We love sharing how our great Pro members of the Disruptive HR Club are disrupting HR in their organisations. Sharing challenges and learnings with one another is just another way in which we grow our supportive community!

This month we’re shining the spotlight on Louise Turner, HR Director at Bedspace and Disruptive HR Club member since 2023.

Tell us a little bit about yourself, your company and your role.

Hi everyone, I’m Louise, and I’m the HR Director at Bedspace where I head up a team of 11 across HR, L&D and Internal Comms.

What do you love about what you do?

I’m incredibly proud of Bedspace, we work across the North West and our mission is to do one thing: transform the lives of vulnerable people.

Our team of 330+ people work to provide housing and support packages to the people we support in asylum, young people leaving care, adults in social care, homeless families and children in residential care. 2024 sees us celebrate our 25th anniversary, in which time we’ve supported 17,000 vulnerable people to transform their lives.

What challenges are you facing currently with changing HR practices and how are you disrupting HR?

My greatest challenge which is super exciting is bringing about major organisational change. The business has grown organically and informally so far and we have ambitious growth plans so I have to support the business from a reactive, “let’s just get it done” approach to one of planned organisational and workforce design.

Couple that with us now having to be registered with OFSTED as a supported accommodation provider – you can see that I’ve got quite a lot to do. My first steps were to ask to lead on L&D and Internal Comms as well as HR, as I could see together, the 3 functions could have greater synergy and impact. Early on, I facilitated the senior leadership team to identify the desired culture and behaviours – now the work begins to get that truly embedded. So, lots to do, but I’m determined and will keep nudging!

How does the Disruptive HR Club help you with challenges/frustrations/what you are trying to achieve?

From the Club, I’ve introduced the concept of agile HR and sprint planning into my approach and my team are loving it! They set their own objectives for the coming 12 weeks – and wow! they have achieved so much working in this way.

I am so pleased to have found Disruptive HR Club – it’s all the things I’ve been thinking about how we should be doing HR – listening to Lucy and Karen gives it the credibility and me the confidence to grasp new ways of working and forge ahead with determination. It’s like having 2 mentors sitting on your shoulder willing you on to put disruptive HR up front and central and not fall into the norm!

Balancing my membership of the Club with lots of reading and listening to podcasts, I find helps and supports me in my continual development as a strategic HR leader.

We love sharing how our great Pro members of the Disruptive HR Club are disrupting HR in their organisations. Sharing challenges and learnings with one another is just another way in which we grow our supportive community!

This month, we’re excited to introduce you to Nana Arkhurst. As Director of People and Performance at Demica, a leading fintech, she’s not just managing the day-to-day – she’s actively transforming the way HR operates. Discover how her fresh approach is driving change and disrupting traditional HR practices.

Please tell us a little bit about yourself, your company and your role. 

I was born and raised in London, where I developed a deep appreciation for the city’s vibrant culture and rich diversity. These days, I’m exploring a variety of new hobbies, including computer programming and the art of fashion design, particularly with African prints and textiles.  While I aspire to adopt a more active lifestyle, my true passion is enjoying holidays in the sun, as it helps me recharge and find a better balance.

I joined Demica in 2019, and my current role is Director of People and Performance. Demica is a fintech that provides a cloud-based platform, which enables financial institutions and corporates to automate and scale their working capital finance programmes. In my role, I lead our People Team with a core mission to cultivate a workplace where individuals can thrive, reach their full potential, and express their authentic selves and I am proud to contribute to the company’s overall growth and culture.    

What do you love about what you do?

With over 20 years of experience as an HR generalist, primarily in SMEs, I enjoy the variety and impact that a generalist can make in these dynamic and fast paced environments. At Demica, I thrive on collaborating with colleagues who inspire me to excel, all within a supportive and engaging culture. While I may be a bit biased, my greatest source of satisfaction at work undoubtedly comes from our people. There is something unique about the team at Demica, which I consider a key differentiator (alongside our award-winning platform). The positive relationships we develop not only enrich our company culture but also drive our collective success.

What frustrates you most about HR?

One of my main frustrations is that HR operations often go unnoticed. While the strategic aspects tend to take centre stage, it is essential to acknowledge the importance of the day-to-day operations that keep the people function running smoothly. Without a strong operational foundation, strategic initiatives are more likely to fail.  There needs to be a greater appreciation by the HR profession for behind-the-scenes efforts, along with a balanced emphasis on both operational and strategic elements, to foster a comprehensive understanding of the overall value that a high performing People Team brings.

