Document older workers’ skills
In the opening keynote of the conference, Ekkehard Ernst, chief macroeconomist for the UN agency, the International Labour Organization, said that, although employers are struggling to fill vacancies, they are missing out on fantastic older candidates.
"Very few older people change roles. That needs to change if we want to bring more people into the labour market. It always puzzles me that companies are struggling to fill vacancies but are reluctant to hire people aged 55-plus."
The solution to this, he said, is to find ways to identify skills that these workers have built up through their careers but have not necessarily been documented.
"We have a really poor understanding of the type of skills people have built up over their lifecycle. The skills people have are not being properly reflected in certificates or diplomas. […] This is why it's so difficult for older workers to move around, because they find it difficult to show what kind of competencies they've acquired over their employee lifecycle."
He said we need to work together to document more skills with a standardised approach, in order to help older workers increase their mobility and long term career potential.
Read more: How the ageing workforce will affect the future of work
Avoid reactive succession planning
Leaders should be strategic about succession planning, rather than reactive, said Nicole Haris, global HR director of pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca.
"There's a difference between strategic and emergency successors," she said. "Rotating the senior leadership to fill a role might be quite reactive and could be backfilling, unless that person really needed that experience or can bring something new."
Instead, she suggests investing in talent that needs development to move into a leadership role.
"It's about moving from succession planning to succession progress. […] We need to ask what gap needs filling before someone is ready for the future role. What mentoring? What education? And what are we doing to do about it? […]
"Our job is closing that gap and holding ourselves accountable about whether we've given the talent the opportunities and progression we promised."
She added that succession planning should be scenario-based, rather than only role-based, mentioning a framework by management consultancy Gartner which factors in strategic scenarios – such as mergers and acquisition – and the timeline of candidates' readiness. Succession planners can then use this to select candidates for different scenarios.
"Whether you've been in HR for 10 years or 10 minutes, you know that succession plans change the moment you write them. This is how you plan for change," she said.
Use people-centric AI implementation for better design and uptake
"We need to use people-centric approaches to deploying AI," said Jo Pick, CPO of logistics firm Wincanton, arguing that HR should be as much involved in AI as departments like IT or operations.
"We need to keep humans in the loop [alongside educating them about the] governance of AI. I would argue that starts with HR. This would make sure AI deployments are fairer, more accurate and that people are held accountable for those deployments."
She emphasised the importance of transparency and trust, in order to help colleagues engage with AI: "We all hope AI doesn't start taking your jobs, but it will change them. As the saying goes, AI might not take your job but someone who knows about AI might. Be honest about how AI will likely impact jobs and how it will integrate into the work people do."
Collaborating with employees and those who will be using AI in their daily life is also crucial, she added: "This will help you understand how AI systems can be more convenient and more inclusive."
Read more: How AI can enhance HR compliance
AI + conversational intelligence = improved performance
James Swift, director of talent development for funding consultancy Leyton UK, explained how he drove improved skill adoption and productivity by tailoring AI-enabled technology that summarises conversations. Eager to identify success-enabling skills within the 3,000-strong global workforce, with a view to training less-high-achieving workers in those skills, Swift used AI technology to analyse employees’ conversations. This followed a manual process of interviewing employees.
Swift and his team used an AI tool to pick up on key words and phrases used by employees, out of which a set of success-enhancing skills were identified that Leyton’s HR team supported greater adoption of throughout the business. Using conversational intelligence, Swift was able to program the tech “to work out what [their] best people [were] doing, and scale that to impact performance”.
For HR leaders who are unsure where to start with regard to using AI to make improvements within their organisation, Swift advised learning about the legislation around AI, and the global picture, which filters down to organisational HR policy. Match that knowledge to your organisation, he urged, which will enable you to go to the rest of the C-suite and say: ‘We need an AI framework.’ “Start the conversation, and have the conversation [about AI],” he encouraged.
Five drivers of workplace misconduct
Providing examples from the many whistleblowing investigations he has overseen throughout the world, Paul de Montlebert, global HR investigator for the digital transformation and energy management business Schneider Electric, presented five drivers of workplace misconduct: company culture, feedback culture, intercultural challenges, excessive alcohol and emotional intelligence. “Stress, or [work-related] pressure, is not a root or direct cause of misconduct,” de Montlebert stated, stressing that this view was based on what he has experienced in his career.
“The most tricky of those drivers for HR is where there is a lack of emotional intelligence and empathy,” he said. He described the process of improving emotional intelligence within an organisation as an ongoing “lifetime challenge”. Robust training is part of the answer to this, de Montlebert suggested.
Read more: Off-the-record complaints and how to handle them
It's not all on HR to develop hybrid workers’ careers
HR leaders must empower managers and employees so that they can individually take charge of their career development while hybrid working, suggested Karen Fitzgerald, head of global mobility for the entertainment business Comcast NBC Universal, who was speaking as part of a panel discussion about how hybrid workers can advance their careers. “People sometimes forget that career development is personal,” she said.
“You are the one that has to take control and put the levers in place to develop your own career. That message has to come through from HR,” Fitzgerald continued. “It’s not the responsibility of my employer to get me promoted; I have to put myself in the right place, and do the work related to getting me to that next level. If that means I need to be in the office more, to be more available or visible, then that's what I need to do. If I'm fully remote, I need to speak to my leaders.”
When asked to provide one key takeaway for HR professionals who are navigating different working patterns within an organisation, Fitzgerald warned: “If you’ve got people on full-time remote working schedules, make sure they are in the [country you expect them to be in],” to avoid tax implications for the individual and regulatory risk to the company. “People believe that they can work anywhere, at any time. They really can’t.”
UK lags behind in genAI adoption
In the UK, 33% use generative AI (genAI) regularly, compared with the global average of 39%, explained Joanna Ritz, lead knowledge consultant for Boston Consulting Group (BCG), during an informative presentation based on BCG’s How Work Preferences Are Shifting in the Age of GenAI report (June 2024). Ritz added that young and highly educated people are the most likely to use genAI, both in the UK and globally.
Ritz shared several other insights and data analysis points, including that the genAI adoption rate is highest in the global south (India tops the list with 74% adoption.) In the UK, workers are generally aware but not afraid of genAI impacting their jobs. This perhaps explains why UK workers have below average willingness to reskill to new jobs.
Workers generally need guidance about what skills to learn to plug the gap that would mitigate against genAI impacting jobs, Ritz explained. They also need better learning programmes. “People may have the right tools; but do they know how to use it?” She asked, rhetorically, adding that training is key to ensuring that UK workers have the capability to keep up with tech advancements.
Leadership behaviours and strategic workforce planning should be key areas for HR to focus on when reskilling the workforce, Ritz suggested, though she also noted that reskilling should be leaders and managers’ responsibility, not just HR’s.
It's too early to measure AI’s ROI
In the final keynote of the day, Oliver King-Smith, founder of the technology business SmartR AI, stated that “measuring the return on investment of AI is a trap,” because it’s too new.
It is near impossible to calculate how AI will improve our lives, he suggested, comparing this to early predictions about spreadsheets: people couldn’t accurately predict how spreadsheets would change the way we work, when they were first introduced, King-Smith said.
Don’t make it your goal to bring AI into your company, King-Smith advised. Instead, start with what you want to achieve. It can be more useful to bring AI in to help on specific projects, said King-Smith, but “don’t blow the bank on it,” he warned; “choose sensible projects, reasonable cost structures, and figure out what works.”
