“Scale is probably the biggest structural difference, and it drives quite a lot of everything else,” Ellis said. In larger UK and European organisations, he explains, HR tends to be more specialised, with dedicated centres of expertise in reward, organisational development, talent and workforce analytics sitting alongside business partners.<\/p>\n
“In New Zealand, functions are generally smaller, so people need to operate much more broadly. A senior P&C practitioner may move in the same day from an individual employee issue to remuneration, organisational design, leadership development and a conversation with the CEO.”<\/p>\n
That breadth carries a warning, not just an advantage. “I have also had to remind myself that smaller organisations don’t have smaller people problems,” Ellis said. “The underlying issues around behaviour, power, motivation, capability, leadership and performance can be every bit as complex. You simply have fewer specialist resources with which to address them.”<\/p>\n
He said the opportunity is to pair New Zealand’s pragmatism and accessibility with the specialist depth larger markets can support.<\/p>\n
The “people and\u00a0culture” label is a distraction<\/p>\n
New Zealand and Australia have largely dropped “human resources” in favour of “people and\u00a0culture” \u2013 a shift Ellis views with open scepticism. “I’m deeply cynical about changing the name of the function,” he said, noting the profession has cycled through personnel, human resources, human capital and now people and\u00a0culture without a matching leap in credibility.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“Scale is probably the biggest structural difference, and it drives quite a lot of everything else,” Ellis said.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":603769,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[297519,297518,111,43,139,69],"class_list":["post-603768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-duncan-cotterill","tag-guy-ellis","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=603768"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603768\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/603769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=603768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=603768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=603768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}