HR Zone

Recently I had a conversation with another client where, in order to create the culture change they need across the organisation, their HR Business Partner, HRBP team need to be much more confident in challenging, pushing back and shifting mindsets rather than just saying ‘yes’ to their business colleagues’ demands. It’s a conversation that comes up a lot. Overcoming this predicament may sound straightforward on paper but is harder to achieve than it sounds.

Summary: Nuffield Health was ordered to pay £150,000 after a tribunal found a pattern of poor treatment following an employee’s whistleblowing complaint. This acts as a reminder that these cases rarely come down to one bad decision, but a string of smaller ones nobody stepped in to fix.

When people are asked to reskill, they are not just learning new tools. They are relearning how to feel competent. As AI accelerates the pace of workplace change, experienced professionals face a particular challenge: the skills that earned them credibility over years or decades offer little advantage in mastering unfamiliar technology. Research suggests many older workers actually want AI training, but the deeper struggle is rarely about willingness.

Summary: Teams experience psychological safety and the organisation’s systems either support it or work against it. Recruitment is the first of those systems anyone experiences. Here’s how each of the five foundations of psychological safety shows up in recruitment. Recruitment gives people their first direct experience of an organisation, and it is where impressions of fairness, clarity and openness form.

In 2013 I joined my mum’s health and social care business. My role was within finance and HR. When my brother and I signed a management buyout, we became joint shareholders at the exact time the world closed down. The COVID-19 pandemic had arrived. We led our team through two older adult care homes in the Highlands. We kept COVID out for a considerable amount of time, while the rules around us changed weekly.

Summary: Investors are treating people strategy as a real performance signal. By connecting its work to financial results, focusing on a small number of priorities and showing one clear win. HR can prove its value to the business. Strong people practices are increasingly linked to stronger business performance. In fact, companies certified by Top Employers between 2018 and 2024 outperformed the market by 22.2 per cent over five years.

Summary: AI hasn’t cut anyone’s workload, it’s just made people produce more, faster. The problem is nobody’s changed what happens after: work still gets stuck in the same approvals, the same meetings, the same manager’s inbox. Unless organisations rethink those processes, all that saved time is lost. The conversation around AI at work is still largely focused on tools: Which platform should we buy? How quickly can we roll it out? How do we encourage more people to use it?

Most HR teams have spent a decent amount of time building a governance framework around AI use. They’ve: Drafted acceptable use policies Set rules about what data employees can feed into large language models (LLMs) Considered the risk of bias in AI-assisted hiring decisions Explored how they’ll protect the security of sensitive data when it’s exposed to third-party tools. That scepticism is well-placed. But that same scepticism is largely absent when AI shapes HR’s own purchasing decisions.

Summary: By reducing avoidable ambiguity, recognising that people do not all arrive with the same reserves of energy and designing teams where different people can contribute their strengths without carrying unnecessary hidden effort, managers can raise the quality of contribution across the whole team. She takes out the pack of sleeping medication, breaks one pill in half. Her hand pauses in front of her lips. Tomorrow she has to get up earlier because James rescheduled the meeting.

Summary: RTO mandates ignore how offices actually get used and often backfire, damaging morale and retention. Pinterest uses flexible hybrid work and occupancy data to design purpose-driven spaces, proving attendance should follow engagement, not force it. Studies suggest that flexible working policies not only promote wellbeing but also don’t negatively impact performance.