Strategic HR Review

Issue Number

Latest documents

• Discovering and expanding diversity with authenticity
• Editorial
• Never too old to work: managing an age diverse workforce

  Purpose: Setting the scene of a workforce that is living and working longer. Changing demographics are going to have a huge impact on the workplace and businesses need to get ahead of the curve. Design/methodology/approach: Age stereotyping is one of the biggest issues faced by companies today. Companies need to focus on recruiting and retaining people based on their ability and capabilities, not their age. Findings: In an intergenerational team, the team members are not artificially defined or divided by age; it is their talent that is important. Employers must recognize the unique skills and experiences each team member brings. Originality/value: The expectation of flexibility among younger employees is now ingrained. If businesses want to recruit and retain younger workers, they must embrace this way of working. Flexibility is just as important for older workers, especially those with caring responsibilities (children or elderly parents.) Employers need to adapt their benefits package to appeal to all.

• Determining the next step: how organizations and aging employees determine whether to stay or to go

  Purpose: This paper aims to discuss the guiding principles for how to find solutions to a complex problem facing HR professionals: What to do with those who could or should retire and move on to the next stage of their lives? Design/methodology/approach: The author offers five guiding principles that may help you find a solution suited to your organization. These principles should help you assess where to focus your efforts and how to build a plan for moving forward. He then provides several potential solutions for HR professionals and their aging workforce to consider. Findings: The challenge to the human resource professional and the organization’s executives is to understand these guiding principles and develop solutions that work for the organization, business conditions and people. Originality/value: With these guiding questions and considerations in mind, HR professionals can better help their aging workforce stay, go or find a solution in between.

• Prioritizing the forgotten generation: why organizations should make boomers a key part of their talent acquisition strategy in 2020

  Purpose: Every day, nearly 10,000 employees in the Baby Boomer generation retire from the US job market. However, many in this generation are not ready for a quiet, traditional retirement and are choosing to remain in the workforce – simply on their own terms. With more employment opportunities open to candidates in the US job market than almost ever before, employers should prioritize engaging these seasoned hires in their recruitment strategies. Design/methodology/approach: Beamery’s Vice President of Customer Success Debra Squyres reviewed the most important reasons employers should not disregard the “forgotten generation” of candidates in their hiring strategies, especially when considering the diverse skills and roles Baby Boomers can bring to an enterprising workforce. Findings: Among other job-specific skills and experience, the greatest benefits of recruiting new hires from the Baby Boomer generation are the candidates’ years of experience and likely leadership roles, propensity for in-person relationship-building and unique perspective in an ever-diverse workforce. Originality/value: Highlighting the greatest benefits of Baby Boomer hires to employers is especially beneficial for those organizational leaders managing talent acquisition and retention.

• Solving the delayed retirement puzzle … and creating win-win opportunities

  Purpose: The population across the industrialized world is aging to the extent never experienced before in history, living 10 years longer on average than the previous generation and nearly two decades longer than two generations ago. Design/methodology/approach: To date, this rapidly growing segment of the population is not always addressed in inclusion and diversity plans and has often been overlooked as a source of competitive advantage, rather seen as a cost and a burden in some organizations. Findings: Leaders in industrial nations agree that to continue strong economic growth, it is vital to support people to live healthier lives and stay in the workforce for longer. By doing so, we can not only improve well-being and enable people to remain active and economically productive but also reduce dependency, bringing down the burdens on health, pensions and social systems. Originality/value: When this challenge is addressed, important motivational and productivity benefits will result from the seasoned talent segment staying a little longer with the organization. They will stay longer because they want to, not because they cannot afford to retire.

• How to close the gender pay gap within your organization
• The 3 C’s of courageous leadership: how to connect to your body, connect to your creativity, connect to your inner revolutionary
• Facilitating a culture of intrapreneurship: an employee involvement approach
• Why people analytics is the HR professional’s secret weapon

Featured documents

• Ruth James, TNT Express Services

  Employees who get feedback on their performance are twice as likely to commit to their organization. In conversations with your team, and when training line managers, the matter of how individuals can raise their game needs to be addressed if your talent is to become a differentiating force....

• Help your managers develop leadership skills

  Joanna Knight, director of Berkshire Consultancy Limited, believes leadership skills can be taught. Here, she outlines five key skills that must be developed before a manager can also be characterized as a leader....

• HR’s role in implementing JTI’s global ERP system: How HR’s focus on change management was key to a successful ERP project

  In 1999, JT International was comprised of over 100 disparate companies. A global ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system was vital to transform the company into a modern multinational. Find out how HR and the change management team focused on the “people” side of change to ensure the four‐year...

• Tying up loose ends in HR: using a value‐adding formula

  Using the “Powerful Connections” method, HR can significantly increase its impact on the organization and veer away from non value‐adding processes, says Robert Bolton, associate partner at Atos Consulting....

• How to improve your CEO’s people skills

  What employees want in a leader is someone who articulates the values the company stands for and models his or her behaviour on those values in matters large and small....

• Trust and technology: Work‐life blending at Unisys

  Bob Illingworth, HR Director at Unisys, describes how the organization has implemented flexible working as part of its shift from a technology supplier to an IT services company....

• Motivation and retention of key people in mergers and acquisitions

  Purpose: The most critical aspect leading to success or failure of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) is people‐related. Unfortunately, how to handle aspects of “people issues” remains one of the most difficult tasks to accomplish successfully. This paper aims to deal with the question of how to keep...

• Building culture from the outside in

  Purpose: Traditional views of organizational culture have one thing in common; they define culture from the inside out – who we are, what we do and how we do it. In this article, the authors suggest that a more robust and practical approach to leveraging culture is to identify and shape culture...

• Preparing our leaders for the future

  Purpose: Recent research released by global talent management company, DDI, shows that over the last decade, there seems to be little real improvement in leadership quality. In the most recent Global Leadership Forecast, only one in three leaders reported that their quality of leadership was high...

• Responding to the changing workforce

  HR professionals must prepare for the imminent shift in employee demographics, technology and social trends, warns Devyani Vaishampayan....