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Four ways to respond to workforce disruption

By Jane Sunley + Jo Harley, Co-Founders Purple Cubed It’s fair to say that in these VUCA times, HR faces more disruption than ever before as digitisation gallops ahead in its sophistication and impact. According to McKinsey, the changes presented are ‘akin to coping with the large-scale shift from agricultural work to manufacturing that occurred in the early 20th century’. No challenge there then…  This surge in workforce disruption is largely driven by increased competition, technological transformation and ever-widening customer expectations. In their recent Global Talent Trends Summary, Mercer cite the current seven most significant human capital risks as:  Excessive time taken to fill vacancies  Low or declining employee engagement  Inadequate diversity  Weak leadership pipeline  Ineffective hiring decisions  Lagging production [surely [...]

2019-05-09T16:32:35+01:00 May 8th, 2019|

A geek-free guide to AI for business leaders (a three minute read)

By Jane Sunley business author and founder, Purple Cubed Artificial Intelligence (AI) has existed conceptually since the 1950s, when the brilliant computer scientist Alan Turin predicted that by the year 2000, computers would be able to pass as humans in an online conversation. However, it’s only relatively recently become relevant and reliable enough to be adopted seriously by businesses. Before people start panicking that robots are taking their jobs, over-taking their intelligence or threatening to bring about end of the world, it’s important to know what we’re dealing with here. In simple terms, there are three categories of AI: Narrow [...]

2019-02-15T11:12:16+01:00 February 11th, 2019|

Change series blog (7): Clarity fuels businesses – kicking off a successful approach

Clarity has always been a business imperative; perhaps, never more so than in these times of great challenge, rapidity and change. The ability to simplify the complex is an essential skill for leaders at all levels – for organisation, team and individual. Yet so many businesses suffer from ambiguity, leading to employee disengagement, customer dissatisfaction, inefficiency, lack of innovation and inability to adapt, all of which are potentially detrimental to the bottom line. Making things simple is tough; yet it’s something that deserves thought, effort and, probably, a change of approach. It starts at the top: People need to [...]

2019-05-09T11:05:04+01:00 November 9th, 2018|

The Ultimate employee engagement score (a three minute ‘how to’ read)

Service businesses are worrying about candidate shortages, labour turnover and how they're going to fuel profitability and growth with such a shortfall of people. It’s clear that employee engagement drives customer satisfaction, which, in turn, impacts bottom line profits. There is also a clear correlation between managerial effectiveness and engagement levels, which goes on to impact the retention and morale of existing teams and, therefore, a company's ability to attract great people. By optimising people practices, leadership capability and accountability for engagement, together with clear ‘people KPIs’, the value add from your people is very likely to increase exponentially. However, [...]

2018-09-19T11:31:01+01:00 September 19th, 2018|

Why you need joined up people systems (and how to do it…)

By Tom Lake, Product Manager at Purple Cubed HR software has evolved and changed over the years, with a dazzling array of cool apps now on the market. The need to adopt a joined-up, streamlined approach has, therefore, become increasingly important and a top priority for businesses across all industries. From simplifying processes to full-scale automation, companies are starting to realise that without integration, there can be no digital transformation. If systems aren’t aligned, it can be a time consuming and costly process to manage everything individually. More and more tech companies are coming together via APIs (application programme [...]

2019-03-19T13:56:14+01:00 August 13th, 2018|

THE CHANGE SERIES #2 Getting the most out of your people tech

Jane Sunley, business author, CEO + Founder of Purple Cubed  For organisations of all types and sizes, digitising the ‘people stuff’ will bring about numerous benefits. You’d expect it to help you save time and cost though, used correctly and with commitment, it will also help with recruitment and selection, with employee engagement and retention, with communication, creativity, recognition, health and wellbeing, with growing capability, with leadership, with enabling people to progress, contribute and drive their careers – the list goes on… However, investing in people tech is seen by many as a potentially risky and expensive business and [...]

2018-04-24T10:47:10+01:00 March 27th, 2018|

Business leaders failing to drive change

This article originally appeared in HR Magazine - Business leaders failing to drive change Leaders are reluctant to make changes in their organisations, research from Purple Cubed has revealed The research found that, while employers recognise challenges within their businesses, few felt they were able to take action through investing in new ideas, instead choosing cost-cutting, risk-averse approaches. In its qualitative research Purple Cubed found that of the 60 leaders interviewed, few saw managing change as a priority. The majority saw the economy and political climate as the biggest risk to their organisations. Furthermore, many leaders felt too overwhelmed by [...]

2018-04-12T10:11:08+01:00 March 15th, 2018|

WHAT TO DO INSTEAD OF THE ANNUAL APPRAISAL

Over the last couple of years there’s been a lot of debate about scrapping the annual appraisal. In fact, the mere word almost always conjures up negative connotations. Shoulders sag, people sigh. Yet progression, development and communication are key drivers for today’s employee. And attracting, engaging, developing and retaining great people is a priority for any business. It’s therefore vital to make sure the right dialogue is happening, with the right frequency, in a way that creates energy and enthusiasm – no more negatives. How the annual appraisal earned its sad reputation In the past, the annual appraisal concentrated [...]

2018-03-07T09:37:37+01:00 February 19th, 2018|

CONTEMPORARY LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT – The HR Revolution #7

You probably know Purple Cubed as a boutique HR consultancy, or perhaps for our award-winning technology. However when we started out (in 2001) we also used to deliver rather good Learning and Development and, for a number of years, e-learning. However, given the changing world, we realised that most traditional learning was no longer effective and so we changed our development business model to one of facilitation, group coaching and enabling people to deliver their own great stuff. Which is how it should be because the majority of today’s workforce want: Bite sized, just-in-time learning Coaching and mentoring Easy, [...]

2018-02-08T13:33:02+01:00 February 8th, 2018|