In “HR Trends for 2025: Part 3 Organisational Tactics,” we explore the tactical strategies that organisations need to thrive in a rapidly changing world. This episode highlights the critical role of HR execution, the emergence of antifragile workforces, and the importance of managers in fostering innovation and engagement. Discover how to align strategic goals with operational success, and gain insights into creating adaptable workplaces that turn challenges into opportunities. Stay tuned as we continue to unpack the future of HR in this transformative series.

What does it take for organisations to thrive amidst the challenges of talent disruptions and technological change?

In this final episode of my three-part series unpacking AIHR’s HR Trends Report for 2025, I run through the tactical strategies organisations need to not just survive but succeed in a world defined by constant evolution.

We’ll talk about why execution in HR is everything, how antifragile workforces can emerge stronger from challenges, and the critical role of managers in driving engagement and innovation. You’ll gain ideas on creating adaptable, agile workplaces that thrive on reinvention and turn disruption into opportunity.

Don’t miss the chance to discover how HR can lead the way in shaping a future-ready workforce that embraces change and innovation.

What’s one tactic your organisation has embraced to create a more adaptable workplace? We’d love to hear your ideas, connect with us on LinkedIn to share your thoughts!

In this episode we cover:

  • Introduction to the theme: thriving amidst disruption in talent and technology
  • Why HR execution is critical for success in 2025
  • The role of tactical HR teams in bringing strategic goals to life
  • Examples of execution failures and their impact on organisations
  • The concept of antifragile workforces and their benefits
  • Upskilling HR professionals to develop T-shaped competencies
  • Leveraging data and technology to streamline HR processes
  • Embedding HR in the business to align with core operations
  • The role of managers in driving employee engagement and innovation
  • Employee Engagement 2.0: addressing systemic challenges and redefining strategies

Resources mentioned in this episode

 

More about Reimagining HR

Have you ever hoped for someone to save you time and effort by sorting through the overwhelming amount of HR content and letting you know what deserves your attention?

Join HR Game Changer Trina Sunday as she challenges conventional HR practices and dives straight into the heart of what matters. After two decades in HR, Trina understands the struggle of feeling time-poor and uninspired. She uses her knack for connection and facilitating meaningful storytelling to bring fresh perspectives from global thought leaders and real people who’ve been where you are.

From successes to setbacks, she’ll navigate it all as we strive for happy and healthy people and workplaces. Reimagining HR is your shortcut to meaningful insights and strategies that truly make a difference.

Connect with us at Reimagine HR:

EPISODE 23: HR Trends for 2025: Part 3 Organisational Tactics

Trina Sunday: This is the final episode in a three part series where I unpack, AIHR’s HR trend report for 2025. This final episode looks at the tactics organisations can use to respond to disruptions in talent and technology and how they’ll determine who’s going to succeed and who’s going to struggle in 2025. I’m talking about HR execution, embedding ourselves in the business, the anti fragile worker, and Employee Engagement 2.0.

Welcome to Reimagining HR with Trina Sunday, the rule breaking podcast where we challenge our thinking and our current people practises. This podcast is for time poor HR teams and business leaders who are feeling the burn, lacking laughs and not feeling the love. I’m Trina, your host and I’m here to cut through the bs, explore different ways of thinking and create high impact HR functions because happier, healthier organisations are better for our people and our bottom line. So if you are keen to flip traditional HR on its head, hit the follow or subscribe button so you’re the first to know when new episodes drop. I’m, here to help and also to shake things up. So let’s get started.