How are you and your team disrupting HR?

Disrupting HR requires taking both a strategic and tactical approach. On a strategic level and given our organisation’s more traditional approach to HR, we originally centred our efforts to engage stakeholders in a broad consultation process, which could slow progress. Now, we focus on identifying key stakeholders who are the most passionate about a particular area of HR and wiling to contribute meaningfully to the conversation.

On a tactical level, we have used this ‘early adopter’ strategy to introduce innovative HR practices more efficiently and effectively, resulting in a greater impact overall. An example of this is our engagement survey. We recently transitioned to a more progressive and intuitive platform that equips managers with direct insights into their team, eliminating the need for the People Team to handle the data dissemination and action planning. To enhance the survey’s relevance and effectiveness, we consulted with a select group of stakeholders to gather their perspectives on what we genuinely want to understand from our employees. A smaller, select group helped us facilitate quicker discussions, and resulted in more relevant and actionable feedback.  

What challenges are you facing currently with changing HR practices?

One of the primary challenges we are currently tackling is the legacy of a traditional oversight culture, which can create a parent/child dynamic that no longer has a place in today’s working environment. 

As we continue to build a more progressive business, we are striving to instil a culture that emphasises empowerment. Our goal is to nurture a culture that champions accountability and ownership among team members. This transition will require us to implement strategies that promote autonomy and self-management while providing the necessary support and resources to help employees thrive. An ongoing focus of our discussion in relation to this, is how to empower individuals to take ownership of their growth and development. Rather than an expectation of a predetermined career path that explicitly outlines the next steps, we should adopt a more organic, individualised employee-driven approach.   

How does the Disruptive HR Club help you with challenges/frustrations/what you are trying to achieve? 

One of the key benefits of being a part of this club is its ability to encourage us to question the conventional practices that can dominate how we operate. It is common to follow established methods with the mindset of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,’ the Club is helpful in ensuring that we continuously adapt and evolve to meet the demands of our workforce and the broader HR/People landscape. Disruptive HR challenges us to critically assess the status quo, especially when familiarity can lead to blind spots over time.

I strongly believe that disruption should not be pursued for its own merit; rather, it should be a strategic initiative aimed at genuinely enhancing the workplace experience for all stakeholders.

What would you like to see more of on the Disruptive HR Club?

I have found the Talent Calibration Cards to be an invaluable resource, as their evidence-based approach adds significant depth to our talent discussions. They have enabled us to establish a more structured framework for these conversations, allowing us to objectively challenge and support people leaders when necessary. I would appreciate seeing more toolkits that adopt a similar format, as they contribute to a more informed and effective approach to talent management.

Additional, increasing the number of in-person networking events would be great. While online training sessions provide great accessibility and convenience, the opportunity for face-to-face interaction fosters strong relationships, networking opportunities and allow for richer discussions.

HR has been through a number of stages since its humble beginnings in the 1950’s and 60’s. For those of you who are as old as me, you’ll remember our early days as ‘personnel officers’. We were seen as the place for employees to go if they needed support. Our main skill set was employee relations, and we were focused on sorting out problems – usually with a significant amount of admin! Our influence of the business and our leaders was minimal and the idea that we could be on the board or exec team would have been laughable.

Strategic Business Partners

Our second evolution came in the late 90’s when we were introduced to the concept of ‘strategic business partners’. Overnight we were told that our role was not to provide tea and sympathy to our employees, and instead we should be a key member of the senior team, influencing our leaders to manage people properly. I think that many of the issues we have today in HR stem from this period. The transformation from ‘Personnel’ to ‘Strategic HR’ was often made without changing or upskilling the people in those roles. They had been trained in administration, process and policy and they brought this mindset to their new positions. Over the course of the 90’s and into the new millennium, HR became awash with processes as the way to change behaviour or improve people performance. Whilst we occasionally did get that seat at the executive table, it’s debatable whether we built up any real influence with our leaders. And sadly, we often lost our reputation as the function that really cared about employees. Our numbers were reduced. We outsourced many of our functions. We invested in cumbersome HR systems that only worked if you applied one-size-fits-all processes in order to streamline. Our alignment to our leaders meant that we were often seen more as the ‘lackey’ of our leaders. Doing their bidding at the expense of the interests of employees.

