New Year, New Blog
This month we start a fresh financial year, our 20th ! We are truly excited about the current dramatic shifts in the world of work. Over the last 3 years there has been so much change – initially it was responsive to a situation none of us had lived through before, and latterly there are more considered evolutions of how organisations can develop for the good of both the company and the employees that make the magic happen. These include a human centred employment relationship; positive hybrid working patterns anchored in outputs rather than presenteeism and business plans with sustainability and ESG at their heart.
In our most recent business planning process, innovation in both what we do for our customers and how we enable it has emerged as our most pivotal KPI. Below, we signpost the priorities that we are most thoughtful about and are excited to innovate in these spaces:
- We will reimagine both the role and the skills required of first line leaders.
We have long believed that this tranche of leadership is the difference between organisational success and failure. Without effective leadership at this level, employee engagement and performance will drop, KPIs will be missed, and good employees will leave. Yet the burden of responsibility on these managers is huge. Relative to more senior leaders, they typically have more direct reports, an ever-increasing pool of duty of care and legal compliance responsibilities and much less time as they are often doing both task and leading. We have worked with thousands of fist line leaders over the years and we are deploying our experience and insights to create a real shift for these leaders, to reimagine how the role can be better designed, develop prioritised skills and growth supported with innovative development methods.
- A culture that drives purpose, belonging and connectivity
Purpose, belonging and connectivity are pivotal to attract, engage and retain employees who in turn deliver high performance. We know that culture comes from daily habits and rituals and our observation is that there is still a long way to go in terms of developing impactful, informal, creative and game changing techniques. We have seen interesting green shoots yet there is a long way to go for these to be truly embedded.
- Unleash the hidden talent within
A few years ago, h2h launched a service to specifically promote internal career transitions. Our service has a key focus on equipping employees and their managers with a toolkit to:
- promote their internal brand, to plan their own development
- identify their longer-term aspirations
- navigate the internal talent marketplace
- grow their career within the wider current organisational construct.
From our conversations with clients, our current view is that employees feel it is easier to leave and secure a role externally than to move within. That simply needs to change and we have some tools and development activities already in place to optimise the Internal Talent Market place concept that is now gaining more traction.
- Unleash and play to strengths
It is no secret that people are operating at their best when they are operating in the flow, deploying their greatest strengths within their workplace and being energised by this process. My question to you is how do you redesign work to tap into strengths that people may not even know they have yet?
Whenever we hire a new recruit, I am always excited and intrigued about what we don’t yet know about them and the strengths they can unleash given permission to do so.
- Experts in the field of Learning
In h2h we pride ourselves in being experts in learning and innovative learning design. We believe learning now needs to be anchored around individual learning needs and learners needs to be supported to adapt to a new mode of learning and personal responsibility for owning their development.
If any of these subjects resonate for you, please reach out if you think we may be able to support you.