This is the final episode in a three part series where I’m looking at the AIHR HR Trends report for 2025. Yes, it’s all about embracing disruption, but in this episode I’m talking about the tactics needed for the organisation to thrive, for your organisation to thrive. And the way that we respond to disruptions in talent and technology is really going to determine who’s going to succeed and who’s going to flail in 2025. And businesses really need to be focusing on creating a really adaptable agile workplace and proactively developing strategies to anticipate the future challenges, right, and the opportunities. We know that as strategic business partners. But it’s not always easy to do. And so effectively executing on these tactics is going to be essential as businesses seek to harness disruption to really be a catalyst for innovation and for their growth. And so in adopting forward thinking approaches, organisations can thrive by turning disruption really into a driving force for reinvention. Most great reinvention and inventions come from really taking something that’s disruptive or not working and turning it on its head. One of the things that AIHR are talking about is that HR execution is going to be king in 2025. I would say queen. HR execution though, is going to be your driving, driving, driving, driving force. strategic HR is often seen as this pinnacle of HR work, right? We have this kind of quest to be strategic HR business partners. But in reality, and not to take away from all of that, because if we’re not strategic, then what the hell are we doing? But it’s the tactical execution of HR policies and initiatives that are equally critical to your organization’s success. Right? And a lot of the time it is where we fall over. The devil’s in the detail, we fall over at execution. And so tactical HR teams are the ones that bring strategic ideas to life.

It’s our operational HR colleagues who are taking some of those strategic ideas and transforming them into really actionable results. And that’s what’s going to ensure the success of people related initiatives. Right. It’s why OD and HR have to work hand in hand the design with the relevant, like your HR operational teams know what’s going to work on the ground with the business or what barriers there might be. And organisational development as a discipline is based on evidence design and thinking. So we need to use more of that qualitative feedback from our frontline HR colleagues. But what happens when execution goes wrong? Right, Great execution draws little attention and it’s tactical HR that drives business outcomes. But when execution’s bad, it really shows. So like in 2017, Uber’s failure to kind of address sexual harassment led to a, massive, massive damage to the company culture. The CEO subsequently left. We’ve heard that before and there was lots of public reputation scandals. Right. So 2025 is going to be the year of great execution. And it’s the year where AIHR talk about HR’s true impact being realised when the strategy and the execution are working really seamlessly, hand in hand. So strategic HR obviously is providing direction long term goals, while our tactical operational HR ensures that they are implemented through really well executed policies, processes and daily practises. But more than that, it’s all of those people practises resonating with employees at all levels, which is where the execution really comes to life. But for us to be able to kind of make that happen, we have to give tactical HR the tools and the support to be able to implement key strategic goals. So I feel like we’re not really great at this. Like we need to promote cross functional collaboration in spades. Like we need to reshape the narrative around tactical HR and we need to encourage teamwork across different specialties of hr, whether it’s talent acquisition or employee relations or learning and development. We need to break down our own silos, right, and create really great tactical people solutions that Ah are going to address complex and real business challenges not perceived but tested to be true. So we need an integrated approach that’s going to give us really cohesive people practises that are going to work across the whole employee lifecycle. pre onboarding, onboarding, we’ve got the whole recruitment performance the whole way around the circle and that’s what’s going to result in less fragmented HR service delivery. Like our customers are going to feel the cohesiveness if it’s coming from a place of cohesive development. And I’ve talked before in other episodes around building T shaped competencies. So T shaped HR teams.

For example, Natal Dunk talks about this AI HR have their own model and obviously we’ll have everything in the show notes for every episode that I’m talking about here. But we really need to develop HR professionals with a really deep expertise in their specialty area. But really combine it with a broad understanding of related HR functions and the business overall. Like we can’t just be really good at the bit that’s our patch, right? We have to understand how our puzzle piece fits in with all of the other puzzle pieces and how pulling which lever is going to make a difference. There’s a lot of metaphors in one message there, but that’s what’s going to result in us in HR being able to facilitate collaboration with stakeholders outside of the HR function, but also within. But it also means that we need to combine business acumen, digital agility, our data literacy, people advocacy and our executional excellence with the thing that we’re really good at, our specialism, our craft. And so the business acumen is around our commercial understanding. It’s about understanding our customers, it’s understanding how the business makes money, what’s happening in that space, our digital agility in terms of these competencies, that’s about our appetite and our understanding of technology, understanding what digitisation is going to mean, what our capacity is to learn those tools and to be able to adapt. And I talked in the first episode in this three part series about how that digital transformation is going to be absolutely critical. It’s not a future facing thing. Digital transformation is our business reality now. And if HR are not showing and turning up with that digital agility and ability, then we’re not going to be able to shift things forward. The third one there was data literacy. So understanding our people, analytics, understanding the storytelling behind the data, understanding qualitative and quantitative, both the numbers and the gold nuggets in the open ended questions where People tell us stuff, we can do something with all of that and build it into our job design.

