HR Zone

I am often asked by small business owners whether AI would be right for handling their HR processes. For smaller teams where HR is often not a priority, getting tasks done with AI saves time and cuts costs. Which makes it seem like a no brainer when you’re busy trying to run a business. However, it does come with risks. I asked AI to write a simple absence policy that could be used by a small business in the UK.

Psychological safety provides fertile soil in which confidence can grow. The emphasis is on learning rather than proving. There is mutual trust and respect among team members, which creates a sense of confidence that no one will be rejected, embarrassed or punished for speaking up or making a mistake. Team members can be counted on to help each other, without agenda or judgement.

The most common questions from client conversations that prompted our global study into High Impact Employee Experience were: How can we move the needle on employee engagement? Where should we be focusing to keep pace with transformation? What are leading organisations doing differently?

Summary: The engagement issue can’t be fixed with another survey or campaign or another wellbeing push. What needs to be addressed is the widening gap between what organisations ask leaders to hold and the capacity they have developed to hold it. The instinct for HR is to call sinking engagement a culture problem and reach for the familiar responses: another survey, a refreshed values campaign, a wellbeing push. This isn’t wrong, but it doesn’t address what is driving the decline.

Summary: Employees do not disengage because the technology failed. They disengage because the signal stopped meaning anything. By addressing governance, clarity and reach, we can begin to address disengagement. Global employee engagement has fallen for two consecutive years. It now sits at 20 per cent according to Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report. This is the lowest since 2020, and is costing the world economy an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity.

For the last two years, organisations have become consumed by artificial intelligence. Boards have approved multimillion-pound investments, CEOs have placed AI at the centre of their growth strategies and investors have increasingly rewarded organisations that can demonstrate a credible AI vision. The expectation from many is that AI will finally unlock the productivity gains that organisations have been seeking for decades. In many ways, the optimism is justified.

Summary: The organisations that succeed in the next phase of AI will be the ones who combine technological efficiency with human judgement most effectively. This requires strong data foundations, clear guardrails and leadership teams willing to approach AI with ambition and discipline. The conversation around AI in the workplace has long been framed as a zero-sum game: humans vs machines. But that framing increasingly feels outdated.

Summary: HR’s role is to hold the mirror up. Not to judge or fix. To reflect back what the organisation can’t see about itself. Here are the questions HR should be asking. I was cold. Stacking shelves at Sainsbury’s. In and out of the industrial chillers. Something needed to change. So I knocked on the door of the Personnel office and asked for a job. That accident set me on a 20-year path through HR. I worked in contact centres, local government, banking, and wealth management.

Summary: Organisations that normalised excessive effort created the conditions they now label as disengagement. HR leaders should design sustainable work, be honest about trade-offs before hiring and measure lived experience rather than sentiment. HR has spent years misreading this. Reduced discretionary effort gets labelled a motivation problem. Employees are ‘disengaged’, ‘checked out’, ‘quiet quitting’. The language implies fault. The data points elsewhere.

Summary: While organisations are investing more than ever in leadership development for women, many women are still burning out, stepping back or leaving leadership roles altogether. We need to align leadership with how people actually sustain performance over time. Organisations are investing more than ever in leadership development for women. The intention is clear: support progression, improve representation and create more inclusive workplaces.