Research data supports the evolving role of HR in modern businesses, yet many HR professionals in the UK are reportedly struggling to get buy-in from leadership.
At the same time, social media trends #QuietQuitting and #ActYourWage have accumulated over 1 billion views – highlighting the needs and expectations of modern employees.
A new study out of Oxford confirms the majority of the world’s workers are “quiet quitting”, costing the global economy USD$8.7 trillion annually.
There is arguably no more important aspect of business strategy in 2024 than people management. The impact extends beyond turnover, absenteeism, and engagement metrics and is directly correlated to business outcomes and profitability.
In this environment, HR’s people strategy plays a key role in helping organisations stay competitive and find new paths to growth.
With many HRDs stuck in the weeds of operational tasks, the HR function has to reposition itself as a strategic stakeholder that creates more value for the business.
As Lizzie Henson, founder of the 30,000 strong HR community HR Ninjas believes, “Transforming the HR function is not a nice-to-have – it is mission-critical in my opinion! In a world where attracting the very best talent is getting harder and harder due to employee expectations changing so fast – it will be those who keep up with the pace that comes out on top!”
We conducted a UK survey with HR professionals and drew from top HR voices to develop practical strategies to accelerate HR influence and impact, starting today.
5 Tried-and-Tested Ways to Move From Transactional HR to Transformational HR
Overview:
When HR professionals want to be brought in as strategic partners, they must build credibility across the organisation.
(Re)build Influence
(Re)prioritise Resources
HR professionals must approach their time and resource allocation for operational tasks with agile methodologies.
(Re)share People Data
Data analytics and data storytelling are essential skills for modern HR professionals to provide stakeholders with people insights.
(Re)structure Employee Training
Traditional training falls short of engaging an entire workforce and requires HR professionals to diversify training methods.
(Re)align with Business Goals
By aligning HR programs with business objectives, HR professionals amplify their credibility, extend influence, and increase profitability.
5 strategies for HR Leaders to Drive Greater Business Impact in 2024.
HR Top Voices
Featured
CEO at Disruptive HR, ex-HR director of BBC
Lucy Adams created Disruptive HR after having held senior-level HR roles in a variety of sectors, most recently at the BBC as the HR Director. She grew frustrated with the lack of innovation and fresh thinking in the profession and wanted to find new ways of tackling old problems. She now runs the agency to help HR Directors and business leaders to do things differently.
Lucy is the author of the best-seller 'HR: Disrupted' and is a popular keynote speaker on the themes of leading people in a disrupted world.
Lucy Adams
Head of People at YuLife
Cali Gold is the Head of People at YuLife. Before her current role, she served as HR and Development Manager at Gett.
She has proven leadership through key business challenges in scaling high-growth companies like YuLife, Gett and Deloitte. With her experience, she’s developed a deep understanding of the unique challenges and opportunities companies who are scaling-up face.
She is passionate about developing and implementing people-focused initiatives that foster a high-performance culture and support business growth.
Cali Gold
Founder of HR Ninjas
HR Ninjas is the UK’s biggest and busiest on-line community for HR professionals. With over 30k members they provide a friendly and safe space for the HR to ask questions, support each other, advertise jobs and share knowledge.
Lizzie founded HR Ninjas in 2018, around the same time as she made the leap from corporate HR (Boots, Experian, Eon, L’Oreal) to self-employment.
Nowadays, alongside the day job running the HR Ninjas community, Lizzie continues to provide independent strategic HR advice and consultancy to companies both here in the UK and globally.Lizzie is an advocate for the HR profession and a champion of the power of community in building high-performance cultures that deliver results.
Lizzie Henson
Head of People at What3Words
Alys is a senior HR executive with over 15 years of experience. Predominantly working within the start-up and scale-up space, she loves working with bright passionate people in purpose-driven businesses that solve interesting and relevant problems – all with a healthy dose of pragmatism and a great sense of humour.