We obviously need to be really good at people advocacy, understanding what’s fair, understanding what’s just, looking after the rights of workers, but also balancing that against the business acumen in terms of the need. But then the final one in that T shaped competency was executional excellence. That’s doing the things we’re going to do, doing it consistently, doing it well, not falling over and telling people that this is how we roll and then not doing it that way. So we need all of those competencies to line up the, and complement whatever our specialism is, whether that’s employee relations, whether that’s learning and development, whether that’s talent acquisition, whatever it is, we need to make sure that we’ve got other competencies to sit alongside that. And what will help us then, this is where our social and our emotional intelligence can really help, is we need to resource our teams effectively. Like we’re expecting operational HR teams that have been leaned up to do phenomenal things and to execute lots of stuff. Well, can’t do that if they don’t have any resources. So what does that look like, though? It’s not always people, but having the necessary resources would be time, not saying, oh, we need this phenomenal thing. You’ve got two weeks and it’s a two month project at best. People need headcount. The number of clients I have that are trying to work miracles, especially as we look at mergers and acquisitions. That’s really interesting.

At the moment you’re seeing different groups come together and HR teams where you might have five in one area of a business and 20 in another. And as they merge, some of those disparity or the, the disconnect in the resourcing is really evident. But we also, when we think about resourcing, it’s the software tools, it’s the budget. So we can’t expect HR to innovate or to digitise, process or enhance and adapt with AI if we’re not investing in those tools for HR teams. So we need to look at that. And, the adequate staffing means that, yep, the team can manage their workload, but the right technology is going to be what streamlines our processes and procedures. Right. So with a sufficient budget, your HR team’s going to be more successfully able to execute key projects and address what the business needs are. Ah, like, makes sense, right? Not sure why we have to say it over and over, but what we don’t do very well is use our data to show what impact we have on bottom line business performance. And that’s where we need to level up when we’re looking at our resources. We know that chatbots also drive efficiency, right? And the Boston Consulting Group used a reference, I think, where they talked about balancing human and AI strategy so that it can boost HR productivity by 30% and dramatically improve self service capability. So taking out all of those queries to HR that someone can look up themselves, all of that, how do I do this thing? People can navigate that themselves, talk to the chatbot to help get them to the policy, to the resource, to the form, to the system where they can do what they need to do so that HR can then focus on the things that they need to focus on. And so all of these things are elements around how we can resource tactical HR teams. And maybe having a chatbot is going to be what’s going to help you. But I have lots of resistance to that in HR forums that I’m in where it’s kind of we’re in human resources and we’re taking the human out and we’re replacing ourselves with a robot. Someone calling you and asking, where do I find Form 1.6 leave application is not a quality connection moment in my mind. They’re not the moments that matter. And so I embrace the idea and the concepts around chatbots, automation and AI in the spaces where we are not having meaningful connections or making a meaningful difference. I don’t mean at a time where someone needs us and they need the human touch and we’re like, oh no, talk to the chatbot. That’s not what I’m talking about here. And so I think by actually embracing chatbots as an opportunity to get people access to information, essentially then that frees us up to do the more impactful work. And so with that there’s lots of customers that I know and AIHR have talked about this as well is looking at embedding their HR professionals in the business. And so Chros are regularly attending board meetings and 43% have reported an increase in their interactions with the board.

