Welcome to People agenda
24 February 2014
Welcome to People agenda. Through our new blog we will give you access to our experts working within our HR consulting team. We’ll aim to keep you posted with regular updates of what’s happening in the marketplace, what might be keeping HRDs awake at night as well as flagging up forthcoming events and other points of interest. To make this all relevant, we’d love to hear from you – if there are topics that you’d like us to cover or debates you’d like to get involved in, then please do let us know.
As HR consultants, it’s our job to understand what’s important to HRDs – and we work hard at keeping on top of it. For example, I was recently lucky enough to spend some time with a few of my fellow PwC partners from around our global network. Much of what we talked about was focused on supporting our HRD client base in the quest to continue to add more value to their organisations. We came together to share thoughts, experiences and views from our respective marketplaces and consider what this might mean for our clients in the future. One of the dominant themes coming through was an increase in strategic focus; for example, strategic talent management was clearly a key issue on the mind of the HRDs around the world.
One area we focused on was strategic workforce planning. Despite the huge amount of change in the economic and regulatory environment CEO’s are often striving to provide a clear and compelling strategy that covers the short to medium term. The big challenge for HRDs is around how you can build the people capability within the business that can deliver the strategy.
Firstly, there’s a need to understand the capability needs of the future. Once you understand the business strategy, you need to work out what this means for the workforce of the future in terms of skills, diversity, geographical location etc. What does all this mean for the mobility, language capability and adaptability requirements of your future workforce?
Secondly, it isn’t enough to focus on the workforce alone. The environment that we work in is likely to change dramatically over the next few years. The introduction of new technologies, regulatory changes or shifts in economic power are all likely to have a significant impact on the future of work.
The other key challenge facing HRDs is the need to plan for the journey. If the future needs of your business require dramatic changes in your workforce it’s not enough to lay out the end state. It’s even more critical to manage this change so that the journey is efficient and has a limited impact on business as usual.
The good news is that, as HRDs, the right tools and data are more readily accessible to help you build the future people capability within your business. But are you using this new found insight to best effect?
Our blog posts will aim to address these and some of the other important issues that are on your People Agenda.