She has worked within Health Tech, Augmented Reality, Fintech and publishing. She’s currently the Head of People at What3words, a proprietary geocode system designed to identify any location on the surface of Earth with a resolution of about 3 metres. It is owned by What3words Limited, based in London, England. The system encodes geographic coordinates into three permanently fixed dictionary words, it is a life-saving technology that is used by emergency services, postal services and individuals around the world.
As the Head of People, Alys works with the senior management team to curate and champion the people and culture behind their incredible mission to simplify addressing, making it safer, more precise and more efficient.
Her favourite What3words address is
///unrealistic.puzzle.lace which is the entrance to the Strand Book Store in New York!
Alys Martin
People Manager at What3Words
Sophie is an experienced HR professional and has worked in a variety of industries in her career including travel, sports, property and now tech. She is currently working at What3words as People Manager and enjoys bringing the team together and creating a culture where HR is seen as approachable and helpful.
She is an avid fan of YuLife (What3words have been a customer of YuLife since 2019) and very much enjoys encouraging others to have walking meetings, use their YuCoin for presents and letting people know when there is a surge - all with the enthusiasm of a Butlins red coat!
Sophie Pohling
What do people really feel?
An overview
What do HR leaders really feel?
63%
of HR leaders say employee wellbeing is important to their organisation.
3%
of HR leaders rank employee wellbeing as exceptional in their organisation.
33%
of HR leaders believe they can influence key decisions that impact employee wellbeing in their organisation.
The Transformational HR Survey was conducted by HR Ninjas Facebook in October 2023, with 789 HR professional respondents. HR Ninjas is the UK’s largest free online HR community, founded by Lizzie Henson.
1 in 3
employees in the UK believe their employer invests in their wellbeing
6 in 10
employees are psychologically disengaged from work
of employees across all countries say they are actively seeking a new job
51%
What do employees really feel?
What do CEOs really feel?
70%
of CEOs would like their HR team to have a better understanding of business goals.
45%
of those same CEOs are actively creating the conditions that allow CHROs to lead business growth.
89%
of CEOs say that the CHRO should have a central role in ensuring long-term profitable growth.
(Re)iterate the Business Impact of the HR Function
An estimated 17 million working days were lost in 2022 because of work-related stress, accounting for 55% of all days lost due to work-related ill health as reported by the HSE.
If ethics were not motivating enough for CEOs to own their duty of care for employee wellbeing, then the negative impact on the bottom line should be.
According to new findings from MetLife UK, more than two in five (44%) employees admit to calling in sick due to feeling exhausted, stressed, depressed, overwhelmed, and unmotivated.
Cali Gold, Head of People at YuLife comments:
“Absenteeism due to stress or burnout can be a big challenge for businesses, impacting both productivity and financial resources. After all, over 80 million hours are lost each year to burnout.
To address this issue with compassion, it's important to establish thoughtful wellbeing policies and manageable workloads.
By the same token, when employees need time off due to these challenges, the added strain placed on their colleagues is often underestimated, potentially causing a knock-on effect of stress and exhaustion on others as well.”
Other significant benefits of aligning HR with the business strategy include
Improving communication between leaders and the rest of the business
Mitigating risks and vulnerabilities associated with people management
Keeping business and employee focus on strategic goals
Augmenting productivity and optimising human capital
Promoting employee retention and reducing turnover costs
Assessing the overall health of the business to support sustainability
83%
of HR leaders believe they can be more effective in their role if leadership aligns HR goals with strategic business goals
Nearly 85% of HR leaders are considered to be influential in specific areas of their organisations
85%
But only 33% of HR leaders are considered to be a key function in driving business successLess than once a year
33%
(Re)build Influence
Strategy 1:
One of the most significant hurdles HR professionals encounter is resistance from leadership when striving to become strategic partners within their organisations. Instead of rationally arguing the benefits, Lucy Adams suggests that HR professionals adopt an ‘agile’ mindset similar to that of a product manager.
