely unsettling and time-consuming approaches to organisation design. Our view is that when it comes to organisation design, these traditional methodologies no longer […]
7 things we’ve learnt from our analytics and data month
Our data, analytics and automation hub includes over 20 articles from experts, researchers and commentators on how HR can better use people data to achieve results. We’ve rounded up seven key learnings from the hub but we urge you to read the full articles to deepen your understanding of this crucial area. 1. “When you automate […]
System selection: how to make the right choice
In our 12-part series, Kate Wadia – Managing Director at Phase 3 Consulting – guides the HR professional through how to navigate, succeed and lead with HR tech project-work. From the inception of the business case to the handover into BAU, we’ll follow an indicative project timeframe to explain the way and the why of a project step-by- […]
Investing in people: what comes first – the chicken or the egg?
If leaders truly believe that people, and more precisely their knowledge and skills, are the most important asset available to our organisations, we need to develop a clear way to articulate the value of those knowledge and skills to help investors, owner-managers and regulators understand critical people concepts in our organisations. However, this is often […]
Putting people first creates better businesses, but this requires investing in measuring human capital
The argument for the importance of people to organisations has, for far too many years, been framed in the terms of the workforce being an asset that is owned by and available to the business. The tired adage of people being an organisation’s “most important asset” has, in many ways, lost the shine that it […]
The need for people – vs just business – analytics
Jon Ingham is Executive Consultant, Strategic Dynamics, and author, The Social Organization. There has been some useful development in HR’s use of analytics over the last few years. One of the positive aspects of this has been the increased use of the term workforce analytics, rather than ‘HR analytics’, to signal that we are interested in […]
Workplace engagement and performance – how do you unpack its mysteries?
This article was co-authored by Martin Reddington and Elmira Bakhshalian, Founder and Research and Development Manager respectively at Martin Reddington Associates. There is a burgeoning interest in the measurement of workforce engagement and performance – both from academic and practitioner perspectives. The old ways of doing an engagement survey every year or two to extract data to produce […]
HR analytics: what does the landscape look like?
Analytics is the business function that has developed to extract meaning and value from the large and growing amounts of data that are routinely generated and stored by the IT infrastructure that organisations use in their day to day operations. There is a widespread consensus that the HR function has made less progress in using […]