In addition, CEOs agree that HR will be more important to the business in the future. So everyone’s saying that 2025 is the year of HR going beyond being an advisor and being a really integral part of the team that they support. And I see that as a really unrealised potential, to be honest, and probably something I’ve been talking about for 10 years also, to be honest, since I Started kind of and left Australia to do the work that I was doing overseas in 2014. But there is a big gap that persists between HR’s strategic potential and, and our perceived contribution to business outcomes. So to close the gap we’re now starting to see a rise in HR teams actively participating in business solutions rather than pushing HR solutions for the business. And so that’s design thinking that’s looking at us solving the right problems, testing what the business problem is before we design our solutions. And really that it’s the people element driving a business strategy, not not driving a HR agenda. Right. And for us if we’re embedded in the business then we can be driving excellence by using our role to increase how we’re linking it all together. Like our role is increasingly intertwined with the business unit’s core operations. People are what makes businesses work and what makes businesses profit. And so our role in HR is becoming increasingly woven into that. And so by embedding HR peeps into operational processes and day to day decision making of teams, HR is ensuring solutions and policies that are integrated with the business processes and aligned to the way they do work to meet the goals that they need to meet. And there’s always been this kind of debate around centralised versus decentralised HR business partner models for examp, but I think there’s an element of both that’s needed here.

Embedment helps you build relationships, understand a business and understand what the real pain points are that are happening on the ground for your operational workforce. But at the same time you need to remain connected to your HR peers and your broader HR portfolio to understand the impact and your collective impact, where you’re going to need to be moving in the same direction to maximise the impact for the organisation. Not all going off and doing everyone’s own thing. Right. And so there’s a requirement for us to be able to get that balance right. And so when we look at it, I think really it’s HR becoming a really key part of the business value chain. But for us to be really valued beyond us being the HR people, people we need to upskill beyond our core HR skills. So effective upskilling means developing that T shaped HR professional that I talked about where we have these phenomenally powerful skills that sit across the top of the T, that’s where the business acumen is, our digital ability, our evidence based decision making, our people advocacy and our execution excellence. Those sit across the top of the T, right horizontally. If you go down vertically, the T that’s where your specialism is. Talent acquisition, employee relations, people analytics, hr, business partnering, whatever your specialism is, that’s what’s down the vertical aspect. But for us to have both a deep expertise in our specific HR area, but also a broad understanding of business operations, culture and data, we need to blend them both. And by blending the skills, it’s going to allow us to create more tailored people centric solutions, right, that are actually going to solve problems and help the business. So we will need to implement cross department rotations.

In my mind, I believe that we need to be getting firsthand experience in really different aspects of the business. Go work in IT for a bit, go work in finance for a bit, go get on the tools for a bit. Not really, but you’re going to be in the environment because obviously there’s safety issues, but the spaces that you can be in, those are spaces you should go into. And so by upskilling beyond core HR skills, you will be able to demonstrate the value that you will add to the business. And for me it’s about moving away from some of these generic HR programmes. Then like we need to intentionally break down the silos between HR and the business by obviously working with the people managers. But we need to be able to tailor initiatives to meet different needs. It’s not the one size fits all. And we need to be able to look at what’s happening across different departments or business units that use our data driven insights to empower leaders to make informed decisions, use our data driven insights to understand where we need to partner better or build different relationships for us to be able to take on a broader functional support role. And clearly defining roles and responsibilities is at the core of all of this. Right? If we’re going to establish a new working relationship with line managers and delineate the responsibility of the people leader in us in hr, then we need to ensure that people management remains a core responsibility of the managers to stop doing their job. But we know that those people leaders will say, but that’s your job, you’re not providing us a good service, you never do anything to add value. Or we need to show where we do add the value. So we need to provide the support and the guidance rather than doing all the doing.

