David Wilson, CEO, Fosway Group, highlights the need for HR teams to align productivity and performance with strategic objectives to have real business impact.

There’s no doubt about it: HR and L&D professionals have their work cut out in 2023. There is so much going on for organisations now, with all the usual pressures around skills, talent shortages, employee engagement, business agility, productivity, performance, digitization, ESG, climate-impacted supply chains and so on.

On top of these ever-present challenges, there’s also the current economic climate to contend with. For the past couple of years, the focus has been on surviving and adapting to pandemic conditions. That focus has now shifted to surviving and adapting to a recession economy.

All of this is generating some big questions for organisations and for HR and L&D professionals. What is your organisation trying to achieve? Where is it now? How are your goals and aspirations affected by the current economic and business landscape? How can HR/L&D support the organisation and help it to navigate its way through to achieve its goals? It is imperative that HR and L&D add real business value by aligning with organisational goals and priorities, while at the same time staying true to the narrative and processes of a modern people-focused agenda. It’s a real balancing and juggling act at the moment.

The employee experience is key, from an organisational and individual perspective. And recent Fosway research shows that HR/L&D recognises that. For our HR Realities Research 2022 , we surveyed CHROs about their top priorities during these turbulent times and 77% of them said the EX was their number one priority for achieving success as an HR team. However, only 17% said their HR team delivers an irresistible employee experience currently (38% said maybe, 42% said not and 3% didn’t know), with only 8% rating it as excellent (44% said quite good, 41% average, 6% quite poor and 1% awful).

When asked about their organisation’s most significant business challenges, availability of skills came out on top, followed by increasing organisational performance, improving customer satisfaction and service quality and then organisational resilience.

What all of this indicates is that there is a strong need to focus on typical HR/L&D issues such as employee productivity and performance, skills and the EX, wellbeing, and engagement, and to align it all to strategic objectives to have real business impact.

Skills and talent continue to be a major headache for a lot of employers. The supply of available talent is not going to suddenly improve, so learning teams need to really hone in on what the business-critical skills are, where the skills gaps are and how to upskill and reskill the workforce to meet those business needs. It’s about aligning the needs of the business with the aspirations and career trajectory of individuals.

The cost-of-living crisis is fast becoming the number one priority for many people right now, as they grapple with financial pressures and basic realities such as ‘Can I pay my mortgage?’ and ‘Can I afford to heat my home?’ And employers are grappling with basic realities such as ‘Can I afford to keep my existing workforce?’ and ‘Can I meet my energy costs?’

The question for HR/L&D teams is: ‘How can we optimise our contribution in this pressured environment?’ The focus needs to be on helping organisations achieve against a set of specific business goals, while still moving forward with skills transformation, with innovations in areas such as AI and the metaverse. It’s about transformational HR/L&D, without neglecting the transactional side of things. No organisation can afford to stand still, even in a recession environment.

As I said at the beginning of this piece, there’s an awful lot for HR and L&D professionals to do and think about in 2023 and it will be very interesting to see where we are this time next year and how much progress has been made.