Thankfully, those first and second evolutions are drawing to a close and we are now in the third evolution of HR.

Not just a change of title

Of course, a new title is part and parcel of our next iteration, and we are now known as the Chief People Officer, Head of Employee Experience, or the People and Culture Team. Whilst these new titles are welcome – what’s more exciting is how we are changing our approach. Our primary purpose is no longer just to serve employees or support managers. Our purpose now is to enable people to their best work. To create the conditions where our people can be more agile, more productive or more innovative. Our key skillset is no longer employee relations or process implementation. Instead our key skills are around the development of tailored solutions based on insights into what our people need and want, supported by the intelligent application of human-centred products.

Let’s take the example of say, onboarding through these three evolutions and see how our approach has changed.

In our first evolution – the personnel phase – we would have delivered onboarding sessions for every employee. In our second as strategic business partners, we would have created an onboarding process, a mandatory onboarding training programme for managers and then monitored compliance. In our third evolution, our starting point is – ‘how do we want our people to feel during onboarding?’ – to shape our thinking. We create a range of onboarding options designed around the different types of people who are joining us. We provide ‘nudges’ to hiring managers to help them think about the key things they need to do on day one or in the first week, such as get the new hire a buddy. We ask new hires to help us create the onboarding approach for the next cohort. We focus on the outcomes we’d like to see from onboarding and then provide digital tools to enable our people to do it for themselves. We focus less on telling people stuff and more on helping them feel welcomed and confident. We see onboarding as an opportunity to find out more about them.

Finally, this third evolution of HR is transforming the influence we have in the business. It now matters less whether we have a seat at the top table or not, because our credibility comes through our understanding of the business and providing solutions that are based around actual human beings, not compliance with our processes.

So let’s welcome this third evolution of HR; focused on enabling people to do their best work through insight-driven and tailored solutions.

We love sharing how our great Pro members of the Disruptive HR Club are disrupting HR in their organisations. Sharing challenges and learnings with one another is just another way in which we grow our supportive community!

This month we’re shining the spotlight on Kim Rolfsen from DNV who has been a Disruptive HR Club Member since 2021.

Please tell us a little bit about yourself, your company and your role. 

Hi, my name is Kim Rolfsen, and I am the People Director at DNV, Energy Systems. We have approximately 5,000 employees worldwide. We are in the business of working with our customers to accelerate energy transition – our experts help our customers to move faster with their energy transition to achieve a greener future.

What do you love about what you do? 

I have worked at DNV for 27 years and I started my career here in the technical field which has then evolved over the years to cover many different roles. In my last seven years, I have been working within the People function. I love working here because I believe that it’s the expertise of our people that we sell to our customers. It’s fulfilling to develop our people and be a part of their journey. Seeing the impact we make at the Executive level as the People Team is also really valuable. And of all this fuels my passion to work here every day!

What frustrates you most about HR?

For me, it’s when we’re unable to be close to the business and create value because we’re sometimes hung up on the ‘process’. I always begin with the business value I want to create and then try to understand which parts of the process or techniques we can use to achieve it. So, solving the business challenges through the People function is what I enjoy the most but also frustrates me the most!

How are you and your team disrupting HR?

To begin with, we are adding ‘speed’ to everything we do. We also aim to go from ‘good’ to ‘great’ in everything we do. It’s not about inventing new ways of doing stuff, but more about fine-tuning what we do so we can do it better. We’re also starting to utilise data analytics – not just relying on people data but looking at it in combination with the other key functions in the organisation. For instance, analysing it in relation to the business development function using data such as the order intakes, sales order book and market data and co-relating it to data from the Finance function. Connecting the dots is where I think we are doing well.

What challenges are you facing currently with changing HR practices?

I think the biggest challenge is the confidence in our People community. I think we need to be brave and confident in what we do. We need to take ownership to learn about the business so we better understand the business and what value we can bring to it. Building capabilities for the future is another challenge we face. So, we are trying to better understand what this could look like in the future for us in the People function so we can increase capabilities in those areas.

How does the Disruptive HR Club help you with challenges/frustrations/what you are trying to achieve? 

We have been a member of the Disruptive HR Club for a while now and it’s really valuable for us to know that we have this resource where we can go to get some inspiration. Every new team member we get, we want them to be members of the Club and start using the resources. The small weekly reminders like the 5 Minute Monday videos are extremely powerful!

