RL100 Spring Summit

I was seated across Sam Berthoud at dinner after our first day with Resourcing Leaders at our RL100 Spring Summit and he told me the story of how they have come together in Whitstable back in the day with an idea to create industry leading events for recruitment professionals. It was fascinating to see how they have managed to take an idea, grow it with passion and able to deliver what they deliver today. RL100 is an 'invite by recommendation only' group of 100 resourcing leaders using their collective thoughts to help raise the profile of in-house recruitment across the UK and there I am standing on the back feeling humbled and lucky to be part of this community.  

I will do my best to try and summarise key topics / discussions after each R100 session including my thoughts going forward to promote further discussion and knowledge sharing created by this community so please do share your comments / questions after reading this article. I came back to London feeling energised by the great synergy in Whitstable Castle over 2 days talking about many challenges facing TA leaders from building an inclusive business to Brexit and thinking more broadly about future of work and what role we'll need to play in shaping that future. 

We've started the summit with a very important topic which is Diversity & Inclusion presented by R100 Chair Adrian Thomas and discussed that we have to adress how diverse we are with regards to ethnic origin, disabilities, religion and many other qualities the same way we adress gender diversity in our organisations. We particularly discussed the importance of inclusion and how companies can succeed in representing diverse groups of people yet fail in involvement and therefore why we may need to start coining the term as Inclusion & Diversity going forward... This is a subject close to my heart as we decided to call London home 7 years back, in the middle of a succesful career, and that transition would have been much harder if I didnt have people around me who valued my experience, created an environment where I can thrive and most importantly showed a genuine interest in what I was going to say.  

UK is leaving the EU in a matter of weeks and it seems like we are going to struggle with creating diverse environments as such in our organisations going forward. Dr Sarah Liebermann who is a senior lecturer and researcher at Canterbury Christ Church University presented the room with possible scenarios on Brexit - which I am not going to share any spoilers here - and we did some Brexit scenario planning afterwards to anticipate how to tackle increasing talent shortages in UK yet we quickly realised we unfortunately didnt have a magic wand for this.

We started the second day on time, surprise to many! We had a very attractive topic to talk about in the morning which was TAs role in digital transformation and we particularly discussed what digital readiness look like for organisations and why learnability, agility and curiosity really matters in a world where change is the only constant and what role L&D is going to play in shaping the future of the organisations. Suzanne Courtney talked about job neighbourhoods where we'll be expected to work in a much more fluid / agile work environment and transferability of skills matter the most. We've also questioned HR's ability to fuel change and innovation with the risk-averse attitude to impacting people at a larger scale and the nature of legacy systems not being compatible with the next generation technologies. That's a sign that HR is here to stay for a while and our jobs will not be overtaken by robots and we're all in agreement that we'll greatly benefit from automation and AI in the short term.

Kevin Green from What's Next Consultancy took the stage to talk about Future of Work and presented a really good snapshot of our talent landscape talking about labor, talent and skills shortages and how the future of work (which seems to be the world of work we live in today!) is going to be one where we have to think more about our company's purpose, people's evolving skills and autonomy to create as Daniel Pink talk in more detail in his book called Drive and which is a great read to understand how to keep your people motivated in an era when war for talent is more prevalent than ever. Another thought provoking presentation was given by Jacob Binkin on early talent programmes and the critical role TA play to promote social mobility at early stages and how we can start building diversity early on in our organisations by engaging with more than 130 universities in the UK rather than concentrating on a selected few. We have to really get better at this if we're going to train AI in the future to remove our own biases and discrimination and build a future proof system.

We've closed the final session with Louise May from Amazon where she talked about Amazon's unique communication style and how culture becomes an enabler in delivering great outcomes. We've also discussed "fail fast / learn faster" culture and what people can achieve if they are not afraid to fail as long as there is a two way door and how important it is to have business ownership when raising a case for change. It's no surprise that Amazon is thriving both from a talent and business perspective.

Overall, it was a great opportunity to connect with industry leaders, debating on topics and sharing our thoughts on what may become solutions to our ongoing challenges. I will take this opportunity to thank once more The Recruitment Events Co and the team for these fantastic 2 days and hosting us in beautiful Whitstable. I can't wait for our next gathering to reengineer our resourcing processes in April!