Lucy Adams
Former HR Director at BBC and Founder of Disruptive HR
“Data and even a strong business rationale won’t change behaviour.”
Create personas
Use tactics from a marketer's playbook and learn how to market your product to different users based on their tailored profiles. Put yourself in their shoes and get clear on why they would be motivated to change.
Find early adopters
Target managers and leaders who are more open to your product solution. Concentrate your efforts on creating these first advocates and don’t waste your time trying to convince the biggest resistors.
Market your products
Use HR communications as an opportunity to steer away from transactional requests only, to curating valuable resources for your people.
If you face repeated resistance, reevaluate your proposed plans and consider ways to break down your initiatives into smaller steps.
Simplify your product
“For HR to be part of transformational change, they have to get right into the heart of the business so they can challenge and improve on existing systems with insight and credibility. But pick your battles. Influence relies on taking people with you in order to be successful, so build those relationships and understand the commercial side of the business so you can make genuinely relevant and valuable recommendations.”
Alys Martin
Head of People at What3words
(Re)prioritise Resources
Strategy 2:
HR leaders have demanding workloads, making it impractical to add extra transformational tasks to their schedules.
The key to breaking free from operational constraints is to increase efficiency by streamlining processes, automation, or eliminating tasks.
Try doing something different in 2024 by reassessing resource management with agile design thinking and prioritisation frameworks.
“Take a look at the initiatives you are running. I like to use a four-box grid with Value on one axis and Visibility to Leadership on the 2nd. The two boxes you want to look at are Low Value/Low Visibility, drop these as soon as possible. Under High Value/Low Visibility, this is work that you are doing that you are getting no recognition for. Create some KPI’s for these, demonstrate how they contribute to the corporate objectives and offer to provide management information every month to the SLT meeting pack.”
Lizzie Henson
Founder & Owner of HR Ninjas
What innovative agile HR practices can we implement to deliver HR without adding costs?
Agile Onboarding
- Personalised Onboarding Plans: Craft individualised onboarding plans for new hires based on their specific roles and goals.

- Feedback Loops: Introduce regular check-ins between new hires and managers to address any arising issues or concerns during onboarding, to place the operational responsibility back on managers to onboard their new hires.
Agile Performance Management
- Frequent Feedback: Shift from annual performance reviews to regular one-on-one sessions between managers and employees.

- Self-Evaluation: Encourage employees to self-assess their performance and career development needs. This creates room for greater self-awareness and encourages both employee and manager to be responsible for feedback and a two-way communication of career goals.
Agile Employee Engagement
- Pulse Surveys: Conduct periodic pulse surveys to assess employee sentiment and pinpoint areas for improvement in real-time.

 - Transparent Feedback Culture: Foster employee feedback at every level of the hierarchy and not at just prescribed moments.
There has been much disquiet around the mismatch between benefits provided and employee expectations. This has meant that HR teams everywhere historically struggle with low engagement with benefits, as well as low wellbeing scores.
(Re)allocating Resources to Where it Counts: Case Study on Hunter
Instead of leaving room for guesswork, Hunter, a 50-person strong creative and branding agency (with an impressive client roster including CBRE, Hotel Chocolat Savills and The White Company), ask what their employees think and feel regularly so they can purchase benefits that their employees want and will use.
Their survey results revealed that private medical insurance and life insurance came in as their highest-rated benefit, which is when they contacted YuLife.
Why Hunter Design chose YuLife as their health and life insurance partner and benefits provider.
Research suggests that 1 in 3 employees in the UK rate health insurance as the #1 employee benefit.
With hospital wait times mounting and people and workplace absenteeism at the highest levels they’ve been in over a decade – it’s not hard to see why.
But the conundrum is that while health insurance does help employees at the point of sickness, there is still the problem of preventing poor health in the first place.
The best return on investment for a company, therefore, would be to invest in a health solution that doesn’t just provide access when one is ill, but can help prevent illness in the long-run, not least because it helps lower insurance premium growth and overall company risk.