What would you like to see more of on the Disruptive HR Club?

Maybe more ideas on what other organisations are doing could provide further inspiration. I think finding ways to share our stories with one another will help us lift each other in the People function and create capabilities for the future.

Whilst January is the official start of the year, September is the month that is all about new beginnings! The excitement of the new school uniform and the new pencil case, the new notebook with those clean pages and the promise of a fresh start. September always feels like a time of new energy and optimism. A time for making plans – with that bit of headspace we got from our summer holiday bringing fresh thinking and a resolve to do things differently.

Maybe you feel the same way – and you’re heading into your new term with a renewed vigour and a drive to make changes to the way you do HR. But where do you start? Here are three things we at Disruptive HR think could get you off to a great start …

We love sharing how our great Pro members of the Disruptive HR Club are disrupting HR in their organisations. Sharing challenges and learnings with each other is a powerful way to grow our HR and leadership capabilities. 

This month, we’re thrilled to spotlight Rob Peacock, Head of Talent and Development at The Very Group, and a valued Club member since 2021.

Rob shares his journey from banking to HR, his passion for continuous learning, and how he and his team are driving positive change in the workplace. Learn how they’re tackling the challenges of AI, hybrid work, and more to build a dynamic, future-ready workforce.

Tell us a little bit about yourself, your company and your role. 

I’m Rob, Head of Talent and Development at The Very Group.  I’m a dad to 3 wonderful young children, married to the amazing Sarah (a children’s author and illustrator) and I have a passion for personal growth, people, good food (and wine…), wellness and Aston Villa! The Very Group is a family of digital retail brands and consists of a team of 4,000 people who are passionate about helping families get more out of life. 

Our People mission is to make Very a place where brilliant people belong, grow and are inspired and empowered to make a difference.  My team and I are responsible for bringing this mission to life by developing a high-performing, dynamic and future-ready workforce.  We look at everything from leadership and manager development, early careers, group capability, the talent infrastructure, and performance process to anything else that helps people learn, grow, love what they do and have the skills to succeed.

What do you love about what you do? 

I work with brilliant people who I enjoy spending time with. Every single day I feel I am learning, being challenged and utilising my natural passions and talents. I started my career in banking, then external recruitment before moving into HR at Tesco’s HQ in Welwyn. As soon as  I moved into Talent and Development, I knew it was the right fit for me. I get inspired by watching people learn, grow and develop skills and often my work feels more like a hobby; albeit perhaps with more pressured deadlines!

What frustrates you most about working in Talent and Development?

Nothing frustrates me as such, but in the 10 years I have worked in T&D I have often found myself making the case for learning and development as an investment and not a time stealer. I’m lucky to have worked for brilliant, forward-thinking, people-centric businesses (Lloyds TSB, Tesco, Virgin Media, Samsung and Very) who are all wonderful and different in their own way. Like most businesses, the consistency between them is there will always be far more to do than time to do it. So everyday people are making choices and it’s about making sure that investing time in skills development, leadership and personal growth and that it’s seen as an important AND urgent daily choice.

Our skills-based economy has meant businesses really get this, but the rub comes at the individual level, where people can feel they simply don’t have time and priories for what’s in-front of them every day.  Both making the case and changing the behaviours around continual learning in role is a daily challenge we in T&D must step up to if we are going to make a difference.  

How are you and your team disrupting HR?

A former HR Director I worked for (Jane Storm, who is now the Group People Director at EasyJet) used to encourage her HRBPs to be agitators for the better.  Early in my HR career, this gave me the confidence to challenge people, processes and cultural norms in my quest for better and it stuck with me as I moved into T&D and started to lead teams. I truly believe this is the best starting point for disrupting HR. My team and I pride ourselves on being agitators for positive change, it helps us create solutions to real problems and make a tangible difference to what matters most to our customers and the business.

Recent work we have done as a part of changes to our operating model is an example of this.  We’ve been working lockstep with business leaders and technical experts to build structured and focused skills and leadership development which enables our operating model and drives the business strategy. One output of this work was a recent group-wide capability initiative on Digital and AI skills, to help our people and our business adapt to and take advantage of AI and automation. This kicked off with a whole-day festival held on-site dedicated to delving into the power of AI, learning from internal and industry experts, including our partners at Amazon, Microsoft and others, so they could understand the impact of AI firsthand.

