What's the greatest challenge facing HR right now, and why?

We must use our Dodo Brains to show that AI will never replicate the empathy, curiosity, and deep thinking HR practitioners bring to the workplace. If we don’t use our brains to think differently, they will go the same way as the Dodo!

What's the biggest opportunity HR teams are currently missing?

Using our shared firsthand experience of how people work and live to fuel positive and impactful strategic thinking.

Who has most influenced your approach to HR leadership?

A former colleague who said they felt they didn’t know me after five years working together. I realised bringing the whole self to work is absolutely key to lead with positive impact.

Why do you think HR Practitioners should attend HR Minds Summit?

It’s a living and breathing cocoon of ideas and shared experience. It will give you new approaches to tackling thorny problems.

ABOUT

Partner and Chief People Officer, Martin Osler joined Johnston Carmichael in 2021. A Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, Martin started his career in journalism and government communications, before building HR expertise in various roles. Martin is responsible for ensuring nearly 1,000 people across 11 different sites across the UK have the best possible experience of working at Johnston Carmichael. His remit includes working with the Board to develop a meaningful and positively impactful culture and people strategy, growing the people value proposition, HR operations, Learning and Development, Recruitment and Early Careers. Martin built an inhouse leadership programme which is accredited at Masters-level and helped contribute to Johnston Carmichael achieving Great Place to Work status in the UK. It is now provided as a service to clients as part of the firm’s People Advisory offering. A Moore Global Harvard Leadership Programme alumni, one of Martin’s finest achievements was climbing Mount Kilimanjaro.

What's a piece of conventional HR wisdom you disagree with?

This has to be the 9-box talent grid.

For many years, I spent hours with leaders placing colleagues into boxes – to distinguish who then was eligible to receive learning interventions and access to talent programmes and who may succeed them. Learning and growth should be for all – with equity applied to its distribution … it should not be about the elite few who, as ‘stars’, have the best and biggest programmes deployed for them.

Every colleague is worthy of development and has a right to fulfil their ambitions and growth. As organisations, we have a role in providing a fair platform of learning opportunities for all, and pigeonholing colleagues into boxes of have and have-nots is not the way to achieve this in my view. Nor is categorising ‘talent’ in the grid inclusive in any sense.

What's the biggest opportunity HR teams are currently missing?

HR for many years has found itself stuck in process management, running cycles of resourcing, performance management, reward infrastructures and role evaluating to name just a few.

What we are missing is that there is a huge opportunity we can all step into, which is far more strategic, through shaping the evolution of the way our organisations work. Designing our organisations, our ways of working, systems, rhythms and routines can have a huge impact on colleagues' experience of work, and also can generate places where innovation, creativity and continual improvement can thrive.

Whilst people processes will always need an overarching role being undertaken by people functions, shifting our focus upstream on the set up, design and functioning of the organisation can have a much more enduring and sustainable shift for colleagues, and enable the organisation to thrive and grow.

ABOUT

After a six-year career at the Co-op, where she led the People Operations Partnering team across retail, logistics and funeral care, supporting around 50,000 colleagues, Sarah joined the children's charity Barnardo's as Director of People and Culture in 2023. She was drawn by the charity's mission to Change Childhoods and Change Lives, and its ambition to create a Barnardo's where everyone can truly belong.

Sarah took on her first HR Director role at the age of 28 and has more than 25 years' experience in HR across a range of sectors. Her career has included senior roles with Boots, Britvic, Your Housing Group, Coventry University and Balfour Beatty.

Sarah describes herself as an activist and agitator for radically transforming the role people professionals play within organisations. Driven by a passion for creating a better world of work, she has reshaped Barnardo's People Strategy, placing belonging, inclusion, personal growth and colleague participation at its heart. She has also led the development and embedding of organisational design principles that seek to reduce hierarchy, increase transparency in decision-making, and foster more adaptive, collaborative ways of working. Her mission is to create a more liberating, inclusive world of work.

A key collaborator with globally renowned HR consultant Perry Timms, Sarah has helped advance the people profession's modern paradigm shift, HR 3.0. She is passionate about influencing the wider HR profession by sharing her learning, practical success strategies and demonstrating how a more progressive people function can be applied in practice.

Alongside her day job, Sarah was a co-creator of the award-winning Night Club sleep health initiative, launched in 2022 to bring sleep research to life in a practical and engaging way for night shift workers. Since its launch, the initiative has been discussed by policymakers in Westminster and adopted by organisations across the UK, helping to improve the lives of thousands of night shift workers.

What’s a piece of conventional HR wisdom you disagree with?
That HR’s job is to be the ‘people advocate’. I think that framing has done HR more harm than good. Our job isn’t to automatically represent the employee, or the manager, or the business. It’s to help create an organisation that works. Sometimes that means challenging a manager. Sometimes it means telling an employee something they don’t want to hear. Sometimes it means questioning whether a long-standing policy or HR process adds any value at all. Good HR isn’t about picking a side. It’s about exercising judgement, understanding the wider consequences of a decision and helping the business make better ones.

