Articles

‘Sure it’s Christmas’ will no doubt be a frequently heard phrase over the next couple of weeks as the traditional season for over-indulgence ramps up. As we know, people have faced a massive cost of living crisis over the past 18 months so the question is what shape the consumer is in and will the tills ring?

There are at least five generations among today’s workforce, the silent generation, baby boomers, generation-x, millennials and generation-z, each bringing different perspectives and expectations to the workplace. The current challenge is for organisations to create a work environment that appeals to all five generations.

Growing up in Belfast in the 1970s and 80s, I was convinced that by the year 2020, we’d all be travelling around by flying cars or hoverboards and have a host of robot servants looking after us.

Healthy Place To Work supports organisations to deliver sustainable high performance, through a dedication to the health of a workforce and within the workplace

The Northern Ireland jobs market remains exceptionally competitive, as borne out in the most recent official statistics.

With tight labour market conditions expected to continue, a dwindling pool of available labour is expected to be a significant barrier to economic growth across Ireland over the coming years.

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) describes performance management simply as “the attempt to maximise the value that employees create”, helping to maintain and improve the performance of staff to align with organisational objectives.

Generation Z, colloquially known as zoomers, is the demographic cohort succeeding Millennials and preceding Generation Alpha. Researchers and popular media use the mid-to-late 1990s as the starting birth years and the early 2010s as ending birth years.

The main goal of successful workforce planning is having the right talent in the right roles at the right time. However, many organisations fail to pay enough attention to their talent pipelines and succession practices, which can lead to excessive turnover and loss of knowledge, affecting the performance and success of the organisation.

What will be hot in L&D going into the future? – This is the one obligatory question posed every year by Donald H. Taylor in the annual L&D Global Sentiment Survey. This year marks the 10th anniversary of the survey and it also appears to mark a transitional year for learning and development worldwide.

In modern, fast-paced and hybrid workplace cultures, leadership is more important than ever before. We have all observed varying approaches towards leadership, and the different styles of various successful CEOs. It is clear that there is no roadmap to be a successful CEO, rather, it takes certain mind-sets that effectively drive organisational performance.

Economy watchers were reaching for the popcorn over the past week as estimates of 50% growth in our economic fortunes over the next decade were cited as the potential prize from the Windsor Framework. Understandably, such an upbeat prediction was given significant airtime, which sparked reaction and challenge by some in the academic community.

The year 2022 ended on a low note, a long way from the hopes of a post-pandemic upturn we had at the start of the year. Prospects for 2023, by contrast, look gloomy to say the least, with concerns about another difficult year for the UK economy in which growth is at a standstill, while inflation has reached new heights.

The economy has rolled from punch to punch over the last number of years, prompting a necessarily reactionary approach. 2023 has started with a similarly uncertain outlook.

For many people in organisations the opening months of the year will coincide with objective setting – an opportunity to plan our development goals over the next 12-months and explore what support is available to us at work to help achieve them. As employees set out to complete this process, organisations will also consider their direction within what is still very much an uncertain operating environment.

One of the key challenges facing many Irish and UK companies is capturing sufficient D&I insights to inform real change in their organisation. Most of them have good intentions to make changes in D&I, but they face challenges due to a lack of rich data, actionable insights, and the necessary metrics to determine and prove progress.