RPO and Talent Management Blog by Ochre House | Ochre Talk

Another lesson from News International!

In the past two days we have seen the leaders of News International send a clear message to the business: There’s you and there’s us.

When you click on their careers pages you see a quote from Rebekah Brooks that reads: “News International is a great company full of talented, dedicated and creative people. We are a company which has journalism at its very heart.” This got me thinking about News International’s HR function and how thankless their job must be right now. What do you do when you are trying to build and protect something as fundamental as a culture, an employee value proposition, when your leaders stand up and say “we have no values”?

Organisations globally are working extremely hard to put values at the hearts of their businesses in order to try to meet the demands of growth, scarcity of skills, changing markets, increased competition etc etc etc. Aligning talent programmes to business goals, with people the key to achieving short, medium and long-term ambitions, leaders have had to live and demonstrate values like never before, with their most critical business partner; HR.

On September 14th Ochre House hosts its annual symposium at Wentworth and this year it covers the topic: “Re-defining Business Value through a Talent Centric Approach”. For the first time we have business leaders joining with HR leaders, as the two have come to work inextricably in those organisations that are leading the way in aligning business strategy and talent.

We have heard that Newspapers have struggled, are perhaps outdated with the advent of the internet, but is it such an archaic industry that the leaders can behave like luddites? I think not, and I sincerely hope the NI staff vote with their feet.

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Comments

1. Christine Nichlos says:

   July 11, 2011 at 4:30 pm

   One lesson I learned long ago is that there is a person for every job and job for every person.
   Some talented individuals cannot work in organizations with high moral standards as they do not hold high moral standards and vice versa.
   The question then becomes, can HR and/or business leaders change culture? I would say, again based on experience, yes.
   The more disconcerting issue is when a company without high moral values operates under the pretense of having high moral values.