Welcome to your HRD Connect update!

What does truly inclusive work experience mean? 

Corporate responsibility should be apparent throughout all organisations. If companies can work with local communities, develop and protect the environment as well as deepen their relationships with both their customer and employees, they should make every step possible to do so. KPMG has recently rolled out their ‘one +1’ work experience scheme, where they allow employees to take on work experience students through the traditional routes and for every candidate placed they work with the Social Mobility Foundation to match a student from a low socio-economic background and offer them the same quality work experience opportunity.

“Social mobility is at the heart of everything we do at KPMG, it’s very important to us, and one of our corporate priorities is to widen access into our profession. We can’t make that claim and then just expect it to happen, we have to take action to make it happen” – Charlotte Carter, Head of Student Recruitment, KPMG

June marks Pride 2018, advocating diversity and inclusion for everyone! One of the UK’s leading diversity specialists, Suki Sandhu who established Audeliss in 2011, a diversity-focused boutique executive search firm speaks exclusively to HRD Connect. Suki is a huge advocate of diversity within any workplace, we took the opportunity to ask him some vital questions around issues that members of the LGBTQ+ communities face daily.

“I’d like to see a greater number of companies looking at their policies and actively demonstrating their commitment to inclusion. I don’t just want them to pay lip service to this.” – Suki Sandhu

According to the 2017 Deloitte Global Consumer Mobile Survey, more than a half (55%) of UK adults check their smartphone within 15 minutes of waking up, and adults aged 40-50 check their phone 33 times a day on average. Taking this into account, how can we find more focus and serenity in our lives? We look into developing and finding much-needed focus in the workplace.

The name Dave Ulrich is synonymous with HR, he designed arguably one of the most tangible and robust HR models in existence as well continuously encouraging the term HR to be reinvented and reborn to adapt to the skills and generations of the modern workforce. For Ulrich, if we aren’t constantly learning about how talent, leadership, and organisations operate, we end up in a vicious circle of irrelevance. Discovering new insights and propelling them into actions is for Ulrich the single most important action of truly inspiring leadership.

“We live in a world of ideas” – Dave Ulrich

As ever, join the conversation and tweet us at @HRDCommunity or email me at [email protected].

I hope you enjoy the features.

Best wishes,

Emily Sexton-Brown,
Editor, HRD Connect