Getting comfortable with being uncomfortable by growing operational knowledge of deeply technical subject matter to enable you to converse with and influence expert stakeholders is a great way for HR teams to drive value and impact for their business and this is where the magic happens in terms of disruption.

What challenges are you facing currently with changing Talent and Development practices?

I’m finding that changing T&D practises (for example, including ever more innovative tech solutions) are incredibly helpful in supporting businesses where they most need us. Namely, in understanding how to identify, navigate and grow the critical and ever-changing skills (what teams need, what they have and what they don’t have), adapting to the rise of AI and the disruptive impact on the way we work, embedding a more settled and sustained approach to supporting work/life harmony and getting the balance of hybrid right.  

A greater focus on driving and embedding cultural and social changes, such as providing purposeful work and cultivating an inclusive, vibrant and diverse organisational culture, all serve to raise the importance of all HR functions.  T&D practices are increasingly adapting to these extra demands and the problem is finding where to focus your attention when you have so many competing priorities; we’ve come a long way since I started in T&D in 2014! 

How does the Disruptive HR Club help you with challenges/frustrations/what you are trying to achieve? 

I love the 5 Minute Mondays (5 minute videos that Pro Club members get every Monday).  It helps to get me firing on all cylinders on a Monday morning and always provides thought-provoking challenges. I also enjoy the focus and sharing of “next-best practice” areas, especially about Talent processes like the 9-box grid. It’s so important to meet your business where they are at and nudge them in the right direction, rather than try out an array of innovative new approaches for the fun of it. But knowing what the best practice looks like is a great starting place from which to decide which approach to take. Whenever I face a big strategic challenge, the Disruptive HR site and podcasts are the first places I go to spark my thinking.

When you’re in an operational HR role, creating the head space to re-think your approach can be really hard. I remember having back-to-back meetings, then getting to the end of the day and thinking – ‘right, now I need to have some BIG thoughts about the future’ – but choosing to go home and watch The West Wing instead! And yet, if we are going to equip our organisation, our leaders and our employees for a disrupted world, then we have to find a way of adding different stimuli and challenging our thinking.

Based on conversations with progressive HR professionals and what has worked for me – Here are some tips on how we can change our thinking in HR.

Focus on the human – not the process

I think we limit our thinking by setting very narrow parameters for what we’re trying to achieve. We want to innovate, but we often set our goal as being the reform of an existing process. This immediately restricts our creativity and results in small, incremental changes rather than the fundamental change we need. So, for example, we often get asked to help clients change their performance management system. There are two key assumptions that are immediately built into the activity – that performance can be ‘managed’ and that they need a system to do it. Not much innovation is going to result. Instead, you can try to broaden the challenge you’re undertaking – by focusing on the human – not the process – problem that you want to solve. So instead of changing the performance management system – ask yourselves ‘how can we enable people to improve their performance?’ Or ‘how can we enable people to be even better at their jobs?’

Widen your sources of stimulation

So, a small confession – when we created Disruptive HR we imagined that all we would need to do is to steal all the innovative ideas from our HR connections with Silicon Valley tech firms! Sadly, when it came down to it – there weren’t many genuinely fresh approaches to steal! So, we had to start from scratch. We found that the best ideas came – not from HR conferences, books and articles – but from adapting ideas from other disciplines. So, we went to conferences on behavioural science, we read books on psychology, we spoke to experts in marketing and advertising, we learned from agile product design. We widened our sources of stimulation. If we just listen to people like us or borrow from so-called best practice, we again limit our ability to be truly innovative. How could you widen your sources of stimulation? Could you invite your marketing colleagues to help you think through your employee experience? Could you learn from your digital colleagues how to move at pace through application of approaches such MVP or sprint planning? Could you broaden the subject matter of the books and articles you read? Could you attend conferences on topics other than HR? Chances are that these efforts will stimulate your thinking in ways that traditional L&D for HR can’t match. 

Identify your red flags

Looking back to my time as an HR Director, I had a number of beliefs that prevented me from being braver and more innovative. My assumptions about the leaders, the employees, my team and even the way HR ‘should be done’ would result in me repeating traditional approaches. We all have these assumptions and beliefs but if we can see them as ‘red flags’ – signs that we are about to make the same mistakes, we can start to challenge them.