Research has shown that 80% of chronic illness is preventable with everyday lifestyle changes. For example, just 11 minutes of walking a day is enough to reduce risk of dying by a whopping 23%.
This is why YuLife’s group health insurance offering (provided by Bupa) is game-changing. By investing in our solution, Hunter gave their people access to world-class healthcare (with access to over 600+ hospitals in the Bupa network), and an app that helps incentivise their people to make simple, everyday lifestyle changes that can improve health in the long-run. As the adage goes “prevention is better than cure” – but YuLife’s solution helped them do both.
Watch the full Hunter case study below.
(Re)share People Data
Strategy 3:
Sophie Pohling
People Manager at What3words
“We've put a lot of effort this year into improving our quality and quantity of data and interrogating the output of that to get better people insights throughout the whole employee lifecycle. It's hard to measure improvement without knowing where you've come from and where you've got to. Having some concrete numbers up your sleeve just gives so much more credibility when you're talking about the value of people work!”
“YuScore is set to transform our customers’ ability to measure – and even forecast – the impact of their wellbeing initiatives dynamically and accurately, which is vital in order to demonstrate the tangible value that a healthy workforce has for an organisation.”
Sammy Rubin
Founder & CEO of YuLife
Innovative HR teams have mastered the art of collecting both quantitative and qualitative people data, building a culture that values fairer data-informed decisions and champions diversity and inclusion.
It’s never been more important for HR professionals to understand company data, translate it into insights, and help reiterate findings to the rest of the organisation. If your HR function doesn’t currently have that skill and speed, it should be a top priority to develop data literacy and business acumen.
In the modern workforce, HR professionals must not only analyse data but also translate it into insights with leaders across the organisation, for overall business health and for personalised employee experiences.
68%
of HR professionals feel their leadership needs to trust HR’s recommendations more.
79%
of HR professionals believe data analytics is the key skill to becoming transformational leaders in their organisations.
People data and analytics have emerged as one of the most crucial human capital trends for HR teams and organisations, for overall business health and for employee experience. Businesses are now leveraging data to answer questions about employee wellbeing and forecast trends, mitigating potential risks.
HR professionals stand to benefit significantly from predictive analytics. Access to forecasting data enables effective employee retention, employee performance, insights into employee satisfaction, and steers better outcomes.
Gathering real-time data is more accessible in the age of AI, facilitating a dynamic and proactive risk assessment. For HR professionals who struggle with data, it is worth considering partnering up with providers who can gather and manage that data for you. For instance, YuLife offers customers access to YuScore, an AI-powered scoring system that provides a real-time assessment of a business’s health and risk levels based on engagement metrics, coupled with targeted recommendations. (Learn more here)
(Re)structure Employee Training
Strategy 4:
The conventional approach to introducing new HR products often relies on mandatory training, but it’s time to reconsider your training delivery methods.
In today’s diverse workforce, the one-size-fits-all model falls short in engaging all team members, requiring a range of diverse training approaches.
Shifting away from traditional, isolated training programs involves incorporating learning journeys—through continuous learning opportunities occurring over a period of time, including:
Only 27%
feel adequately trained in spearheading transformational HR initiatives for their organisation.
Alyssa Lahar, Chief Human Resources Officer at ZoomInfo, advocates for a culture of learning where HR isn’t the sole driver of professional development. An initiative embracing this culture is the establishment of ‘Leadership Lounges,’ encouraging spaces for leaders to teach and learn from each other.
Accurately measuring the impact of new training methods is another challenge. High-performing organisations have moved away from standard metrics, such as completion rates, towards outcomes-based measures, assessing the impact on individual performance and employee engagement, and business-process improvement.
2.4x
Companies that invest in the next generation of leaders yield significant results
60%
of L&D strategy has no explicit connection to the company’s strategic objectives.
