REWARD
Give your people tools to take back control Screentime management tools such as Freedom, Forest and Opal, or the inbuilt screentime settings on phones all help your people to create better digital boundaries. “The real opportunity with technology isn’t to replace us, but to empower us” Work on your attention intelligence Pay attention to what you pay attention to, track where your focus wanders, master the art of deep work. Protect your mornings with 20-minute pomodoro work blocks or try co-working accountability platforms, such as Focusmate.com. Make meetings more human Prioritise presence over productivity in meetings, making them in-person whenever possible. Events can be a great way to bring the team together, check the CIPP event calendar for key dates, here: https://ow.ly/kAN050XpbXS. Pick up the phone When in-person is impractical, mix up the communication methods. Video calls can be effective but quickly drain our batteries if we overschedule them. Emails can be time poor and energy draining if they become overly complex and long threads. Messaging platforms should be restricted to clear use
focussing solely on technology rather than people risk losing their identity, their competitive advantage and their purpose in the marketplace. Let me be clear on this. Businesses who make technology their most valuable asset will do so at the cost of their people and will lose in the long-term. Technology can be easily replaced, upgraded, switched off. People can’t. Your strategy for the year ahead shouldn’t solely be about technology. Nor should it solely be about people. It must be about both. And striking that balance between people and tech should be your highest priority. Technology is the single greatest opportunity of our time, but it’s also our greatest challenge. Because how your people use technology is going to be the most defining factor of success in 2026. So, how do we do it? Well, in a world becoming more tech- driven and transactional by the day, we desperately need to make time for human collaboration and communication, along with developing interpersonal and meaningful relationships built on honesty, compassion, empathy and trust. So, in the year ahead, I’d like you to think about these five ideas and make your 2026 more human than ever before. Keep the human touch Make the most of technology but not at the expense of human contact. Let technology work in the background and allow your people to hold the front-line relationships between teams, departments, customers and stakeholders.
cases and during set hours. But one method we vastly underuse is the telephone. Walk and talk catch-up calls can be a great way to build rapport amongst remote staff without risking Zoom fatigue. As we celebrate 150 years of the telephone, I feel it only fitting to end with my favourite, albeit lesser known, quote by the late great Alexander Graham Bell. He said: “We walk through life with our eyes shut. There are things all around us, right at our very feet, that we never see because we never truly look.” Despite the irony that his invention laid the path towards one of the most distracting pieces of technology ever created – our telephones – this simple yet powerful concept that we too often miss what’s hidden in plain sight, I think, sums up our relationship with technology perfectly. Because if we’re not careful with our obsession over technology, we’ll miss the real opportunity which has been standing right in front of us, right at our very feet, all along. Our people. So, perhaps it’s time to stop obsessing over the latest prompt and instead return our attention to people. Because there’ll always be new technology, new innovation, new ways of working. But we must remember this too – every invention, every industrial revolution, every innovation was once an idea by a human who was trying to improve the lives of others. And that’s a concept which predates even payroll. It’s who we are, what we stand for and runs deep in our DNA. And no amount of technology will ever replace it. Because human connection beats technological progress every single time. n
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| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward |
Issue 116 | December 2025 - January 2026
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