A relaxed, casual and honest review of weekly thinking from people who work with people. Giving thoughts and reflections from their weeks in HR, Learning & Development, People coaching and Recruitment. Guiding people through the full life of their career journey in a 20 minute (ish), in the style of a Friday morning coffee catch up. The PeopleTalk podcast team details are below, we are continually sharing content on our LinkedIn pages so please look us up and join the conversation. Chris Cheesman SisuPeople (https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrischeesman/) Paul Marston Eidos Consulting (https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-m-b8ba1827/) Rachel Norrington Face2FaceHR (https://www.linkedin.com/in/rnorringtonhr/)
This week, we have a relaxed conversation around identifying what you need as a business - is it management, or is it leadership?
With management being more procedural - what needs to get done and how - versus leadership which focuses more on inspiring your people to produce their best, how do you understand which approach is needed and when?
We start the conversation by defining each and asking how business goes about developing leadership skills and management skills - what programmes are available and how you choose the right development approach for your needs. Times are changing, and so is the approach to developing leadership skills, especially considering changing working environments, and so we touch on this aspect.
Conversation then moves to how organisations frame a role, and how the language they use to describe leadership or management gives candidates a snapshot of how that organisation perceives positions of responsibility.
Chris proposes that management tends to focus on what has occurred, versus leaders that tend to look forward at what is yet to come - perhaps this is a differentiator? Is one bad and one good?
Overall, it is important to realise that modern business needs elements from both, and both roles have their place in making an organisation successful.
Enjoy this weeks episode and, as always, we would love to engage with you on the topic. Join the conversation on our LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-peopletalk-podcast/
Skills Vs. Attributes - do you know the difference?
This weeks episode looks at the difference between skills and attributes, how each are developed, and the impact of each on employee capability.
We start off by asking Chris how each is evidenced through the recruitment process and what is best practice around job specifications and assessing skills & attributes at interview.
importantly, we also discuss how individuals demonstrate attributes through 'standard' CV's.
We then go on to discuss that as you advance up the career ladder, attributes become more important due to leadership roles focusing on supporting businesses through change and or difficulty, changing what you are looking for in these individuals.
Of course we see skills shortages mentioned everywhere throughout the press. Have you ever seen an attributes shortage receive the same coverage? Especially with the need for key attributes needed for effective remote working.
At the core of this subject of course is how you develop both skills and attributes, and our conversation continues into how businesses can do both and the considerations that need to be made for the different approaches needed.
We hope you enjoy the conversation and, as always, if you have any friends or colleagues that you think would enjoy this podcast, please bring them into the conversation.
Enjoy the episode.
This week Chris leads us on a great conversation around your Employee Value Proposition (EVP). This is an episode that was recorded a few weeks ago that unfortunately Rachel was unable to join us in recording - don't worry, she is back to full fitness and back with us on the PeopleTalk Podcast!
So what is an employee value proposition?
As a business, your employee value proposition is the value that you are able to offer your employees, including benefits, environment and the like.
This week, me and Chris reflect on our understanding and experience of EVP, how this has changed with the onset of remote and hybrid working, and how employers should now be communicating their EVP to potential and existing employees.
The conversation then moves on to how SME's should approach EVP (it is not just a focus for large corporates!), how you need to follow up with your promised benefits and not just pay lip service to them, and whether you can use personal development as part of your EVP.
As ever, we love this topic and would love to hear your thoughts. As a topic there is so much to consider around how you structure your EVP and how you keep it current, and so would love to hear your experiences with this.
Enjoy the episode.
Happy Birthday....to us!!!! This week, 'The Peopletalk Podcast' turns 1!!
We started out 12 months ago as 3 people coming together to talk about our weeks in the World of People and to act as a support network to each other, a way of sharing our thoughts in the midst of a global lockdown. This week we reflect on our first year as a podcast, our favourite episodes and themes and a few thoughts on the next 12 months
Discussing how in years to come these episodes will be like mini time capsules, allowing us to reflect on the changing world through crazy times and look back on what has stuck around, what has flexed and what has returned to the way it was before. Such a cool way of looking at it we thought!
So Happy Birthday us and we hope to be celebrating many more in the years to come
Imposter Syndrome
As we do most week, the subject was recommended to us as a topic, so we start with a good old google search to define and give us some starting structure.....
"Imposter syndrome is loosely defined as doubting your abilities and feeling like a fraud"
Interestingly it went on to say that It disproportionately affects high-achieving people, who find it difficult to accept their accomplishments.