While every business leader acknowledges the need for employee training and development initiatives to align with a company’s overall priorities, research at McKinsey indicates only 40% of HR leaders align their learning strategies with broader business objections.
more likely to achieve their targets (McKinsey)
(Re)align with Business Goals
Strategy 5:
Lizzie Henson
Founder & Owner of HR Ninjas
“Ask the leaders of your organisation what is important to them; transformation won’t happen without their buy-in. I appreciate that creating more accountability is scary. If we can get past that though, over time we can create an environment where we see less low-value work, more influence and we can make an argument for investment.”
Prioritising and aligning HR programs with business goals is pivotal for HR professionals. This alignment not only amplifies HR's impact but also broadens its influence and elevates its credibility.
Strategic alignment of HR with business objectives goes beyond merely connecting employee wellbeing with productivity—it necessitates close collaboration and shared responsibility among stakeholders to meet business goals.
To execute this effectively, HR professionals must cultivate a deep understanding of the business’ objective, vision, and strategic planning. Integrating HR initiatives with business goals, in turn, streamlines the measurement of impact on both employee wellness and productivity.
Here are examples of areas to consider where HR initiatives can be aligned to create more business value:
By focusing on delivering tangible commercial benefits, HR professionals reinforce the crucial role of transformational HR as a core function. This seamlessly aligns with the evolving expectations of CEOs, underscoring HR's role in driving substantial business impact.
Strategic alignment of HR initiatives not only improves retention rates but also reduces costs associated with recruitment, hiring, and training new employees.
Employee Retention
£30k+
is the average cost of turnover per employee in the UK earning £25,000 or more a year
35%
higher financial returns in companies with a higher racial and ethnic diversity
Aligning HR efforts with diversity and inclusion objectives not only strengthens the company's reputation but also boosts innovation and employee satisfaction.
Diversity and Inclusion
Employee Experience
Aligning employee onboarding and wellbeing initiatives with business objectives can lead to a high-performing workforce and happier employees.
69%
of employees who have a successful onboarding path will stay with their company for at least three years.
Less About Processes, More About People
Summarising Transformational HR in 2024:
Cali Gold
Head of People, YuLife
“HR can and should be the transformative force that shapes the very essence of a thriving and forward-looking enterprise.”
Building a long-term workforce strategy for the organisation should be the top priority for HR to deliver, a cornerstone that underpins the business strategy and supports employee needs.
It's important to note that transformational and transactional HR aren't mutually exclusive. A successful organisation requires a blend of both elements, and HR teams must integrate routine administrative tasks with more forward-thinking initiatives.
Implementing transformational HR approaches also enhances employee morale and motivation, encourages an environment conducive to achieving objectives and fosters a culture that naturally promotes high performance.
While some companies can swiftly discern priority areas for transformational HR through employee satisfaction surveys, others might face challenges in identifying focal points.
For those without sufficient data or systems to measure employee wellbeing, initiating a simple survey serves as an initial step to orient themselves within the organisational landscape and decide on a starting point for improvement.
Group insurance like no other
Meet YuLife:
Ready to hear how we can help?
Get a free quote and find out how our simple and affordable group insurance can help your employees live healthier and happier lives.
Insurance will never be the same again.
Level-up investment in your people with insurance that protects their futures, alongside wellbeing and rewards that inspire a healthy life today: group health insurance, group life insurance, group income protection, group critical illness, and more.
Healthy business starts with a healthy life.
Make healthy living for employees fun with rewards for walking, cycling and mindfulness. Incentivise participation with friendly competition and gamification – and watch the immediate culture-boosting experience unfold.
Wellbeing that works for everyone.
Enrich your people’s lives with immediate access to mental health and virtual GP support, alongside mindfulness and fitness apps that drive daily engagement – and experience the power of an effective wellbeing programme.
Make the world a better place – with rewards that make a difference, and matter to your people. Plant trees, clean oceans, donate meals and measure your carbon footprint through the YuLife app.