Publications

A report on the apprenticeship trailblazers one year on from the launch of the first standards in March 2014.

The European Restructuring Monitor’s annual report for 2014 explores the rapid transformation of the public sector in Europe since the onset of the financial crisis in 2008.

This report containing IES research looks at gender and class roles in the European labour market.

This paper raises an interesting issue of the role of HR in ethics, is it HR’s role to ensure ethical behaviour or is it the role of every employee?

Business partners are one of the Ulrich model’s most endemic manifestations, seen as integral to the running of business units and providing strategic advice and support to maximise performance. However, all too often various pressures on business partners result in a failure to be sufficiently strategic, the tendency to be drawn into low added value activities and becoming too associated with the business unit in which they sit and less willing to toe the HR line. The popularity of the role can also make it harder to find people of the right calibre. These are partly problems of role definition but also of line interface; devolution to the line has proved harder than anticipated. As a result, there is a real tension between strategic contribution and operational support which organisations have not yet resolved.

This review of competencies argues that our tendency in the UK to atomise (whilst Germany for example favours an holistic interpretation) leaves knowledge isolated, fixed in conception and unable to be summonsed to help with new situations. The effects include dispiriting appraisals, narrow recruitments, rote learning, and the downplaying of theoretical knowledge to the broader detriment of agility (back to change management again) and the ability to deal with novel and complex situations.

HR needs to consider how talent management lands with those who are tasked with bringing it to life – how line managers are key players and how they can feel unsupported, isolated and unskilled in fulfilling their role. Considering how the line can be enabled to succeed should be the focus of HR intervention.

In this paper we explore the importance of the individual, exploring the challenges of engaging employees in innovation, all too often limited by individuals having too little time to enable ideas to come to life or feeling as if they are not ‘allowed’ to have ideas that make a difference. The term innovation can be off-putting too; all too often people feel that only those in senior or specialist roles get to be creative. Some tried and tested ways of encouraging people to play, of giving them permission to innovate and in creating the structured support of colleagues to do so, can make a huge difference.

In this paper, we place the emphasis on how we can help individuals adapt to, support, and lead change better. The evidence is that using coaching to accelerate skills development, help understand change better and work with teams to adapt to change, can help organisations unstick themselves and offset the all too common inertia that means too much change is attempted and too little achieved.

In this paper, we highlight the importance of organisations having one foot in the past through exploiting current capabilities whilst also stepping into the future by designing organisations able to explore opportunities. This difficult balancing act is supported by engagement and yet engagement is always threatened by change. More established ways of managing change are replaced by evolving fluid approaches, enabled by what is shared across organisations, to promote collaboration, to simplify what is being faced wherever possible, and to mobilise the workforce.