Blog post
Top focus areas for people and HR teams in 2024
As we move into the new year, people teams everywhere will be looking at the key drivers in their area and considering how to respond. Here the Openca...
Blog
Opencast’s mission as an organisation is to “to deliver human-focused solutions to the challenges our clients face by harnessing the potential of people and working together to ensure technology is done in the right way.” This mission informs all of our work as a business and sets out the approach that earlier this year saw Opencast receive certification as a purpose-driven B Corp.
As a people team, we all work to build and maintain Opencast's human focus, fostering a work environment and culture that focuses on our people. We take a future-focused approach to talent, supporting career progression and building skills to give our people the best opportunities for their personal growth. We also empower our people to make an impact, and enable their expertise through a focus on continuous learning.
Across all of this, we work to be inclusive, sharing diversity of thought, all the while listening and collaborating.
We want to share knowledge and inspiration for our work that we come across, to act as a resource for people and HR teams in other organisations working on similar missions. We also want to help Opencast colleagues by sharing spotlights on:
Cate Kalson, Chief People Officer (pictured): “I’ve been reading David Liddle’s book ‘Transformation Culture’. I had the pleasure of meeting David in the summer as we were both included on HR Magazine’s top 100 HR leaders list. I’m always super curious to learn about people’s career journeys and was immediately captivated by David’s story of starting his career in race relations and conflict mediation. Not the typical HR leader’s starting point!
“David has developed a definition for a transformational culture to be a blueprint for how to achieve it. I loved the practical nature of the toolkits and also the wide variety of case studies shared from organisations who are on the journey of becoming transformational cultures.
“I’m so glad I invested the time in reading this! I quickly decided it was going to become a handbook for my planning for 2025 and beyond so my copy is now covered in scribbles and actions that we will be taking into our people team planning for 2025. A number of other people in the team are reading it and I’m looking forward to hearing their insights, too.”
Victoria Reilly, Director of People & Organisational Development (pictured): “Over the past year we have embedded the Skills Builder Partnership’s Essential Skills framework into our people development approach. All Opencast colleagues now have a competency framework that is based on these essential skills. We’re now planning how we embed this into our recruitment practices.
Nicole Eaton, Talent Engagement Partner: “We have been creating a bank of interview questions for each level of role which are being reviewed by our content design community to ensure accessible language to all. We’ve then been working closely with our practice leads to prioritise the skills in their areas to create a scoring matrix that allows us to create a clear picture of a candidate’s strengths and areas for improvement when joining the business. Once this is completed, we will be creating examples on our recruitment system and start to design a training plan for interviewers.”
Sheena Widdowfield, Head of Engagement and Inclusion (pictured): “Our approach to diversity, equity and inclusion at Opencast is one that is commonly led by curiosity. Leaning in to topics that aren’t always comfortable but offer huge growth opportunities in our understanding of the experiences of others.
"We recently partnered with the Northumbria Police and Crime Commissioner’s office to be the first private sector company to run a cohort of its ‘Active Bystander’ training, which aims to raise awareness of the issues of violence against women and girls. This training highlights systemic power imbalances that allow violence and harassment to persist, encouraging people to reflect on how their actions – or inactions – can either challenge or reinforce these dynamics.
“It’s not just about understanding extreme forms of violence; it also brings awareness to more subtle biases, such as microaggressions or unequal expectations in the workplace, that disproportionately affect women. By engaging in these conversations, we begin to see the broader impact of gender inequality. We hope to support this programme in the future for Opencast and others in wider society as this content could be literally lifesaving in some cases.”
Stef Monaco, Director of Purpose (pictured): “This was the first year that Opencast tried to use an objectives and key results (OKR) framework across the organisation to help us deliver on transformation and change. We’re a high-growth organisation, so our leaders are grappling with the different pressures of establishing new functions, growing a team and delivering day-to-day business needs in parallel within the same time frame. This is complex, so having OKRs has been a useful anchor. OKRs have provided much needed clarity on what we’re aiming for, something to aim for is always good,
“We’ve learned that it’s not easy to get the O (objective) right. It needs to be broad enough to be aspirational but achievable. When it comes to KRs (key results), we need to measure what matters. This is also not easy. We tried to focus on outcomes not outputs as that ensures that we’re really focused on delivering the outcome that matters. As this was the first year for OKRs we didn’t have a lot of baseline data, which has made it tricky to understand how ambitious we should be. We’ve also learned that while we want to measure quantitatively, qualitative insights are also important. People-centred change is not always directly measurable or causation attributable, so how do we ensure that we are listening to and amplifying some of the more qualitative insights?
“Next year we’re going to building on this year’s springboard. Fewer, more collaborative OKRs would be better. We want to improve how we set KRs now that we’ve measured more of our baselines, to ensure we’re focused on outcomes and have the right level of aggregation.”
We hope you enjoy what we’re sharing here and would love to hear your feedback so we can evolve and keep it as useful as possible for everyone. If you're working on a people team in your own organisation and have ideas to share, we'd love to hear from you.
We want to share knowledge and inspiration for our work that we come across, to act as a resource for people and HR teams in other organisations working on similar missions
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