HR and Diversity

Another really good post from Sukh. My organisation is one that has a huge level of diversity across most of it areas of work, including HR, which I have noticed for us means that we don’t often talk able diversity, simply because it is part of our day to day life, our corporate DNA so to speak. What I do find interesting is that Sukh has hit the nail on the head, when I think about my networks and connections and the conferences I attend outside of the organisation. We are all for the most past, either white middle aged men or women. I am not sure however that this means that diversity doesn’t matter to HR or that if diversity did matter HR would look very different. It might mean that as a profession we are not working hard enough to encourage people from diverse backgrounds not only to enter the profession but to want to share their experiences at conferences and such and work towards leadership roles. I agree that we should reach out more and do more to encourage people from diverse backgrounds and not just for legislative reasons or the like, but because highly diverse workplaces can really encourage different ways of thinking and doing things.

Thinking About Learning

After an enjoyable couple of days at the CIPD Annual Conference and Exhibition, I’m quite buoyed about the growing understanding amongst HR professionals to innovate their practice, and how to make their practice more human centred. There were great stories from companies who insist on their managers being of the same level and with no extra pay than the people reporting into them, stories of companies who gave their staff breakfast everyday, stories of purposeful mentoring programmes to help women achieve senior levels, and stories of how to cultivate managers to be their best authentic selves.

And as I reflect, I’m struck at just how far down the agenda diversity is. Not in terms of the conference or exhibition – there were a good range of topics to address diversity, and a good number of exhibitors who were concerned about raising awareness of various topics about diversity.

Here are the…

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Creating a Learning Culture

Creating an Organisational Learning Culture

or a framework that captures how an organisation thinks about learning can be quite challenging, if for no other reason than, there are a lot of pieces to the puzzle.  While creating or providing the strategic direction is clearly the role of executive and senior management, but how these members of articulate and reinforce that message, and what it means, needs to be as clear and as simple as possible.

So how do we create a culture in which learning is valued and promoted and seen as an integral part of the business, rather than just an add on that can be ignored, or not taken seriously.  You need to be able to show how learning functions sit with the organisation and what the purpose of creating this culture is.  As I have said before, I think that I have it a little easier than most when it comes to this as the organisation that I work for has ‘Leading through Learning’ as one of its central values, and as an L&D person that makes my job much easier when it is there in front of everyone’s face.  Having a model which explains how learning fits in and how the organisation view and seeks to create a learning culture to help immensely and serves as a way to articulating the vision for learning within and organisation;

A model like this simply explains the various parts of the puzzle that lead to the development of a learning culture.  From here it then becomes an issue of expanding what each of the parts of the model mean within your particular organisation, who is responsible for them and how they are supported.