Maybe you hold beliefs that prevent you from changing the way you think – for example:

So, if we widen our sources of stimulation, focus on the human challenge – not the process one and challenge our personal red flags, then we have a chance to genuinely build fresh thinking in HR.

We’ve come a long way since the early days of ‘Personnel’! These days we’re all about enabling people to do their best work and not just serving leaders or employees. Are you ‘fully evolved’?!

Download the infographic here.

We keep saying that the world around us is changing but in many ways we continue to lead, engage and develop our people like we did in the 1980’s. Every organisation in every sector is trying to do create more of four things to ensure we survive and thrive – more agility, more productivity, more collaboration and more innovation.

If HR is going to create the conditions where our people can be more agile, productive, collaborative and innovative then we need a fundamentally new way of of doing what we do. This short video gives you an introduction to our framework for changing HR – the EACH Model – Employees as Adults, Consumers and Human beings.

When we started Disruptive HR seven years ago, even having the words ‘Disruptive’ and ‘HR’ together in our company name raised eyebrows. Now, our name isn’t so much of a provocation. It’s more a statement of fact! HR is disrupting – sometimes with rapid speed – often very slowly – but it’s happening!  It is so great to see the increased appetite for change. The continued increase in business challenges such as digitisation, plus major global events such as the pandemic, the war in Ukraine or #MeToo and Black Lives Matter have combined to prompt even the most traditional to think ‘Maybe it IS time to do something different in how we lead and engage our people?’

We are seeing bold and ambitious people plans. And we’re seeing business leaders making greater demands of their HR colleagues. But are we ready for this increased appetite? When we look at the team around us who will take on these challenges to do HR differently – are we confident that they have the skills, the mindsets, the experiences and the relationships to make it happen?

If we’re not confident in their change readiness, then it won’t matter how ambitious our plans are, we won’t be able to deliver. So how can we check our team’s change readiness? I think we need to assess it against 5 criteria:

Credibility

Attitude

Skills

Relationships and

Resilience

Let’s break this down a bit.

Credibility

It’s not enough to actually have the skills and abilities to deliver – we need our leaders to believe that we can. Sadly, I still meet plenty of leaders who don’t see their HR business partners as having the wherewithal to deliver significant change. Their perception of us as ‘order takers’ for their people needs remains a problem. Ask yourself whether your team has a voice that’s heard and valued. Are you and your team seen as an essential part of strategic decision making? Do they genuinely want us at the important meetings because of our strategic insights – and not just for the potential employment legalities?

Attitude

One way of checking whether your team has a change ready attitude is to ask yourself, ‘how do my team get their sense of the value they add?’ Do they like providing a service to others, for example? Do they quite enjoy the power of being the HR compliance officer? Do they see their role as being about protecting employees from managers who can’t cut it?’ If you’re answering YES to any or all of these, you might have a problem. Change ready HR teams get their sense of value from creating the conditions where leaders and employees do their best work, not from a traditional caring parent or critical parental relationship.

Skills

Do your HR team really only excel in employee relations and employment policy? Yes? It’s not going to be enough! A change ready HR team needs to have a blend of skills in disciplines such as marketing, agile product design and behavioural science. If not, we risk trying to deliver the same old stuff in the same old ways.

Relationships

How tight is your team? Have they managed to overcome the traditional silos of Centres of Expertise and Business Partnering to work together on shared priorities? Are they comfortable challenging each other? Or do your team meetings comprise a series of ‘show and tells’ from each department, whilst their colleagues sit scrolling on their phones? And how about their relationships outside the team? Do they REALLY know the business and understand how the people agenda drives the commercials? Do they have impactful relationships with key stakeholders and understand how different HR products will land in their area? Do they have a strong range of connections outside of HR and the organisation – to bring outside intelligence in? Change is a team sport, and you’ll need these relationships if you’re going to succeed.

Resilience

And finally, how resilient are they? Embarking on significant change is not for the feint hearted. Will they be able to hold firm when the inevitable setbacks occur? Are they flexible enough to adapt their approaches and ideas if they seem to be facing a block in the road? Do they believe, deep down, that change has to happen – and not just telling what you want to hear? Above all, are they confident? Will they back themselves against the resistors and find agile ways of working round them to achieve the goals you’ve set yourselves. More than anything, you need them to believe in what you’re doing – and themselves as being ready to take on the change.

If you want to check out the change readiness of your HR team, why not check out the HR Team Change Readiness Diagnostic here