Annual HR Directors' Retreat: Strategic Human Resource Management: Back to the future with people management?
Past HR Network Event
23-24 May 2019
Event resources
Slides
Session 1: Is Strategic Human Resource Management worth taking seriously?
David Guest
Session 2: The HR Division's Strategic Plan at LSE
Indi Seehra
Session 3: Health and Wellbeing: Employers and Delivery
Dame Carol Black
Session 4: Employee engagement - now more than ever
Nita Clarke
Strategic Human Resource and People Management
Duncan Brown
Related reading
Strategic Human Resource Management in Practice: Case Studies and Conclusions - from HRM Strategy to Strategic People Management
Brown D, Hirsh W, Reilly P
Strategic Human Resource Management: Back to the future?
Armstrong M, Brown D
Engaging for success: enhancing performance through employee engagement (report available to download further down linked page)
MacLeod D, Clarke N
Britain's healthiest workplace (as discussed by Dame Carol Black)
Facilitators
Duncan Brown, Head of HR Consultancy, Institute for Employment Studies
Zofia Bajorek, Research Fellow, Institute for Employment Studies
Speakers
Ed Griffin, Director of HR Consultancy & Research, Institute for Employment Studies
Professor Dame Carol Black, Principal of Newnham College, University of Cambridge
Nita Clarke OBE, Director, Involvement and Participation Association (IPA)
David Guest, Emeritus Professor of Organisational Psychology & HRM
Indi Seehra, Director of Human Resources, London School of Economics and Political Science
Event details
Thirty years ago, North American ideas of HRM strategy first crossed the Atlantic and the HR nomenclature was rapidly adopted, as the more boardroom-influencing advance from personnel management. But the two major suspicions with these ideas ever since then, amongst Academics, executives and trade unions, have been whether such ideas can actually be put into practice, or worse, whether they are just a cover for employee exploitation.
So today, after the post-financial-crash growth of zero hours contracts, pension and training cuts and what has been described as the worst decade on pay for 200 years, how should we interpret the increasing adoption of the People Management title for the function? Is employee wellbeing (where the profession started as the Institute of Welfare Workers, at a similar time of real pay decline) and the ‘employee experience’ really at the heart of contemporary models and methods for improving organisational performance through employee engagement? Do major skill and talent shortages represent major opportunities or major problems for the function? What does being strategic really mean in this technology-driven fast-moving world where speed and agility seem more important than long-term plans and projects?
With the latest academic research summarised, including our own study with CIPD, some excellent and varied case studies and lots of discussion and debate, our retreat aimed to stimulate delegates' minds and subsequently influence their policies and practices.
