Insights

Redefining HR Functions Amid the Evolution of the Workplace

The main point is that the pandemic shone a light on the need to ensure greater engagement and empowerment of employees. Almost for the first time, employees realized that they are in charge of their own destinies, so Martina Mangion says, we as HR teams need to be more competitive in how we attract, recruit, engage with and retain those employees. People now move laterally not just upwards if a competing role has better conditions or benefits. So upskilling has also become more important than ever before. On top of that, it is crucial that we have a diverse workforce …

Paris Armstrong Workforce, Skills and Capability

1 Sep 2022

INDUSTRY TRENDS

Strategies to Attract and Retain the Next Generation of Leaders for Tomorrow’s Public Sector

In the forgotten past, people were happy to have a job and often stayed in their roles for many years even if they didn’t really enjoy what they were doing. In the last few decades this started to change and now, especially after the pandemic, the job alone is not enough to sustain employees. It is about the workforce and the workplace as much as the work itself. For instance, the demographics of most workplaces will soon change with the retirement of the baby-boomers and incoming of the next generation who have a different priority as they join the workforce. …

Paris Armstrong Workforce, Skills and Capability

31 Aug 2022

WHITEPAPERS & REPORTS

HR & Future of Work Roadshow 2022 Highlights

The work of government and the way government works is changing, yet there continues to be a preoccupation with cost optimisation, cost reduction, and sustainable cost management. This has required HR to play its part, largely through making the HR function more efficient, but not necessarily more effective. The people aspect in government organisations contains some truly business-critical issues and the need for HR to rise to these challenges has never been more acute.

Teresa Anderson Workforce, Skills and Capability

17 Aug 2022

INDUSTRY TRENDS

Powering Performance in the Public Sector

This is where Te Ao Māori (the Māori worldview) might come in handy. “Our visions look 150 to 300 years into the future because we look at intergenerational well-being.” Māori traditions don’t always align with western culture, “but our people can generally connect to purpose, even in lieu of a vision, because many of us understand how to help achieve an organisation’s purpose.” “Being able to achieve a purpose is very important when the structure of an organisation is extremely complicated. The NZTE is the trading arm of New Zealand’s government, and has “about 800 staff operating in 52 international …

Lily Stokes Workforce, Skills and Capability

12 Aug 2022

INTERVIEWS

Inspiring Communities Spotlight Interview

Inspiring Communities, a not-for-profit organization based in Nova Scotia, is an equity-centered systems change leader in Atlantic Canada. We recognize that our current systems and institutions don’t work for the people who need them most. We believe that collective action is essential, so we innovatively connect communities. We create collaborative systems partnerships and measure our impact. To ensure our effectiveness and sustainability, we maintain a strong core. We engage in reflective evaluation practices to learn from our experiments, integrate that learning into our work, and share what we’ve learned through our regional and national networks. Our initial funders from the …

Madeson Darcy Workforce, Skills and Capability

29 Jun 2022

INDUSTRY TRENDS

Improving Leadership Representation for Women from Diverse Backgrounds

The following ten rules are based specifically on Senator Jaffer’s experience, but she says they are particularly important if you want to break down barriers. That is a very difficult thing to do, but it is much easier than it was 50 years ago. Moreover, there is a much bigger group of women in the public service these days, verging on 50%, but there is still not the diversity of backgrounds in the parliament or in the public service as there is in general society, so there is still a lot of work to do in order to get the …

Lily Stokes Workforce, Skills and Capability

16 Jun 2022

INDUSTRY TRENDS

New Ways of Working

It is fair to say that the last two years have been rather tumultuous for much of Eastern Australia. In NSW in particular there were bushfires in late 2019, the pandemic that started in 2020, the floods of early 2021, and then the Delta strain of the pandemic in the second half of 2021. Nicole Grice, the Director of People, Performance, and Culture at the NSW Department of Planning, Industry, and Environment (DPIE), says that “we have been operating in a heightened crisis mode for two years now.” DPIE has been at the centre of much of the state’s response …

Lily Stokes Workforce, Skills and Capability

8 Apr 2022

INDUSTRY TRENDS

Future of Learning and Development Insights

As such, the only way to embed L&D is through continuous and ongoing learning. At the APSC they are “adopting a continuous learning model to enable our workforce to build the critical capabilities needed to do their best work today, and the ability to learn and adapt at the speed of change.” At ESTA, Shannon Pigram says that they too are adopting an ongoing learning approach. It is about “ensuring that there are constant conversations about it and that little challenges that occur with a number of little initiatives. We then look at leveraging those against our existing workflow and …

Lily Stokes Workforce, Skills and Capability

5 Apr 2022