But therein is, if we harness digitization and AI to help us with the doing, then our customers might not then be absorbing workload back. Let’s reshape our processes, be very clear in the delineation of responsibilities, but make things less administratively burdensome. so that people don’t hate on us. So by working closely with line managers and other leaders, we can help drive people excellence. And those are things that are going to enhance the organisation’s effectiveness, meaning getting outcomes, employee engagement and strategic business alignment. We’re going to put our effort in the right place at the right time to make sure things are happening. And we know, for example, like if we look at that delineation, like more than half of chros that AIHR have surveyed or have data on, they want to shift decision making power in HR processes completely over to line managers. Over half of us are saying that, which means that we don’t have that delineation of responsibility. Right? But part of what’s complicating that is that we’ve got really misaligned perceptions about who should be doing what. Right. So 80% of C suite members, they believe that their managers are able to manage employee relations issues, but probably only 40% of us share that view. So I don’t know how often you had thought, oh, well, we can’t have the manager do that, they’re going to mess it up, we’ll end up in fair work or, or, well, how do we bridge the gap if we’ve got this misaligned perception and we think managers should be taking responsibility for X, well, how do we equip them to take responsibility for X without us creating a massive issue for ourselves and the organisation? Aoi, HR are also talking in the, HR Trends report for 2025 about the antifragile worker. So it’s a concept they’ve used and I’ve talked about before and I’m still trying to figure out, to be honest, how I feel about it. But it’s a bit different to traditional resilience. Like, the antifragile worker, we’re talking about constant change, overwork, economic uncertainty, high cost of living, the job insecurity. All of these things are taxing on our employees who are exhausted and stressed out and burnt out. And I know many that have got to the end of 2024 and are feeling this, feeling this, it is amplified. But antifragility is rising to the top as the answer to developing a workforce that grows stronger through challenges. And AIHR are talking about the fact that antifragility is getting some real traction.

So the concept of antifragility is kind of like how you can help people with these challenges. And unlike traditional resilience, antifragility doesn’t withstand shocks. Rather it actively gains strength from turmoil. From capitalising on disruptions and using challenges to grow in strength. And so there’s a school of thought around antifragility being used as part of a workforce strategy. So it’s an interesting concept where it’s like, I’m not sure how the language would translate, if embedded strongly in Australia, but it’s an interesting reflection to have where if antifragility addresses social and structural factors, turning adversity into an opportunity for growth. Well, HR is implementing anti fragility strategies, right? And the goal is an environment in which growth and adaptability are prioritised and where we empower employees to thrive throughout their careers. And so really it’s kind of how do we then reshape our workplaces to make sure that people can do that? And we would really have to kind of develop a workforce that grows stronger through challenges. So it’s like, how the hell do you do that? So part of what AI HR talk about is upskilling beyond the technical skills, right? So focus on developing employee soft skills. Hate that term. They’re like critical skills, human skills as Beth and Wynne would call them. Focus on developing employees critical skills like adaptability, emotional intelligence, collaboration, problem solving and a growth mindset M to support that long term employability. And it’s equipping employees to anticipate future challenges through scenario planning and encourage risk taking and really active experimentation through cross functional projects and innovation labs, hackathons, that kind of thing. And I must admit, it is actually a really interesting space because I do this through some of the HR programmes at Reimagine HR Drive, especially our HR breakthrough experience, different customised experiences where we go into organisations or we bring people together and we talk about throwing out the HR rulebook, we talk about a scenario that’s on the table and we rip it apart and we look at how we would take greater risk rather than looking at the problem with our traditional or really conservative approach. And it opens up thinking and growth in people every single time. So there is merit in this. I think the challenge for us is how to look at antifragility as a concept is also, something where people just hear fragile, they don’t hear the antifragile. And then when we’re looking at developing a workforce that grows stronger through challenges, well, what does that look like in practise? So, yep, we need to upskill everyone on the human skills.

