Talent management and workforce development

This theme focuses on how organisations plan for and develop their future workforces. Strategic workforce planning is rising up the agenda. Talent management and succession planning have recently concentrated on future leaders and ‘high potentials’. But there is also strong interest in learning, development and career support for the wider workforce and for key populations of managers and professionals. Practical challenges include how to combine different development methods, evaluate the impact of development and make line managers more effective developers of their people.

Reward and recognition

This Network theme looks at topical issues in the reward world. Employers in recent years have been investing heavily in well-publicised concepts such as broadbanding, job families and variable pay, whilst also creating great places to work. The current economic climate is putting a new focus on efficiency and cost-effective pay management, yet organisations do still want to improve productivity and performance through employee engagement. As a consequence there is renewed interest in total reward and employee recognition, which this theme aims to address.

Performance, motivation and engagement

The evidence is clear: engaged employees make their organisation better (higher performing, more innovative and delivering better to customers). Engaging people to perform during pay freezes, downsizings and redundancies is as, if not more, important than during fair weather. Recovery brings the new challenge of holding on to your best people. This theme focuses on understanding what motivates individuals, what enthuses the workforce, and crucially how organisations can mobilise the line to engage and manage their teams to deliver.

HR strategy and effectiveness

This theme focuses on the effectiveness of the HR function itself, including how to develop HR strategy to support the business objectives as well as the internal organisation and capability of the function. It includes organisational structures, roles, skills, career management, training and development needs, relationships to stakeholders, resourcing the function, links to the organisational strategy, measurement and monitoring and the content of the function’s work (especially in relation to other functions).

Organisation Development and change

Capability in Organisation Development (OD) and change has become highly valued in the current turbulent business environment. OD’s humanistic values are particularly relevant at a time when many of our institutions and corporations are in moral crisis. This network theme supports members in developing their own OD strategy, learning about different change models and approaches, building and selecting a toolkit of techniques and methods, developing the capability and confidence of practitioners and embedding sound evaluation principles into the OD cycle.

Leadership

Leadership is a complex, shifting concept, with so many models and frameworks and best practice solutions, that sifting through this complexity to understand what makes great leadership is not easy. The result can be leadership fatigue– a disassociation from current and emerging thinking. And yet we know that management and leadership make a huge difference to organisations’ performance, employees’ wellbeing and customers’ experience. This theme refreshes our understanding of great leadership, finds the linkages between leadership and performance and explores how organisations can mobilise it effectively.

HR Network Overview

• About the HR Network
• Membership structure
• Core benefits
• Price options & joining
• Download the brochure

Modules

• HR Director or Leader module
• HR Team Development module
• Business Problem Solving module
• Additional modules