This week we covered a range of areas including
Our personal experiences...first leadership roles, starting businesses and podcasts...we've been there!
Resilience
This week we chatted about resilience. A great follow up conversation to lasts weeks focus on Mental Health in the Workplace. Paul lead this week and was honest to say he has had a week to forget...isolating after a family member tested positive for Covid (don't worry, they're fine), a lightning strike leading to no internet and any entertainment for home bound Children and being forced to work from home!!
Paul was reflecting on his tough couple of weeks and was reading this article (https://positivepsychology.com/resilience-in-the-workplace) and thought it would not only be a timely conversation for him but also a great follow on from last week.
The article summarised by saying...
"Broadly speaking, resilience is the ability to ‘bounce back’ when encountering the challenges that are an inevitable part of life. The workplace presents a different range of stressors to employees. What is resilience in the workplace? Why is it even important? Can individuals even become more resilient anyway? The exciting thing about resilience is that it is a skill. Like any skill, with practice, resilience can be learned."
We covered a few areas in this chat including-
We were joined by another guest this week, which centred around the so very important theme of Mental health in the Work Place
We welcomed Chris West.
Chris has a huge passion for helping and developing people. Whether this has been supporting team members, peers, graduates, customers or appearing at events and being the one in a group of friends that is there to help. A career in FMCG Sales leadership over nearly 20 years, leading teams, P&L management and national retailer relationships.
We know that the last 18 months have been very tough for lots of people and Chris has been open and honest that physically he struggled with two knee operations, mentally he struggled with the death of two friends. So maybe this has acted as the catalyst for him to make a shift in career away from the corporate environment in to consulting where he will specialise in Advanced Grief recovery, mental health first aid and coaching.
This weeks chat was a starting point, a way for us to continue the conversation and give some sight on the value it brings to a business to offer support and create a culture that encourages the conversation.
Chris started with the facts...
31st episode of the PeopleTalk podcast and we're talking about all the positives that we feel are here to stay after the last 18 months and how we are seeing them impacting our worlds in HR, L&D and recruitment.....the overriding theme we chatted through....people are key to business success!!
We were are all in agreement that our businesses have sensed and are seeing real positivity and pace in business in the UK in particular, early signs that we may being seeing global talent mobility slowly starting to open up again and that businesses are thinking more than 4 weeks ahead again!
A few of the themes we covered-
The importance of HR- if the function didnt have a seat at the table, it does now!
Remote working- think more about flexible working; it is more than just WFH...ability to get the job done when it suits you but how do businesses adapt to this.
Wellness- is firmly on the agenda with real meaning now not fluffy things!- burnout, mental health, work/life balance are rightly being openly talked about and supported.
Onboarding and Company Culture- the importance of truly understanding your culture and how you bring people in to the business rather than simply relying on the 'office vibe' and free coffee/drinks!
Training- a lot of businesses have realised the need to invest here to develop their people. More so in some cases where businesses have realised they can't rely on more casual/informal development in an office environment
Leadership skills- the remote/hybrid leader is evolving. The need for leaders, who have demonstrated adaptability, is #1 on the must have list in recruiting currently.
This week's PeopleTalk podcast welcomed a guest to mark our 30th recording to begin the conversation with Paul, Rachel and Chris around Diversity & Inclusion.
Good people with diverse backgrounds and perspectives are vital to an organisation’s success — both inherent diversity (e.g., race, gender) and acquired diversity (experience, cultural background) are associated with more sales revenue, more customers, greater innovation and higher profits (HBR, 2016).
We welcomed Jessica Hornsby from Equalital joined us this week (www.equalital.com) . At Equalital, they use proven psychology to actively advise clients how to find, develop and motivate the very best talent, nurturing and capitalising on the unique perspectives each person can bring
We really didn't scratch the surface and all came away with plenty questions and points for discussion and will definitely carry this on during future episodes
This week in the UK the sunshine has made an appearance and as we are lucky enough as individuals to have our own businesses and be able to work around this so, we headed out for the day yesterday and thought it might be topical to reflect up on how the change in the seasons can effect employee motivation.
HR
Recruitment
L&D
This week we reflect upon a topic that Paul came across recently in the Harvard Business Review, the topic of Limits to performance – but more specifically, how some peoples high levels of performance do not translate well when they are promoted. As always, we chat openly around the subject through the lenses of each of Worlds; L&D, Recruitment and HR
People Development- Putting in plans to develop and nature high performing talent is key, but what about raising the conversation with those who may not make the next career step in your business, should we have this conversation? Should we have it early or should we support the person if they want to make the move and see if things work?