We need to road test it by scenario planning and saying what if we did this and see what happens? But we need to do it by having different people in the room, not just our little HR team or our big HR team, depending on who you work for, but we also need to reevaluate performance and foster that safe environment for innovation. Oh my goodness. The cultures in many of our organisations and many that I’ve worked with over the years as a consultant, we don’t have cultures in our organisations that foster innovation. We’re not fostering failure as being an option. It’s not being viewed as a learning opportunity and we’re not encouraging kind of that rapid iteration. And I talk about that a lot in hr, circles around. Iterate, iterate. Stop trying to build this big bohemia that’s perfect. Iterate small iterations, get it right, work with your customers. But we have to create a safe space for that risk taking. And you kind of then need to incentivise resilience, right? Like you kind of need to give people some skin in the game for failing, fast failing forward and knowing they’re going to be supported for it, not disciplined for it. how do we recognise continuous learning and reward innovation instead of these traditional outputs which half the time aren’t actually impacting our performance anyway? That’s where you can create an environment where employees feel safe to experiment. They’re more likely be taking calculated risks and learning from failures. And so examples that we talk about in some of our work are innovation labs running pilot projects. Don’t come out and tell everyone you’re changing the world. Come out and say we want to run a pilot project on a new performance review process. Choose an ally. Do you mind if we pilot it in your area? We’d really love to get some feedback and see if this is a better fit for you. Pilot projects show it works, build your advocates along the way, then get everyone else wanting it as opposed to you pushing it onto them. And cross functional team collaborations are everything in this. Getting the non traditional people around the table is key in terms of us actually developing a workforce that’s going to be stronger through challenges because you have the different perspectives. Your risk taking and your risk assessments can happen quicker. But to do that we really do need to encourage really healthy work life boundaries as well. So I’m thinking about creating antifragile workplaces. We have to recognise then the link between wellbeing and productivity. So if stress and burnout at work is resulting in depression, anxiety and really serious physical health symptoms as well, aihr, talk about the fact that that’s costing like a trillion dollars in losses and we’ve worked back through some of the source data like it is huge. And when you do talk to people around the rapid amount of burnout that is turning up in our organisations, I don’t know that that’s going to be far off, to be honest. But we have to provide employees with the space to recharge and to maintain their productivity and antifragility over the long term. And that’s a space that I feel like we’re not investing in enough. So we know that 4 in 10 people report feeling burnt out at work like it is a growing workplace crisis. And I did a burnout episode on the podcast with Kelly Swingler recently. She’s a burnoutologist in the uk. And we know that burnout in the HR profession, we’re in one of the top four professions for burnout globally. And so if this is you or you feel like it’s a growing crisis in your team, I really encourage you to lean into that episode. But we know as well that as this kind of evolves, employee satisfaction is going to decline. only 43% of workers say their organisations left them feeling better when they left than when they started. Like, only 43% of our workers feel like they’ve come out the other side of working for our organisation in a better spot than how they came in. So if you unpack, that it’s like that’s, 57% of workers feel like they are coming out of our organisations worse than when they went in. In terms of satisfaction and wellbeing, that’s pretty terrible. Our whole mandate from a HR perspective is to try and get that right. And so AIHR are talking about the Employee Engagement 2.0 and sure, over the last 25 years, I would say, because I’ve been working in HR for around 25 years, let’s just say over my whole career, engagement’s been a focal point of our HR and our people strategy. And Gallup started measuring this back in 2000. That’s when I had just come into HR, around 2000. But guess what? It’s 2025 now. The needle hasn’t moved, it’s been 25 years. And, global engagement levels remain at 23% despite decades of HR policies, best practise and billions of dollars being invested. So Employee Engagement 2.0. Where do we even start? AIHR Talk about driving engagement. right. And if HR wants to impact engagement and productivity, then obviously we need to understand the drivers of engagement and be informed by that and how we show up and our approach makes sense. But they do talk about the fact that highly engaged employees are three times more likely to feel heard at work than highly disengaged counterparts, which is like 30%. Feel her. So no one wants to hear from you, mate. You’re a negative Nelly. Sorry, sorry. But we know that employee engagement translates, right? But we know that if people have, a positive mindset, good vibes, good energy, other people will lean into and listen to those people. So when Robert Cialdini talks about the powers of persuasion, six principles of persuasion, he’s gone to seven. Now, that likability, that positivity, that drawing people in, is a part of how you influence people. You get people to listen to you if you have something positive to be able to kind of talk to them about. So we know that collaboration doesn’t work well when we have low engagement because no one’s wanting to be around each other because we’re all miserable. And so we need to make meaningful changes in this. But surveys don’t make employees feel heard. Like seeing meaningful change based on feedback makes employees feel heard. And we’re not really great at that. And Richard Rose now did a podcast episode with me on people analytics and I loved how he talked about analytics and data and surveying is listening at scale, but we have to get really good at how we do it and making impactful changes based on employee feedback. It’s still not the norm. So like 86% of employees feel their organisation doesn’t hear everyone fairly or equitably, and that’s an issue. So one of the key things that we need to look at is how we redefine engagement and what employees truly care about. So one of these things is around supporting managers with development and automation. And we started this three part series by talking about automation and the fact that it’s here to stay. The technological transformation is here to stay. But line managers are facing numerous challenges, right from heavy workloads, not enough people, budget constraints, and it’s causing a lot of difficulty in terms of them engaging with teams. So we need to equip managers with really targeted development programmes to enhance both their leadership and their people management skills. But again, we need to give them the tools to streamline the administrative tasks, freeing up the time that they can dedicate to coaching and employee engagement and, give them some skills in that role there. So we need to design balanced roles if we’re doing this well and clarify how people are contributing. So if employees see through superficial perks, right, they’re not going to see that their contributions are valued. So we need to address some of the deeper structural issues that impact their engagement, like fair pay, safe working conditions, clear expectations, so clearly defining roles with manageable tasks aligned, so not setting people up for failure and employee skills and organisational needs being aligned to that, then we can benchmark that against competitors. We can guarantee that individual contributors understand their contribution, to the overall strategy and the goals. And that’s what’s going to boost motivation. Right? But we need to communicate that kind of transparently and promptly, like, we are really time poor with some of this stuff.

