When organisations are faced with crippling, complex and seemingly unsolvable culture challenges, they often put sole responsibility on the HR team to ‘fix’ the problem. But this rarely works because you can’t outsource culture to a single function in the business – it needs to be deeply embedded into all of your business practices.HR practitioners aren’t the keepers of culture – they are the culture leaders and enablers. They set the scene and provide leaders and managers with the tools they’ll need to help their teams live out the organisational values in an authentic and impactful way.

In this episode of Let’s Take This Offline, Siobhan McHale, Executive General Manager of People, Culture and Change at Dulux and speaker at this year’s AHRI National Convention and Exhibition, offers a range of practical frameworks to help HR practitioners reframe their role from ‘business partner’ to ‘business leader’ and offers advice to help HR have a greater impact at an executive level when it comes to driving culture transformation projects.

Skip to the section that interests you most:

• 5:37 minutes: How to get buy-in for culture change without having to take ownership of it
• 8:00 minutes: McHale explains the difference between a culture disruptor and a culture leader.
• 15:15 minutes: Tips to help identify patterns in your culture.
• 20:17 minutes: Advice on how to look at culture from a commercial perspective.
• 30:00 minutes: The difference between emotional intelligence and group intelligence.
• 35:33 minutes: How to get change resistant people over the line.
• 40:55 minutes: McHale responds to a made-up scenario about a CEO whose too focussed on short-term results to focus on long-term culture impacts.

Check out the episode transcript here.

Extra resources:

For more conversations to inspire HR, listen to season one of Let’s Take This Offline here.

If you’d like further information and resources to help put McHale’s insights into action, check out the links below:

Learning opportunities

• Sign up to AHRI’s National Convention and Exhibition⁠ in Melbourne on 20-22 August to hear more from Siobhan McHale.

Further reading

• Learn more about Siobhan’s books here.
• Read this article where Siobhan shares more details about how to become a culture transformer.

Member-exclusive content

• AHRI members can Join the ⁠AHRI LinkedIn Lounge⁠ to connect with your peers and for access to a member-exclusive bonus episode.

Connect with us

• ⁠Connect with AHRI on LinkedIn⁠.
• ⁠Connect with Beth Hall CPHR on LinkedIn⁠
• Connect with Siobhan McHale on LinkedIn.
• Visit Siobhan’s website.

Subscribe so you never miss an episode. You can follow the podcast on Spotify, Soundcloud or Apple Podcasts. AHRI members receive exclusive bonus content via the LinkedIn AHRI Lounge.

The post Podcast: How HR practitioners can become cultural leaders appeared first on HRM online.

In an era of rapid technological advancement, with the demand for certain skills rising and others becoming obsolete, preparing for the future of work requires foresight and adaptability. 

In this episode, Ravin Jesuthasan, global thought leader and Senior Partner and Global Leader for Transformation Services at Mercer, talks about how HR practitioners can navigate the evolving skills landscape and prepare their organisations and employees for these changes. 

You’ll learn how to take advantage of the shift towards skills-based hiring, how artificial intelligence might reinvent the graduate-level position, and discover models and frameworks to think about skills and job design as a small, medium or large-sized business.

Skip to the section that interests you most:

• 3:40 minutes: Three things HR can do to prepare for the evolving skills landscape
• 6:09 minutes: How to effectively map skills
• 12:51 minutes: The most crucial skills for businesses to focus on
• 16:03 minutes: How AI might change (or remove) graduate level positions
• 22:24 minutes: How to get started as a skills-based organisation
• 29:24 minutes: How to apply these skills as a small to medium-sized business
• 40:44 minutes: Jesuthasan responds to a scenario about a company that is moving towards a skills-based approach and has created agile teams working on project-based assignments.

View the podcast transcript here.

Extra resources:

For more conversations to inspire HR, listen to season one of Let’s Take This Offline here.

If you’d like further information and resources to help put Jesuthasan’s insights into action, check out the links below:

Learning opportunities

• Sign up to AHRI’s National Convention and Exhibition⁠ in Melbourne on 20-22 August to hear more from Ravin Jesuthasan.

• Sign up for AHRI’s new short course, GenAI Integration Essentials.

Further reading

• Learn more about Jesuthasan’s books.

• Read HRM’s article where Jesuthasan talks about the future of leadership skills.

