i4cp Boards January 2023 Cross-Functional Meeting - 2023 Priorities and Predictions

Meeting Details

At the January meeting, 70 members of i4cp’s six invitation-only executive boards gathered virtually to discuss how organizations are operationalizing some of the i4cp 2023 Priorities and Predictions highlighted in our recent report. This group was made up the heads of HR, diversity/equity/inclusion, talent acquisition, learning, talent, people analytics, and total rewards from leading organizations around the world.

In this exclusive meeting, these executives engaged in small group discussions with peers who serve on various i4cp Boards in order to provide a diverse and cross-functional lens on two key questions:

• What is your organization doing to address its biggest talent challenge? 
• What are you doing to gauge and ensure your organization’s culture health? 

Discussions in these breakouts included internal talent marketplaces, pay transparency, manager and worker capability and accountability, well-being, talent sources, and agility, among others. However, a few themes stood out and cut across all conversations:

• Employee value proposition – ensuring it strongly appeals to and is experienced by key talent. For some, it was about reconnecting their existing workforce to the organization’s purpose (i.e., why it does what it does).  For others, it was redesigning their EVP to appear more attractive to new sources of talent. While, for others, it was about reinforcing an existing EVP that the company feels strongly about, but has been miscommunicated to (or missed entirely by) the talent it needs most. And for some, it was a bit of it all.  As one executive shared, “We need a clear EVP to re-anchor and retain key talent, but also to help us rev up the hiring engine.”
• Skills – putting them at the core of all decisions related to hiring, developing, moving, and rewarding talent.  This includes enabling the organization to source skills and capability where and when needed as well as provide intelligent career pathing and development planning based on the skills one has, their ambitions going forward, and the future needs of the business.  On the development front, many of the organizations represented on the i4cp Boards will be emphasizing ongoing development as part of their refreshed employee value propositions; via internal talent mobility (i.e., experiential learning); and equipping leaders to better manage in a hybrid environment. One executive set the benchmark for all to follow, stating, “Skills are the foundation to everything the company needs to get done”. Importantly, emphasis will be on both a skillset shift and a mindset shift. 
• Culture – listening, renovating, and measuring to ensure it is healthy and continually supports strategy. These executives realize the importance of ensuring a culture that not only supports the current strategy, but also fosters the type of environment that allows it to pivot and adapt quickly to the evolving needs of the business, as well as drive productivity.  “How is what we are doing in HR connecting with those in our target markets?” This question, raised by one executive, demonstrates the systemic thinking these leaders have. They understand that culture health sustainability is critical to business health sustainability.  One leader shared the culture rating scale they use a part of their performance reviews, that rates individuals on whether they are lacking, learning, living, or leading the company’s values. This means that no one can do well on performance, without also doing good.

Whether facing a merger or acquisition event, a shift in business model, a decision to advance (or cut back) in a market, or the move to hybrid work, these HR executives understand that success is heavily dependent upon the company’s approach to managing the interconnectedness of talent, leadership, and culture to market alignment and strategy execution.

To learn more about what the members of the i4cp executive boards are thinking about, be sure to read the i4cp 2023 Priorities and Predictions report. This report is based on input from 127 professionals who lead HR or its core functional areas and also features insights from several of the world’s top HR and management thinkers.  To learn more about i4cp and its executive boards, click here.