Recruitment- this has huge implications when it comes to a business's hiring strategy. We discussed, hiring potential v's 'ready made', Internal v's external hiring considerations, is there such thing as over promotion?
HR– more often than not, the payoff for performing well is that you get the opportunity to climb the career ladder – so if we are saying this can be a poor decision for the individual and the business, how else can we manage performance and reward?
As the World slowly splutters back to life, we chat about the early impact this is having on our Worlds of HR, L&D and Recruitment
As we all feel our way back in to some normal life again, how is this journey looking around work, does anyone have the answers and do we foresee this changing as time goes on??
We meander our way (as usual!) through the subject this week covering off;
This week we attempt to tackle the massive subject that is Social media in 20 minutes!! This will lead to a few spin off episodes to discuss a few topics in more detail. Today, lead by Rachel, we give summary to how Social media impacts each of our Worlds in HR, L&D and Recruitment.
Last year over 70% of 18-34 year olds found their new job via social
We would love to continue this conversation in further episodes and would love to connect with any digital marketing people or employee lawyers with interest in this space and get you involved...find us via our links in the bio
We hit the quarter century this week with the 25th episode of the PeopleTalk podcast.
Today...building trust through recruitment & onboarding, firstly is it possible and more importantly how can we do it. With the changing world of the last 18 months one trend that is shining through currently...the breaking of trust with current or past employers who have gone back on their word and how this is carrying over into recruitment processes for new opportunities...so how so do we build trust from the very first conversation to ensure we bring the best people in to the business and as a candidate you find the right role....and just importantly keep them!
With Chris leading today, he has seen that this seems focussed around a couple of key areas currently; flexibility of working in office/remotely and talk of bonus/commission and cynicism around it being paid.
So with this in mind how do we build trust with prospective team members through a recruitment process...
Today we chatted about-
Our key take aways as always revolve around openness, honesty and transparency of conversation
This week we're talking about the importance of the working environment to employee performance.
With the World slowly returning some degree of freedom to us....we hope....today we talked specifically around what the working environment can do to impact performance of the business through the eyes of HR, L&D and Recruitment
Rachel started us off defining the 2 aspects to the working environment:
We go on to cover a range of topics (some actually related to the title today!) including;
This week, Paul lead our conversation around the topic of 'Team Building' which saw us focus particular attention on people returning to a physical office in the coming weeks and months.
We feel this is the start in a series of chats around team building , particularly around the building of blended teams, mixing those in office and those remotely joining the set up.
An ongoing theme in the world of people in the workplace is that of talent. We ourselves have talked around this subject quite a bit recently. Businesses are always on the look-out for their next rising star, or are putting considerable effort to talent development within their business.
We discuss this from a slightly different angle today around the question that Paul poses....Is there anything wrong with 'just' being a 'worker'? What does it mean to be an individual that is happy with their current position, and what does it mean for a business to have employees that don't have lofty aspirations of senior leadership?
As always we cover a range of views over the 20 minutes this week which included;
What do you want to be when you 'grow up'
We are back for another week of interesting conversation around people in the world of work and this week, as it is National Careers week here in the UK, we are continuing our theme of career development which has seen us cover a few areas over the past weeks including talent engagement and apprenticeships, posing the question....what do you want to be when you grow up!!
National Careers Week promotes careers guidance across the UK. National Careers Week started in 2010, after a conversation about how to help students make effective choices about their future career.
Now National Careers Week is a celebration of all things careers guidance, which aims to support young people leaving education and moving on to employment.
Chris hosts our chat this week, telling us how he often often starts his conversations with potential candidates. When speaking to candidates for the first time, regardless of career journey or level of role, he positions a question to get people talking that always gets a laugh...I'm keen to find out what you want to be when you grow up....and most answer the same way....I am not quite sure I know!
As always, our conversations jump around and we cover a range of subjects which include..
So we pose this questions....What type of career planner are you and is there a right way to do things??
Episode 20!! Today we're talking about the benefits of small teams and the (potentially negative) impact that one person can have on the performance of the team and what happens when you have an employee who isn't happy or not performing at work, they suddenly become a drain on the energy of the team, affecting morale and have the effect of a rotten apple in a fruit bowl!
