Top HR challenges: Strategies for today and the future

With the skills landscape in a constant state of flux, keeping your workforce agile is now non-negotiable. Gone are the days of traditional development and skills mastery – instead, a complex and changing labour market is rewriting everything we know about the workplace.

Our Connect Live event in London provided a great platform for our Cornerstone team and customers to converge and discuss developments in the HR and L&D space. Kate Graham caught up with Lynda Gratton, a leading academic, thought leader, writer, and speaker, for a ‘fireside chat’ on the biggest HR challenges we face today – and can expect to face tomorrow. Here are some key takeouts from that discussion.

Skills are the building blocks of our working lives – and their development starts far earlier than we realise. As such, going through a skills transition can often be a difficult process; the end point often requires an entirely different set of skills and uses very few of an organisation’s existing skills.

Consider, for instance, an oil company. Organisational skills will centre around managing specific risks and husbanding resources. But if the company transitions to sustainable energy, its workforce needs to learn how to manage a completely different set of risks and develop other skills like project management.

When your people have been flexing the same skills for decades, embracing change quickly is often easier said than done. And employees aren’t the only people who need to weather the storm.

As HR professionals, you need to persuade leaders of the skills transitions taking place, which isn’t an easy feat. Why? Because the C-suite needs to strike a balance between what is needed to run a business and supporting their people.

Here, data is your best friend and the lifeblood of every business; if you don’t have it, then it’ll be much harder to engage with your leaders. Gathering your data on your people and their skills will help leaders better allocate resources to bridge organisational gaps, and take appropriate action.

The trick to remember is that the message itself doesn’t need to be data-driven; rather, it should centre on your organisation’s vision and people. Skills are a major asset to every business, but it starts by investing in people. That’s the sweet spot for successfully engaging with the C-suite.

Generative AI is changing everything we know about the workplace. Yet, it’s difficult to know how to progress when the technology is accelerating at an increasingly rapid pace. Moreover, generative AI is spotlighting the question of what it means to be a human and human skills.

Judgement, decision-making, and empathy all play a prominent role in our day-to-day lives and are skills that generative AI models can’t yet masterfully replicate. But there’s still a sense of fear and uncertainty around how the technology will impact work.

Let’s break it down into manageable steps. Firstly, it’s crucial to start with the business case; what exactly do you want generative AI to help with? Then, take time with experimentation, and do it as much as possible – this demonstrates to employees that they can be augmented with, and not replaced by, AI. But you also need to develop your workforce’s digital skills to ensure they can pivot and transition into being digital experts. One way of doing so is by finding adjacencies.

When undergoing skills transitions, it’s important that your people ask themselves, “What is it that I’m doing now that will help me pivot internally?” and take the right steps to move on. This can also be described as a skills escalator.

Adjacencies almost always have some aspect of human or social skills associated with them, and these are what allow people to move up and escape from what can be precarious jobs, to more stable roles. Essentially, your people can simultaneously remain agile, develop their skills and build their network.

Take the telecommunications sector as an example. When the industry shifted from copper lines to digital networks, it was a harsh transition; organisations didn’t have the relevant skills, and those in lower-paid roles were particularly hard hit. Navigating this meant finding adjacencies to help employees move up and retain their place at their company.

In the digital age, human skills and connection have never been more important. The only way to come out of a transition is to act through it, and that means coming into contact with a wider network of peers across internal teams. By doing so, employees can open up new opportunities, such as side gigs, which will help them forge a clear career path, and new skills, amidst change.

Achieving and maintaining workforce agility is no small feat, and requires buy-in from top to bottom. However, organisations that do succeed in keeping their people agile will be able to stay competitive, retain their people, and continue growing, not plateauing.

If you want to learn more about workforce agility, check out Cornerstone Galaxy and help your people unlock limitless potential.