Member-exclusive content

• Join the AHRI LinkedIn Lounge to connect with your peers and for access to a bonus episode later this week.

Subscribe so you never miss an episode. You can follow the podcast on Spotify, Soundcloud or Apple Podcasts. AHRI members receive exclusive bonus content via the LinkedIn AHRI Lounge.

The post Podcast: practical tips to prepare your organisation for the evolution of skills appeared first on HRM online.

HR is an incredibly rewarding profession, tackling some of the most pressing workplace challenges, from navigating and addressing mental health concerns to meeting the high expectations of leaders and employees.

These responsibilities place HR at the core of our organisations, navigating the increasing complexities of today’s ever-evolving business landscape. However, they can also take a toll on HR practitioners’ mental health.

In this episode, we speak with Dr Adam Fraser, peak performance researcher and workplace wellbeing expert, to explore how HR practitioners can care for their own mental health and wellbeing as they tackle complex workplace challenges head on (which can sometimes lead to emotional stress and vicarious trauma). 

In this episode, you’ll learn how Dr Fraser’s research on vicarious trauma in the education sector can be applied to HR practice, along with some valuable, research-backed tips to help manage your mental health. 

Jump to the section that interests you most:

• 6:48 minutes: Dr Fraser shares his research into vicarious trauma among educators.
• 15:20 minutes: The importance of creating debrief spaces for HR.
• 18:35 minutes: How can HR clock that they have vicarious trauma?
• 24:17 minutes: What are the impacts of having resilience levels that are too high?
• 26:55 minutes: The importance of creating a third space.
• 38:06 minutes: Dr Fraser responds to a complex scenario about an HR leader who has been faced with mass layoffs and restructuring and explains how they can manage the vicarious trauma that might arise from this.

Extra resources

For more conversations to inspire HR, listen to season one of Let’s Take This Offline here.

If you’d like further resources to help put Dr Fraser’s insights into action, check out the links below:

• Article: 4 tips to identify and mitigate burnout in HR practitioners
• Article: What is trauma-informed HR and why is it important?
• Short course: Renewing Resilience: Addressing burnout in HR practitioners
• Short course: Trauma-informed HR
• Short course: Implementing Wellbeing Initiatives
• Event: Sign up to AHRI’s National Convention and Exhibition in Melbourne on 20-22 August to hear more from Dr Adam Fraser.

View the podcast transcript here.

If you need immediate and urgent mental health support, please call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or visit their website to start an online chat or text thread.

Subscribe to AHRI’s podcast on Spotify, Soundcloud or Apple Podcasts so you never miss an episode. AHRI members receive exclusive bonus content via the AHRI LinkedIn Lounge.

The post Podcast: Supporting HR to manage their own mental health at work appeared first on HRM online.

What does it take to run an effective coaching session? Does the coach need to have undergone a comprehensive training program in order to provide value to their mentee? Do they need to develop a 12-step action plan following the session to help put their mentee on the right path?

According to coaching expert Michael Bungay Stanier, often it’s just about learning how to ask better questions.

“If you can coach somebody in five minutes or less, everybody wins. And sometimes that’s having the discipline to ask them good questions, and then [staying quiet] and listening to their answer,” he said in a recent episode of AHRI’s podcast Let’s Take This Offline.

His book The Coaching Habit has sold over a million copies worldwide because, in his words, it “unweirds coaching”.

“I didn’t write the book for coaches because they already love coaching. What I was trying to do was [write something] for all the people who are like, ‘My organisation is making the coach. I don’t really want to do it, but I have to. Where do I start?'”

He wanted to help them see that coaching can be baked into your everyday interactions without a huge amount of extra effort and time, which is exactly what time-poor managers need.

7 questions for an effective coaching session

Often, what trips managers up when running a coaching session with their team members is adding structure to their line of questioning. They might go into the conversation with the goal of learning about the employee’s learning and development ambitions or to understand more about how they want to progress in the organisation.

However, Bungay Stanier thinks it’s often best to just let the conversation unfold naturally and learn what’s on their mind.

Following decades’ worth of experimenting, he landed on what he believes are the seven most important questions to ask in a coaching session:

1. “What’s on your mind?”
2. “And what else?”
3. “What’s the real challenge here for you?”
4. “What do you need?”
5. “How can I help?”
6. “If you’re saying yes to this, what are you saying no to?”
7. “What was most useful for you?”

