Pros
Great benefits - pension scheme and health and wellbeing apps. One department has a 4 day working week. Hybrid working though it was mostly remote.
Cons
Poor management - The People Team need to address the issues with particular CIPD team managers who have been in their roles for some years and who clearly don’t take people management training seriously to support and manage their teams effectively and with compassion. Those same managers also tend to stick together and take on ‘favourites’. There is a list of behaviours that all staff should strive to adopt, one being is to challenge and not accept the mediocre but with these particular managers it’s not how they want you to behave for fear of showing them up. The irony of ‘championing better work and working lives’ is not lost on some working at CIPD. Those People Managers directly impact the wellbeing and engagement of their staff and it’s been disappointing to have received as well as witnessed poor people management behaviour, from embarrassing members of staff in front of others, to slighting other team managers to showing such a lack of empathy for team members with difficult personal issues. The second transformation in particular that took place in March 2024 was poorly handled with many staff commenting on the deterioration of their mental health, trust and confidence in CIPD. Transformations can do this, it’s the nature of them, however, yet again, it’s CIPD, how they got so much wrong was bewildering from basic administrative errors to repeated incorrect and poorly timed comms. However, once it was all over, (a 49+ day process) the teams heavily impacted had no clear understanding of their new ways of working for months afterwards, nor of their stakeholders so there was this limbo many were in, bearing in mind that all staff affected had 4 weeks to see if they fitted their new roles or had the option to leave. Many talented members of staff left as a by-product of the transformation on voluntary redundancy and many will continue to leave if SLT and the People Team don’t build back the trust and prove that the decisions made at the time were data driven and informed by experts. It’s worth mentioning some SLT members and senior people managers struggled to engage with their teams and offer the support they deserved, not even the bare minimum of active listening because they didn’t know how to navigate the challenging conversations. Many, to this day, still feel that there has been no true accountability taken for how we ended up in such a difficult financial situation and if they’ve made the right business decisions to move the organisation in the right direction. Systems We do not fully maximise our system capabilities for a few reasons, 1. staff training may only cover the basics of what’s required within individual teams, so there’s an disconnection of seeing the bigger picture and effectively capturing data to provide crucial data-driven insight. 2. When the new systems were brought in the capabilities were restricted as they weren’t thought through/ deemed necessary / reliant on another system to partly to do the same job. 3. Systems aren’t compatible with others so workarounds are used which end up taking the time we were looking lose. 4. The wrong people (some and not always) were part of the project teams that brought in the new systems; lacking seniority/knowledge to challenge before rolling the systems out organisation wide.