So by fully understanding and looking at how we want to improve the employee experience, we can keep employees connected and committed. But we need to adopt a really deliberate listening strategy to uncover genuine insights. we need a really robust employee listening strategy. We need various feedback channels, we need stay and exit interviews. Don’t just talk to people when they’re on their way out, it’s too late. Talk to people about why they’re going to stay. Stay interviews are the key. No point talking to people that are halfway out the door. Talk to the people you’ve already got. And what will it take for you to stay here? What will it take for you to feel great about the work you do here? And redesign our employee value propositions around that accordingly? that’s where we can implement things that truly reflect the employee experience. What’s on the label matches what’s in the jar. And we know that this costs us a, heap of money, right? And I talked with Claire Sieber about this on a previous episode as well. But it’s this high price of disengagement. Disengaged employees are costing 8.8 trillion in lost productivity worldwide. 8.8 trillion. And so what we know is that to improve that, our, managers are going to be key, because managers make or break their teams, right? Don’t leave the organisation, people leave their manager. And Gallup data shows that it’s 70%. 70. So 70% of team engagement variances. So, like 70% of. The reason why engagement varies across an organisation is determined solely by the manager of that team. Our  people. Managers are everything. They make or break our day, the work we do, our souls.

So as we close, let’s think about what it takes for organisations to thrive in the face of disruption. The way businesses respond to shifts in talent and technology is going to define who leads and lags in 2025. And so success is going to demand more than resilience, right? It’s going to require adaptability, agility and really proactive strategies to navigate future challenges and to seize emerging opportunities. And disruption isn’t just an obstacle, it’s an invitation. I see it as an invitation for us to innovate and grow. So for hr, this means championing that forward thinking approach, right? Transforming challenges into catalysts for reinvention and progress.

What if HR can embrace and harness the power of disruption to create a workplace that thrives on change and innovation? Imagine that before you go this was the final episode of a three part series looking into AIHR’s HR Trends for 2025 report. We looked at a lot of things in here, so cheque out the first two episodes and see what’s ahead for you in 2025. And we’d really like to know what scares the shit out of you and what resonates the most. Thanks for tuning in and leaning in to this week’s episode. As we look to reimagine how we show up for our people, organisations and community, reach out to us via our website at reimaginehr.com.au with your HR horror stories or suggestions of people you’d love to hear from or topics you want to explore. 

It’s all about people, purpose and impact and we are here for all of it. 

Until next time, take care team.

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Celebrating Impact: 100 Women Gala 2024

Celebrating Impact: 100 Women Gala 2024

This year marks the 11th anniversary of the 100 Women Gala Dinner, where we celebrated $211,005 in funding being gifted to five impactful projects! These initiatives will benefit over 323 women and girls across Australia and Cambodia, focusing on needs from healthcare and arts education to anti-trafficking efforts and cultural mentorship. Among the inspiring recipients are Homeless Healthcare, The Warrior Woman Foundation, Big hART, Free To Shine, and Ember Connect. Through the dedicated support of our members, we are creating positive change and a promising future for women and girls worldwide!

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