They might seem overly simple, but that’s the point. And he says that, time and time again, they prove to be fruitful questions.

One that he often gets positive feedback on is: ‘What’s the real challenge for you here?’. Because we’re prone to trying to solve other people’s problems, we often jump at the opportunity to impart our hard-earned wisdom and advice, but that’s not always useful.

“We’re all so wired to get on with stuff. Our advice monster shows up and we start trying to solve the first thing that has come up,” he says. “But the first thing that shows up is never the real challenge. It’s just the first challenge.”

“If you can coach somebody in five minutes or less, everybody wins. And sometimes that’s having the discipline to ask them good questions.” – Michael Bungay Stanier, author and coaching expert.

People are testing the waters, assessing how safe it might be to disclose the actual challenge they are facing, he explains. 

For example, they might mask their deep dissatisfaction with their manager by instead talking about frustrations they’ve experienced during a recent project.

“Curiosity takes you closer to figuring out what’s really [concerning] the person that you’re working with. So it works both at a strategy and a cultural level.”

For HR professionals, being the person who can figure out the root of an issue will make you “immensely more valuable to your organisation”, he says.

“And you have far more impact because you’re willing to say, ‘My job is to figure out what the real challenges are.’ That is a strategic act.”

The way the question is structured also helps, he adds.

“It’s not just, ‘What’s the challenge?’. Because, if you ask somebody [that], you’re going to get a bit of a restatement from what you’ve already heard, when you asked them, ‘What’s on your mind?’. When you add the word ‘real’, what you’re saying is, the first thing you told me isn’t the real challenge. So immediately, you’ve got them thinking. 

“You can feel the difference. What’s the challenge, what’s the real challenge? It’s like a different question, even though there’s only one word added. 

“But then I think the magic happens when you add ‘for you’ at the end of that question: What’s the real challenge here for you? Now they’re not talking about the problem out there. They’re talking about, ‘Here’s why I am wrestling with this. This is what’s hard for me around this.'”

Download a one-page guide to Bungay Stanier’s 7 questions for an effective coaching session.

Coaching the coaches

A lot of what Bungay Stanier talks about will relate directly to HR practitioners, who themselves need to be effective coaches to leaders, managers and employees. However, often they’ll be the ones teaching managers to level up their approach to coaching employees.

Sometimes that means being willing to tell managers that they’re prone to giving too much advice, rather than listening deeply to what their mentee is saying to them (or what they’re not saying).

 “You could say, ‘There’s a really important place for advice, just not as fast or as omnipresent as you’re currently delivering it. So let me introduce curiosity as an element of leadership that is underdeveloped in you right now,”’ he says.

But what about those leaders who don’t want to be coached?

“For most leaders, if you come up to them and say, ‘Hey, I’m from HR. I’m here to coach you.’ The typical reaction is [to resist that]. So I usually don’t make a grand announcement that the coaching has begun. 

“When you push into a system, it pushes back. It’s a survival mechanism driven by your lizard brain – your amygdala. So don’t make a big deal about it. Just be curious.

“So if I’m starting to work with a leader, I’ll go, ‘How can I help? So what’s the challenge here for you? And then I go, what else? So what’s the real challenge? So what do you need?’.

“You can call that coaching, or you can call it having a conversation where you’re trying to be as helpful as possible.” 

This is an excerpt of a conversation from AHRI’s new podcast, ‘Let’s Take This Offline‘. Listen to the full episode here.

The post 7 questions to make your coaching sessions more impactful appeared first on HRM online.

Subscribe to AHRI’s new podcast, Let’s Take This Offline, to stay in the loop with each episode release. Listeners get access to resources that will help them put each episode’s learnings into action and AHRI members gain exclusive bonus content that’s distributed via the AHRI LinkedIn Lounge.

Season 2

Episode 1

How can HR care for their own mental health?

HR is an incredibly rewarding profession, tackling some of the most pressing workplace challenges, from navigating layoffs to meeting the high expectations of leaders and employees. But this kind of work can take a toll.

In this episode, we speak with Dr Adam Fraser, peak performance researcher and workplace wellbeing expert, to explore how HR can care for their own mental health and wellbeing as they navigate the ever-evolving business landscape.

