The People Agenda

How well does your HR team deliver successful diagnosis for its challenges, rather than retrospectively finding solutions? Is your HR function seen as the ‘police’ of your business and what can you do to avoid that? Chris from LACE Partners talks to Steve Othen from Product Madness about these issues, as well as what Product Madness are doing to drive the upskilling of their people.

Wendy Muirhead from Ceridian talks about how Ceridian try to drive innovation in their business through the culture that they have developed. As a technology-focused business, the expectation is that Ceridian are innovative in its culture, but how do they achieve that? And what tips do they have?

How capable is your HR function? What is stopping your team from reaching your strategic objectives? In 2019 LACE Partners spoke to a series of HRDs as part of the HR on the Offensive whitepaper and to follow on from the findings, Emma Leonis talks about the importance of HR moving from the transactional side of the business, to that of a strategic ‘people consultant’.

How do you make the world of work more engaging for your people? How do you bring your workplaces back into sync with better engagement and how can you break down the existing constructs of the workplace to improve the overall efficiency of your business? Chris talks to Cecile from Ultimate Software about her book ‘From Dissonance to Resonance’

In such a time of uncertainty and both personal and professional challenges, how can HR teams keep their line managers positively engaged, especially when so many are remote managing (possibly for the first time)? Danny Harmer from Aviva and Steph Davies from Laughology talk to the LACE Partners team on what they've seen in recent months.

What is agile leadership? How do you identify companies that deliver it and what types of characteristics do they have? Stephen Sidebottom and Clare Harvey explore this in the latest edition of 'In the Spotlight', a HR podcast brought to you by the Guild of HR Professionals, in association with LACE Partners.

What legal considerations do you need to make when bringing back furloughed workers? How much notice do you need to give to inform a furloughed worker of a return date? What can furloughed workers do when on leave and what are the logistics of part-time working? What about holiday pay or the process of redundancy? We look at all of these questions in the latest podcast, featuring Paul Griffin from...

How have businesses reacted to their resource plans during the global pandemic? How important will employer brand be post the current crisis? What creativity in resourcing has this global pandemic delivered? Andrew Wilkinson from Peoplescout and Sally Talbot from Per Ardua give their take in the latest HR Guild podcast.

How has the covid-19 crisis impacted the search for leaders? How have views on leadership and identifying leaders changed during this time? Is 'trust' the new frontier for businesses when it comes to empowering their leaders and line managers? Which leaders have developed the most during this difficult time? These questions and more are answered by Steve Bernard from Connectwell and Emma Leonis fr...

How do you adapt the workplace to meet your colleagues' needs in this current climate? Do you have a hybrid wellbeing offering? How do you make home-based workers feel fully included in wellbeing programmes? What are your plans for holiday rollover and how do you deal with that? These are just a few questions that we look at in the latest HR Guild 'In the Spotlight' podcast featuring Mark McLane a...

How much of what the government has set out for returning to work are 'rules' and how much are 'guidelines' for HR teams and employers to deliver on? What happens to those people with childcare arrangements that are concerned with going back to work? Chris and Cathy from LACE Partners spoke to Paul Griffin from law firm Norton Rose Fulbright to get answers to some of the common questions HR teams...

Master of the Guild Paul Hucknall talks to Chris Howard and Annette Andrews about how his business - Quilter - has adapted quickly to moving from an office-based environment to a remote one, touching on policies, support, but also how their leaders have adapted to the change across the organisation, not just at the top.

What will the office of the future look like when everybody returns back to work? Will there be creative and news ways of utilising space? Will businesses need as much space? How can you social distance in a lift designed to get 20 people in it and up to the 20th floor as quickly as possible. Aaron and Chris from LACE talk to Carissa Kilgour from Co.lab advisory about what the future of the office...

In the second edition of the 'In the Spotlight' series from the Guild of HR Professionals, Peter Cheese - CEO of the CIPD - talks about how HR needs to position the 'human' at the centre of the business after the Covid-19 pandemic has begun to subside. HR needs to come together as a community and share collaborative ideas and Peter shares his thoughts on how that can and should happen in future.

Chris from LACE Partners is joined by Jig Ramji, Head of Talent at the London Stock Exchange, to talk about the importance of HR teams using data to evidence their decision making and delivering ROI to the people function. Jig talks about challenges of businesses who value HR as a critical part of its business objectives, as well as those businesses who don't put HR at the front of their strategy.

In this first episode of the Guild of HR Professionals' series of leadership 'in the spotlight' podcasts, Chris and Aaron from LACE Partners talk to Danny Harmer from Aviva on her experiences during the current lockdown period, having joined Aviva earlier in 2020.

What are the common challenges that leadership teams are facing and what coaching support do they need? Do HR Directors need to focus more on themselves in getting coaching support? Jessica Raby from Jess Raby Associates talks to Chris and Aaron from LACE Partners.

How good is your digital learning platform and how much are you utilising it in the current climate? With some businesses using digital learning to re-skill employees in light of the Covid-19 global pandemic, or with furloughed employees able to undertake training whilst not being able to physically work, digital learning has become even more prevalent. The latest Hr on the Offensive Podcast talks...

What is your business doing about it's wellbeing strategy? What are other HR teams looking at right now? What will be the focus as we come out of the current global pandemic? The LACE Partners Team spoke to Annette Andrews, former Chief People Officer at Lloyds of London, to find out what she is seeing and hearing from senior colleagues in the industry.

How can HR teams react appropriately to the current crisis brought about by Covid-19? Is HR the conscience of the business? What does the return to work plan look like? What will 'business as usual' look like when the crisis starts to subside? Chris from LACE Partners sat down with strategic advisor Kevin Green to ask how HR can think differently and how bold HR should be.

Workforce planning may not be new, but the environment we are currently operating in caused by the global pandemic is. Chris Howard and Charlie Donaldson talk about why agility is needed more than ever from HR during this current period and what HR teams need to be thinking about as they consider how to efficiently restructure and reploy their workforce to be in the best position to succeed once w...

With large numbers of people working from home during the global pandemic, how can you maintain business continuity in your culture, your people and your processes? Aaron Alburey and Cathy Acratopulo look at this issue, as well as the impact that technology is playing for companies, in this challenging time.

We all know what it feels like to be managed well, but how many of us have been trained to be better people managers? How many companies have effective processes in place to help line managers become better people managers? Cathy Acratopulo from LACE Partners shares some findings from work LACE Partners has done with a variety of different sized businesses across a multitude of different industrie...

How will AI and blockchain impact HR teams in 2020? How much do you need to know about and what’s on the horizon? Aaron Alburey from LACE Partners provides a quick overview, as well as some of the practical ways in which these two very different technologies will affect your department.

Does HR try to be all things to all people? Is that hindering HR’s ability to be successful? Do HR need to focus on core business priorities? Emma Leonis from LACE Partners talks about some of the core priorities that HR Directors have spoken to LACE Partners about.