5 essential people opportunities you need to review right now

Working with so many amazing clients across sectors as diverse as retail, health, manufacturing, supply chain, pharmaceuticals, packaging and consulting means that, as a People Director, you need to have your finger on the pulse of emerging trends, as well as giving top quality, value-creating advice and guidance. In this article, people and business strategy expert Conal Scholes discusses five critical people opportunities that every business needs to be focusing on.

While the current world of work may sometimes feel like being in a brawl with no rules, taking note of key trends is a great way to ensure you’re heading in the right direction. One size may never fit all, but these trends are too big, and too important, for any business to ignore.

As a top line introduction, here are the top five trends we’re seeing a need for businesses to focus on right now, and well into the future.

1. Reward and Transparency

Transparency around salaries and reward is still a rare thing, despite widespread campaigning advocating for it. HR teams or business owners trying to keep salary data in a dark room are missing the point: with pressure on businesses to make pay bands public and offer more transparency around salaries, it’s becoming increasingly important to be open about your rates of pay. A quick look on Glassdoor, LinkedIn or Indeed shows that the cat is already out of the bag.

Sharing creates engagement with your people, helps to build trust and a sense of value, and wastes less time during recruitment. Making reward very clear to your talent pool and sector helps them understand what they’re applying for. It also turbo charges talent acquisition because it attracts people within a set range, which delivers better ROI. The days of getting 1000s of applications but only a short list of two are dead and gone, so it’s important to be specific about who you’re looking for and what you’re prepared to pay for them.

Pay transparency is a challenge for many organisations, but it does offer many benefits to your people and external talent pools. Ask us at People Puzzles and we will come up with innovative ideas and ways of working to:-

• Align reward and pay to results and behaviours
• Benchmark where you are versus what you can afford, as well as where the market is and where it will be
• Give you reach into new geographies and understand impacts where acquisitions and mergers are an option
• Create the links between reward and the holy trinity of culture/structures and results

Right now is an enormous opportunity for HR and business leaders to get ahead of the reward game.

2. Investing in the amazing people in your business

Internal promotion and developing career paths have sometimes played second fiddle to recruitment. Changes in the labour market and lack of external options have driven business reflection on who might already work within the organisation who could make a difference.

Most business have a retention problem, NOT a recruitment challenge. Employee turnover is usually a symptom of a lack of clearly defined career paths, with 44%-56% of organisations recognising that this is a core issue for them to engage with. (Sources – CIPD/Gartner/KPMG/People Puzzles).

At People Puzzles, we recognise there’s a real challenge in offering internal progression and encouraging existing talent to stay in the business with interventions like succession planning, engagement surveys, core skills programme development, career pathways, regular and structured communications and 1-2-1s all playing their part.

3. ESG and Consumer Habits

Sustainability efforts are the fastest growing differentiator in consumer markets and employees want to align with organisations who are putting ESG at the centre of their organisations. Reward is important but ESG is going to be the game changer for organisations planning on recruiting and retaining people with the right skills and behaviours.

Research carried out by IBM and the National Retail Federation shows that 62% of consumers are willing to change their purchasing habits to reduce their environmental impact, and 85% of people have changed their buying habits to be more sustainable.

The best thing about ESG is that its employee driven and allows them to align with your organisation and its aims by improving sustainability in their processes, there’s an opportunity to increase customer loyalty and improve their bottom line as part of your employee engagement and operational excellence models. A real force multiplier.

At People Puzzles, we are available to help our clients identify, develop and embed the right ESG strategy for them, with a national network of expertise to draw from to ensure the latest thinking and most appropriate plan of action for each unique business.

4. Technology and the Metaverse

Research from the leading players (Mercers, PWC, Josh Bersin et al) shows that roughly a quarter of people will spend around an hour a day in the metaverse. Organisations need to pivot and use this new world in talent acquisition efforts, from onboarding to virtual meetings and virtual conferences. This emerging stage will be game changer for learning and training for people, delivering on what organisations can influence to deliver engaging interactions with candidates and employees and support ongoing flexibility in less linear working patterns.

HR teams will be central to figuring out how best to use this technology, whether it’s developing new working policies to ensure safe and healthy workplace practices, to teaching leaders how to use it to lead effectively. With the right execution, the metaverse could be an effective way to improve business performance and employee engagement.

At People Puzzles we work closely with Freeman Clarke to develop innovative People Technology solutions that have redefined how our clients work with technology day to day. This includes new age HR management systems which deliver employee engagement platforms, integrated recruitment solutions, reward platforms that generate value for your people and amalgamated time and attendance that takes out the leg work for busy owners and HR professionals alike, enabling businesses to focus on the strategy and results. Sounds good, right?

5. The F word!

Yes, you guessed it – flexibility! And it isn’t going away in 2023. Smart business owners and savvy HR teams need to get to grips with flexible and hybrid ways of working.

As a minimum, update policies to reflect what people want. Clever and agile businesses with an eye on the future won’t be relying on policies and lawyers to block flexibility; they will be embracing it by leveraging technology to deliver communication that simplifies connectivity between colleagues and guarantees that data resilience and compliance is a given.

The real winners will be those who move forward from outdated ways of working. The data is simple (Source – Linked In / People Puzzles): roles that are hybrid get 66% more views and 33% more applicants than those that are fully onsite or don’t offer flexibility.

People Puzzles can deliver you:

• Tech that allows you to work flexibly
• Recruitment solutions that access wider talent pools via flexibility
• Expert guidance in implementing and managing new ways of working that embrace flexibility
• Reward strategies that reduce your cost of employment but give your employees more benefits – more for less! Yes it is possible – in fact, our entire business model is built on it!

2023 is proving to be a heck of a ride and the rollercoaster only looks to be getting more extreme as time goes on. Get People Puzzles onboard to discover the art of the possible and transform your people problems into people capabilities. Book your 30 minute free consultation with a trusted people expert near you – just call 0345 6465201 or email [email protected] .