Season 1

Episode 4

Building stronger relationships at work with Michael Bungay Stanier

A key part of being an effective HR practitioner is about building strong, strategic and trusting relationships with key stakeholders in order to build your influence and help move your organisation towards its goals.

In this episode, coaching expert and author Michael Bungay Stanier shares insights from his latest book ‘How To Work With (Almost) Anyone’ and provides listeners with insights to make their relationships at work more effective and resilient.

Episode 3

Doing HR differently with Lucy Adams

In a world where the HR profession has been elevated to new heights, how can HR professionals maintain the momentum they’ve gained over the past few years to continue adding strategic value to a business’s long-term goals?

In this episode, we speak with Lucy Adams, CEO of Disruptive HR and former HR Director at the BBC, who shares her thoughts on fresh ways to think about HR, including her EACH framework, (which stands for Employees as Adults, Consumers and Humans), and shares practical examples of different ways organisations are trialling new ways of working.

Episode 2

Rethinking learning and development with Rod Farmer

In episode two of AHRI’s new podcast, we speak with McKinsey and Company’s Expert Associate Partner Rod Farmer about how HR professionals can get cut through with their learning and development programs.

We’re moving from a jobs-based economy to a skills-based economy, says Farmer, which is why we need to rethink how we embed the right skills in our organisations. He shares useful frameworks and an interesting case study from some work he’s done with the Department of Regional NSW to create more digital literacy within its workforce.

Episode 1

Designing a culture journey with Shane Hatton

In the inaugural episode of AHRI’s brand-new podcast, we dive into all things culture with Shane Hatton, a renowned culture and leadership expert and author.

Shane shares a range of helpful frameworks, a case study demonstrating how an organisation got collective buy-in for its new culture, and practical advice that any HR professional listening can take away and apply to their organisation, no matter what industry they work in.

Subscribe to AHRI’s podcast on Spotify, Soundcloud or Apple Podcasts so you never miss an episode. AHRI members receive exclusive bonus content via the AHRI LinkedIn Lounge.

The post AHRI podcast: Let’s Take This Offline appeared first on HRM online.

The need to upskill and reskill employees has never been more important. In a world of work that’s rapidly evolving due to the introduction of new technologies, and as generative AI reshapes the type of work that humans will do, HR and L&D leaders need to cultivate dynamic, agile workforces that understand how to utilise their uniquely human skills to complement the work that technology will do.

Organisations understand the importance of investing in these future-proofing programs. New research from LinkedIn into workplace learning has found that, within the next six months, nine out of 10 global executives plan to either increase or maintain their L&D investments. But how can HR demonstrate a return on that investment? And how can they get employees to see upskilling as more than just a tick-box exercise?

In this podcast episode, our host Shelley Johnson speaks with Rod Farmer, Expert Associate Partner at McKinsey and Company, about how to address common barriers to learning and he talks about how McKinsey worked with the Department of Regional NSW to embed more digital literacy skills into its workforce.

We hope you learn something valuable from this episode. Don’t forget to like and subscribe so you never miss a future episode.

Jump to the section that interests you most

• 2:16 minutes: Rod shares some interesting insights into the percentage of employees who complete self-directed digital learning programs and encourages a shift towards a more contextualised approach.
• 6:18 minutes: Rod discusses the difference between a jobs-based economy to a skills-based economy.
• 7:40 minutes: Shelley notes that learning and development programs are often hard to gain investment for as they can be perceived as not driving value. Rod shares his advice for overcoming this mindset.
• 14:32 minutes: Advice on how to create a learning culture in your organisation.
• 18:05 minutes: Rod walks listeners through a case study: how the Department of Regional NSW embedded more digital literacy into its workforce.
• 33:31 minutes: How to avoid your L&D budget being put on the chopping block.
• 44:53 minutes: Rod responds to a made-up scenario about a CEO who has invested into an expensive learning and development platform and isn’t seeing any uptake from employees.

View the episode transcript here.

Subscribe to AHRI’s podcast on Spotify, Soundcloud or Apple Podcasts so you never miss an episode. AHRI members receive exclusive bonus content via the AHRI LinkedIn Lounge.

The post Podcast: Rethinking learning and development programs appeared first on HRM online.