Today we cover a range of themes, as always, including;
Enjoy this week's chat and as always please rate, comment and share if you've enjoyed!
So, in the UK it's #NationalApprenticeshipweek which follows on from last week's podcast when we talked about talent engagement and the benefits of young workers in business and rising stars.
We were delighted to welcome our first guest!! We found just the person to talk to... the fabulous Ziggy Pindoria whose business is Aspire2Learn (https://aspire2learn.com/). Ziggy's mission is to enable a positive change in life when starting in your career and provide continued opportunity to develop knowledge, skills and behaviours relevant to your chosen profession through delivering training and apprenticeship training.
We chatted about all things apprenticeships
And as always we finished with our takeaways and top tips to developing a skilled and motivated workforce through the use of Apprenticeships
We would love to continue our thinking around talent development, so if you are a willing guest let us know!!
This week Paul lead the conversation on a topic we are all hugely passionate about, identifying high potential talent and nurturing the 'stars of the future'. We were all in agreement that those in early stages of career are facing some daunting challenges in the current world...I can't quite imagine starting your first job from your kitchen table and not meeting people for months?!
A topic that needs (and deserves) far more time on it (and will be covered in coming weeks) but this week we covered the following and more-
We hope you enjoy the chat this week.
We are looking to continue this theme in coming weeks, so please reach out to one us on Linked In (links in podcast bio) if you are interested in picking an area to come and chat about
This week we chatted about our weeks just gone, each giving a main topic we are seeing lots of, which meant interesting insight and some live examples and lots of jumping around on topics...nothing new there for us!!!
We covered
Some of the content we disucssed-
How to give employee morale a boost (fsb.org.uk)
Time to shake off the cobwebs for our first podcast of 2021!
This week Rachel took the lead to talk through the topic of resilience through leadership. A topic that becomes more relevant by the week after the last 12 months and today we tackle it from all angles with HR, L&D, Recruitment and Coaching in mind.
Covering off a range of things today including-
With 2020 coming to an end...a year we will not forget for the wrong reasons!!! It's that time of year where we sit and contemplate what next for the year ahead, whether that be for us as individuals, our businesses or through supporting our clients with their thinking.
This week we talk through a few of the areas we feel need focus for 2021 in the World's of HR, L&D and Recruitment.
The word 'bitesized' came up a lot for us during the chat and we feel gives a good start for 2021 planning...bitesized planning to allow flexibility and agility as needed, bitesized content for training, bitesized review processes for better engagement for remote teams...the list went on
Enjoy our final chat for 2020 and we look forward to bringing you new and improved version of us for 2021 as we PLAN for what's coming!! Some amazing guests lined up and a full diary of content planned and as always please connect and reach out if you'd like to see any topics covered or want to come join the chat as a guest!
Our penultimate episode for the year and time to reflect. We are looking back on the 'messed' up year that is/was 2020!!
We will give our 3 main takeaways and take time to reflect on how this impacts each of the areas of specialisation that we play in…recruitment, coaching, HR and L&D
As three fledging business owners we have faced our own challenges in a year of lockdowns, recessions and home schooling!! We look back at what we've learnt and the main areas we would encourage our listeners to reflect on ahead of planning for 2021 (more on this in Ep 15)
We were all in agreement that positive mindset remained crucial away from our main areas of thought and thankful that we came together and found the PeopleTalk podcast!
This week we talk about how a flexible benefits programme can help businesses to recruit, retain and invest in personal development of their employees.
Having a flexible benefits programme in place is a way of an employer providing choice to their employees in the benefits that they want or need to suit their personal circumstances or lifestyle choices. Everyone is different, with different needs and wants so, having an element of choice in relation to benefits can be valuable.
Employees feel valued and cared for.
However, few businesses have truly flexible benefits schemes in place with core benefits that the employee is unable to opt out of.
So, today we chat about our experiences of flexible benefit packages and the direct effect they can have in their worlds or recruitment and people development
There is a famous saying that says the beautiful thing about learning is that no one can take it away from you. Ensuring you maintain a learning mindset is something that requires constant focus and nourishment to make sure you don’t lose it.
The importance of the learning mindset is not only that it may be a key personal motivation, but more and more people are assessing you on your continued development, especially when it comes to seeking new employment.
So today we would like to dive into today how we can actively engage our learning mindset why it is so important to do so and give you some insight in to how we do that for ourselves.