What’s the biggest opportunity HR teams are currently missing?
I think the biggest opportunity is redesigning work, rather than simply introducing AI into the work we already do. There’s a lot of focus on which HR activities AI can make quicker: writing policies, producing job descriptions, summarising meetings, answering employee questions. All useful, but relatively uninteresting. The bigger question is what jobs, teams and organisations should look like when technology fundamentally changes what one person is capable of doing. If somebody can suddenly do in two hours what previously took a day, the answer cannot just be to give them five times as much work. HR should be right in the middle of questions about role design, capability, decision-making, management layers and how organisations create value. I’m not convinced enough HR teams have realised yet that this is the real opportunity.

What’s the greatest challenge facing HR right now, and why?
Remaining relevant. HR has spent years asking for a seat at the table, but having the seat and being useful once you get there are two very different things. The function is increasingly expected to understand commercial decisions, organisational design, technology, data, capability and productivity, while still being excellent at the fundamentals of people management. That means HR practitioners need to be able to think beyond the immediate HR question.

    What does this decision do to the organisation? What behaviour will it create?

What are the unintended consequences? What happens six months from now? The challenge isn’t that HR has too much to do. It’s that the standard expected of good HR is becoming much higher and I think that’s a good thing.

What’s one piece of advice you’d give to someone starting out in HR today?
Learn how the business actually works. Understand how it makes money, what customers pay for, where the costs sit, what good performance looks like and what keeps the leadership team awake at night. You can learn employment law, process and policy. You absolutely need those foundations. But the people who become genuinely useful in HR are the ones who can connect those things to the commercial reality of the organisation. Don’t just learn HR. Learn the business/commercial awareness that sits alongside it.

What’s the most valuable lesson you’ve learned in your HR career?
That there is very rarely a purely ‘HR’ problem. Performance issues can actually be management problems. Engagement issues can be caused by poor organisational design. Retention problems might really be about pay, workload, leadership, career development or simply hiring the wrong people in the first place. The most useful thing you can do is resist the temptation to immediately reach for an HR solution. Understand the problem properly first. Ask what is actually causing it, what else it affects, and whether fixing the obvious symptom will create another problem somewhere else. That shift in thinking has probably influenced my approach more than anything else. Who or what has most influenced your approach to HR leadership? Probably not another HR leader. I’ve been much more influenced by people who think about organisations, systems, decision-making and human behaviour than by traditional HR thinking, particularly a CEO that mentored me in my early career right through to their retirement five years ago. They taught me a lot about always trying to understand how the whole system works rather than looking at one decision in isolation. If you change performance management, what behaviour does that create? If you change incentives, what gets optimised? If you restructure a team, where does accountability actually move? I think good HR leadership is largely about connecting those dots and anticipating consequences before they become problems.

ABOUT

Tom Nash is a senior people and business leader with a strong bias towards action, change and tackling things that are difficult. He is drawn to ambitious problems, unconventional ideas and environments where standing still is not really an option. Whether he is redesigning how a business operates, challenging established thinking or exploring how AI will change the way we work, his focus is always on creating something better rather than simply maintaining what already exists. That same mindset extends beyond work. Tom is a competitive skydiver and co-founder of REIVER Performance, built around the idea of pushing limits, developing capability and remaining undefeated by the challenge in front of you. He brings that philosophy into leadership too: think deeply, challenge intelligently, commit fully and make things happen.

ABOUT

Idris Arshad is a chartered fellow of the CIPD and head of people for the charity Asthma and Lung UK. He is also an independent adviser on the people committee for Citizens Advice, and chairs the Richmond Group of Charities HR Network, consisting of 15 key healthcare charities. In April 2025, Arshad co-founded Muslims in HR, a community network helping to provide a space for Muslim HR professionals to connect, learn and grow. He also helps shape the future of HR by teaching Chartered Management Institute (CMI) and CIPD qualifications with We Are HR, a CIPD-accredited learning and HR solutions organisation. A passionate HR leader who advocates to uplift the reputation and showcase the value of HR, Arshad is proud of making sure HR improves frontline services, and helps better serve people in need. His extensive strategic and operational HR experience in the charity sector covers a range of organisations including those focusing on international development, homelessness, hospice and healthcare. Arshad has led the equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) and wellbeing agenda strongly throughout his career. He has increased the diversity of workforce representation and improved wellbeing cultures. More recently, Arshad has focused on ensuring that employee experience is a key driver for organisational success, impacting the lives of the people that charities exist to serve. This is his third consecutive year being featured on the HR Most Influential Practitioners list.