The sticky notes were everywhere, at our most recent Agile HR meet-up. Yellow, green and blue clusters of thought and input around five big themes. Members came prepared and were soon chatting through the opinions, honest frustrations and, occasionally, cautious optimism that they had about an agile future at work.
The backdrop was the CIPD's People Profession 2030 report and the headline finding from our room was that the trends the report identified were right... It’s the pace of response that has been the problem.
So, how do our HR SIG think we’re becoming more agile? And what do we see happening in the years remaining until 2030?
The Five Trends, Revisited
The CIPD's report identified five major trends it expected to dominate the people profession through to 2030:
- Internal change and evolving organizational models
- Digital and technological transformation
- Changing demographics and D&I strategy
- Diversifying employment relationships
- Sustainability, purpose and responsible business
Our members spent the first part of the session mapping their own experiences against each and finding that, by and large, the trends had materialized. Some faster than expected, some slower, and a few in forms the report hadn't quite anticipated.
The AI Question Nobody Can Avoid
Artificial intelligence and specifically, what it means for the shape of the workforce, was a topic that everyone was keen to discuss. "AI isn't coming for jobs. It's coming for tasks," one member offered. And this distinction matters enormously for HR practice. If AI automates tasks rather than wholesale roles, the implication is that job design (the deliberate crafting of what a human’s job role contains) becomes a core HR competency rather than a standalone project. It needs to happen all of the time.
The entry-level work question surfaced with urgency here, too. If junior roles have traditionally been where graduates learn by doing (observing, assisting, absorbing institutional knowledge) and AI automates those task-layers, how do organisations build the pipeline? How do young people learn to use their skills in practice? Nobody had a clean answer, but the group agreed: this is now a workforce planning problem. It’s real and tangible.
A connected concern was knowledge transfer. When people leave, organisations don't just lose their skills; they lose personal qualities, informal networks, contextual judgement. Things that are notoriously hard to encode into any system, artificial or otherwise.
Can AI help us to solve this learning and institutional knowledge retention issue, as well as being part of the problem? We weren’t so sure.
"We're in danger of sleepwalking into the future, dreaming of the past and not recognizing what is right in front of us."
CIPD People Profession 2030
Agility: Aspiration or Reality?
The CIPD report was direct: most business models are "fixed at a moment in time," no matter how much agility organisations try to build in. Half a decade on, our members' consensus was that this diagnosis still holds, though the symptoms look somewhat different.
The pandemic forced a kind of emergency agility on many organisations. Decision-making accelerated. Hierarchies flattened temporarily. HR found itself at the center of the response. But as a member observed, "the emergency is over, and in many places, the org chart has quietly just reassembled itself." The question now is whether the genuine structural change the report called for has actually embedded, or whether it was situational.
The shift from individual goals to team-based recognition emerged as a live debate. Reward and recognition systems, often designed in a previous era, are now actively misaligned with the collaborative, cross-functional ways of working that agile organisations demand. "Structural change requires a shifted budget cycle to enable better reward and recognition," one member noted. How can teams work better together to make real change?
The Human Dividend of Remote Work
Remote work has been the most visibly transformed aspect of working life since the report was written. The CIPD's 2020 hackathon participants anticipated that offices would persist but be repurposed for social and collaborative tasks. That prediction has broadly held.
"Remote work makes international recruitment more viable," one member observed. A genuine upside that has expanded talent pools significantly. Yet the costs are real too. "Isolation and relationships need more focus." And "learning through osmosis": the informal, incidental learning that happens when people share physical space, the overheard conversation that reframes a problem, the mentor relationship that develops organically. These are not things that video calls easily replicate, and we discussed that organisations have struggled to embed ‘osmosis opportunities’ into their day to day.
The group noted that flexibility has its limits. "Flexibility is less valuable if it doesn't come with certainty”, pointing to the anxiety that can accompany arrangements that feel precarious or subject to reversal. Job security, several members agreed, matters more than many organisations currently acknowledge.
"When people leave, you don't just lose their skills - you lose their institutional knowledge and their personal qualities."
Diversity, Inclusion and the Long Game
The group felt the profession has made genuine progress on D&I, but also that the work is far from done, and that some of the most important shifts have been cultural rather than structural. Remote and hybrid working has paradoxically both helped and complicated diversity efforts: geographical barriers to talent have fallen but so have some of the informal signals of inclusion that physical presence provides.
Trust emerged as the underpinning issue. Inclusion without trust is performance. For it to become culture, we have to be able to trust that it happens when nobody is looking. "Be curious about the people you work with. Ask questions and be friendly" is deceptively simple advice that many organisations still struggle to operationalise at scale.
Purpose, Sustainability and the Whole Value Chain
The report's fifth trend has arguably gained the most momentum since 2020 and "see the whole value chain" was one member's distillation of this shift. HR can no longer concern itself solely with the internal employee experience; it must understand how the organisation sits within wider social and environmental systems.
Reporting came up as a specific tension. "Don't get good at the wrong things," one member cautioned, pointing to the risk of performative metrics that measure what's easy rather than what matters. Cross-team mentorship and broader organisational literacy were proposed as antidotes: build people who understand the whole system, not just their corner of it.
The Employee Value Proposition: Still Evolving
The traditional EVP, which includes salary, benefits, and title, has been genuinely disrupted. The pandemic surfaced what people actually value (flexibility, meaning, belonging, security) in ways that have shifted expectations permanently. "Sense of belonging and connection" appeared as a cluster in the notes: the idea that what employees now seek is not just engagement but resilience through difficult moments.
Succession management and continuity also featured, with the recognition that workforce planning must now extend beyond filling vacancies to thinking about skills, institutional memory and organisational capability over time.
So, Are We More Agile?
The honest answer from our room was: in some ways, yes. In others, not nearly enough.
The CIPD's 2020 report called on people professionals to role-model agility, lead on strategic change, make horizon-scanning a priority and genuinely adapt the people function itself. The profession has moved on all of these fronts, but unevenly, and often in response to crises rather than as deliberate strategy.
What our members seemed most agreed on was the necessity of intentionality. Both in a general sense and as a specific call to design: of onboarding experiences, of reward systems, of knowledge transfer, of the EVP, of how entry-level people learn in distributed environments. The agile organisation, it turns out, is not the one that moves fastest. It is the one that has thought most carefully about what it is trying to do and built the systems to do it.
2030 is close enough to see from here. Our members left the session with more questions than answers (which is, perhaps, exactly the right outcome for a group called a Special Interest Group). The interest, clearly, has not diminished.
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