‘Good work’ and focusing on wellbeing are the levers needed to get people back into work, according to CIPD chief executive Peter Cheese.

Speaking at this year’s CIPD Festival of Work in London, Cheese argued that wellbeing “is not an ideology” but is fundamental to good business.

UK statistics show that just over a fifth of the UK working age population is currently economically inactive, yet a high proportion of these people would benefit from being in work, he added.

“Wellbeing needs to help people back into work,” he said. “It’s fundamental to good business, to help people to give their best and to address underemployment, just as much as inclusion and engagement.”

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More broadly, HR teams are having to deal with huge demographic, political and societal shifts as they plan for the future, he said.

“We’ve had the job for life, then it was a life of jobs. Now we talk about things like squiggly careers, where you can come into a job and it could move in all sorts of directions.

“Technology has massively impacted the nature of the work we do. To predict the skills we need in the future becomes harder, but we need to do this to invest in the skills of tomorrow.”

Artificial intelligence, in particular, should be used to add value not just to business but to people’s wellbeing, Cheese added.

“People talk about using AI to take costs out, or diamond-shaped organisations where the technology does the entry-level jobs. But what does this mean for young people?

“The goal should be that we create better work – that the robots do the dirty and the difficult things. We still have too many jobs that are not good for people.”

Earlier this week, the HR body released research showing that a quarter of employees feel that work has a negative impact on their health.

Safeguarding employees’ wellbeing can also add value in other ways, according to Sarah Armstrong-Smith, chief security adviser at Microsoft, who spoke on the behavioural drivers behind recent cyber attacks, such as at M&S.

“Contempt breeds apathy,” she said. “When people stop caring about their job, bad things happen; they stop caring about your controls and your processes.”

These employees can become “super malicious users” who are more vulnerable to clicking on a dangerous link from hackers, she added.

To mitigate the risk of attack, organisations need human-centric leadership where people are the top priority in business continuity, rather than potential financial loss.

“Transformational leadership is rooted in empathy, and this leads to psychological safety. If someone feels cared for on their worst day, they’re more likely to speak up,” explained Armstrong-Smith.

Rather than “barking orders” about what employees should and should not do in such situations, leaders should think about how they protect workers and what avenues they have to listen to them.

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“Empowerment doesn’t cost anything – you need to empower people to be able to say no,” she concluded.

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