Crafting a European HR agenda

This was an opportunity to meet delegates from HR associations across Europe and understand their issues and ways of working. Talent management and diversity were continuing themes. Interest was high on collaborating on European HR research and the launch of an international HR day. 

View interesting videos of these European HR leaders discussing their national issues. 

At the EAPM Congress hosted by the French association, ANDRH, there was much debate on social dialogue, and progress on the Posted Workers Directive was acknowledged by Pierre Moscovici, European Commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs, Taxation and Customs. Peter Cheese, CIPD CEO, talked about the implications of Brexit and our readiness for a changing HR profession.

Job quality

Agnès Parent-Thirion of Eurofound gave an insightful presentation drawing on the findings of the Sixth European Working Conditions Survey: Job quality and working life in Europe. She discussed the connection about how improving job quality improves working life.  Job quality is associated with being employed and longer working life, and research is currently being carried out by CIPD on this. For Eurofound, job quality consists of a number of key variables and their constituent parts, namely:

• Physical environment, that is ambient, promotes good posture and reduces exposure to chemical agents
• Lower work intensity, with interdependence and capacity to manage pace
• Working time quality including flexibility 
• Social environment with quality management and social supports and no anti-social behaviour 
• Skills and discretion including using cognitive skills, decision making and training
• Prospects including career prospects, employment and job security
• Earnings

Eurofound mapped types of jobs and different sectors onto these job quality features to provide more insight into where improvements can be made and demonstrate how these factors effect well-being, engagement, job satisfaction. The evidence is very striking. While no job was perfect and there was always a trade-off, it is important to note than improvement in one of these features will improve quality of working life.