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Latest insights
Under Pressure: Making the Case With HR
HR teams in INGOs and multilateral organizations are under growing pressure from funding uncertainty and new pay transparency rules, both requiring clearer and more consistent HR decisions. Recent experience shows that funding shocks often lead to rapid, role-based restructuring, highlighting the need for strong job structures. However, many organizations still struggle to connect jobs, skills, performance, and pay in a consistent way. The key challenge now is building simpler, more integrated HR systems that can withstand both operational demands and external scrutiny.
HEADLINES: The Return-to-Office Debate is Not Over, But the Workforce Has Already Decided
Hybrid work is still the norm despite major return-to-office mandates, with most employees expecting flexibility as a basic requirement. Ending remote options risks higher attrition—especially among top performers and caregivers—and disproportionately impacts women. Research shows RTO policies don’t improve financial performance but do raise equity and workforce challenges, making fairness and consistency across locations more important than where work happens.
Building Equitable Workforce Systems Through a Skills-Based Approach
A global organization faced concerns about pay inequity, unclear career paths, and inconsistent recognition despite having formal systems in place. To address this, a skills-based pilot with Birches Group linked pay more directly to demonstrated capability using a structured framework. The analysis compared assessed skills (actual performance) with imputed skills (pay-based expectations) and found widespread misalignment—many employees were under-recognized, with gaps often starting at hiring or promotion and sometimes spanning multiple skill levels. It also revealed structural issues, including too many lower-level roles and limited strategic capacity. Traditional systems often fail to align pay, progression, and development with real capability. A structured, skills-based approach improves fairness, transparency, and workforce planning by clearly linking what employees contribute to how they are rewarded and developed.
HEADLINES: Managing Performance Across Distance - From Visibility to Value
In distributed teams, traditional visibility and informal check-ins disappear, making performance harder to assess. Many organizations still rely on flawed proxies like hours worked or responsiveness, which creates bias and favors more visible employees. Without clear standards, decisions on pay and promotion default to proximity and familiarity, reinforcing inequity. A fairer approach is to define performance based on role-specific expectations and evaluate it through multiple perspectives, ensuring consistency across locations and work setups.
HEADLINES: Distributed by Design - What It Actually Takes to Build Teams That Work Across Borders
Distributed work is now common, but most organizations lack the structure to support it effectively. Communication is often fragmented, and success depends less on tools and more on consistent workflows, shared standards, and disciplined use of a centralized workspace. The bigger challenge is governance—not technology—as global teams require clear policies, compliance systems, and leadership ownership. Organizations that treat distributed work as a deliberate operating model, with strong structures and practices, achieve better and more equitable outcomes.