This weeks discussion is focussed around what makes the 'perfect' candidate if in fact they actually ever exist! We will look from both sides of the table and give thoughts, ideas and suggestions.
We throw some of Chris, Paul and Rachels views and opinions, get each others thoughts as experienced HR/L&D professionals but also as business owners who are going through recruitment themselves.
This sessions is aimed at causing some reflection and help to those who may be leading or going through recruitment processes currently around the World.
Chris leads us through his thoughts on the following points from his 15+ years of global recruitment experience getting comment from the guys on each-
With Rachel taking turn to host this week, she took inspiration from a talk she heard at the CIPD Virtual Conference this week in the UK. She heard Mo Gawdett speak about emotional intelligence, vulnerability and happiness, focusing on how we find 'happiness'.
He talked about the fact that it’s ok to show emotion in the workplace but it’s how you manage and deal with the emotion that matters, which is something we all know first hand throughout 2020 which has challenged us all in different ways. Showing that you're 'human' in the workplace as a leader gives you a voice to be heard and trusted in the workplace.
So using this as our focus today we explored what we feel the current 'Workplace' looks and feels like and what people are expecting now in a World that has seen, and continues to see, unprecedented levels of change.
As always, please find us all on social media and join the conversation, we'd love to hear your thoughts.
We use this weeks chat to reflect on another UK lockdown, how this may impact our sectors and give insight on our current work, trends and themes across HR, L&D, Recruitment & Coaching.
What did we cover?
As always, this was done in our own unique relaxed way with Paul hosting this week
We seek support and guidance in so many other aspects of our lives, our health...PT's, physios etc financial planners, travel, home improvement....so why not more in terms of taking control of our own careers and personal development?
This week we chatted through coaching & mentoring...starting with the differences and giving views on where we feel they are best used, trends we have seen lately in uptake and some really good thinking on how they can be used to strengthen engagement with your teams.
With many businesses coming towards the end of their performance review cycles, meaning review time...this year we are seeing businesses responding in different ways...delaying, shifting the way in which they are done or cancelling them all together.
We chat about how the current World has exacerbated how in-flexible and antiquated some methods are and the need to be more agile way of managing performance where continuous communication, objectives are continuously reviewed. If you don't look after your best talent it goes without saying that others will be very keen to do so!
Plenty of referencing of some great content in this area so make sure you follow us on Linked in to pick up on us posting them.
We chat about how the benefit of personalised development and how the current situation has impacted L&D activity, the challenges and more importantly the opportunities that it brings.
The discussion was a reflection upon how important it is that businesses are not only developing their people, but how important it is that they look to personalise employee development as much as they can.
We could have talked for hours about this subject, what we are seeing, the opportunities it brings, SME v's Big Corp environments, L&D as a retention and attraction tool plus plenty more!!
Retrain, recruit, redundancy. A challenge to businesses to think strategically about how to deal with change or times of difficulty, rather than being reactive. We want to talk about the options that are presented to business and how to make decisions around these options
Join Chris, Rachel and Paul for the 5th episode in our series for a relaxed conversation about how businesses need to be strategic with their thinking around recruitment, retraining and redundancy, and their experiences around this topic over the past few months.
Join Chris, Rachel and Paul for a relaxed and light hearted chat about people… more specifically, does the current climate of essential work place flexibility and working from home mean companies need to revisit their cultural values and importantly, how this is portrayed, described and lived day to day?
Join Chris (SisuPeople.) , Rachel (Face2FaceHR) and Paul (Eidos Consulting) for a relaxed conversation about the importance of employers understanding their skills needs in times of change, and the impact that high performing, commercially thinking individuals have on your chances of success, ability to adapt, change and thrive
Many of our conversations this week have centred around how must continue to keep people engaged in a remote World. Whether that be with eLearning, Recruitment, or broader more general employee engagement and HR practices. We reflect on our recent experiences of what we have seen recently with our customers or connections locally and further afield.
We would love to hear how you are keeping employees engaged in their work, their recruitment and their development, irrespective of their location or working practices. Happy listening!
Our first podcast...welcome to PeopleTalk! Today we introduce ourselves;
Rachel- HR
Paul- L&D
Chris- Recruitment & Coaching
We then go on to chat about our week and themes we are seeing out in the World-
The rise in people planning their future careers, coaching, the importance of Change Management and the vital role that a marketing/coms team is playing in the current climate
Its our first podcast...please be gentle and we promise we will improve if you come on the journey with us!!