What's keeping Chief People Officers up at night?

At our July Roundtable, we were able to hear the insightful answers from Caroline Gillard, CPeO at Marshmallow, on some of her biggest challenges. With more than 40 people leaders on the call, the debate was lively and we learned a lot, so we wanted to share the key themes with you.

Challenge 1 – Developing high performance whilst focusing on profitability

Over the last 12 months most businesses have pivoted their strategy to focus on cash generation and profitability. Yet the challenge remains that you need a high performing culture to deliver on your strategy in a cost-effective way.

Developing a high performance system typically takes 2 to 3 years in a fast growth company. This allows time to embed the system, behaviours and language and for leaders to understand how to do it well.

• The starting point is to have clarity on what good looks like and to communicate that clearly to the whole organisation.
• Create a framework, process, and use tools to remove ambiguity and empower everyone to consistently work towards high performance. Caroline Gillard shared that Marshmallow uses the ‘9 Box Grid’ which is a performance map to guide professional development.?
• Calibrating performance regularly and providing targeted and cost-effective learning helps to develop the highest priority needs.
• Never put high performance above a strong culture and values as this can lead to significant dysfunction.

Challenge 2 – Managing headcount and organisation size during tough economic times

The economic headwinds businesses are facing create a move to cut headcount and retrench and still most businesses have the ambition to grow revenue.

• Remember that “this too shall pass” – stay patient and don’t cut headcount too hard and too soon as rehiring can be expensive and difficult.
• Get clear on what is essential over the next 12 to 18 months and build an organisation matrix to reflect the skills needed to deliver this.
• Grow capability and leadership from the top down by investing in people with experience as this then trickles down through the organisation as they are the people that will build teams that perform.?
• Be ok to side-line, layer and let-go of people who will not have the skills to contribute in the future as this allows space for new talent to enter.

Challenge 3 – Retaining talent during salary inflation

Requests for salary and compensation continue to rise as the cost of living spikes making retention of top talent more challenging.

• Be honest and straightforward about where to invest and reward.? Identify the key contributors who are pivotal to value creation and prioritise your resources here.
• Recognise that everyone is different and take time to understand what motivates them the most.? Use fresh challenges, autonomy and learning as a tool to retain talent.
• Use flexible benefit packages to enable people to select rewards that best fit with their wants and needs.

Challenge 4 – Adapting to the changing needs of younger generations

Caroline Gillard noted that particularly the new Generation Z employees coming into the workforce have very different perspectives on what they want from work.? She noted that this is exciting and uncharted territory.? Some key steps:

• Younger employees can appear more demanding.? Take time to engage and listen to their wants and needs to shape the right approach to motivate them.
• Recognise that you may “borrow” people for 2 to 3 years and build experiences that make that a win/win for them and the organisation.? This means great experience for the employee and adding real value for the company.
• Engage younger team members in designing the people strategy – they are savvy and have insight that we would otherwise miss.
• Retention may become less of a factor over time as employees build patchwork career journeys, so people leaders will need to adapt to this change in their org design planning.

We felt so privileged to hear these pearls of wisdom and wished we had all day to continue the conversation.? Thanks so much to Caroline for her time, all the participants for their contribution and to Kusia Pell for brilliant facilitation.??

At Elevayte we organise frequent events for People leaders to connect, share inspiration, and best practice. Our next event is our inaugural People Summit on September 27th, where People Leaders will come together for a half-day to listen to a panel of the UK’s leading ScaleUp CPeOs and work with peers to solve people challenges.

Get in touch if you would like to join.