HR Management | Human Resources, Work and Employment blog

Placements are a key part of employability in higher education. They give students real world experience and help employers spot future talent. However, for disabled students, placements can involve barriers that are not always visible.

In a recent systematic literature review co-authored with Dr Laura William from the University of Greenwich and published in Studies in Higher Education¹, we explored these challenges in detail. In this blog post, we focus on what the findings mean for HR professionals and placement providers and why inclusive pathways into work matter.

Why building awareness of disability and placements matters for HR and workforce planning

Many employers use placements to build talent pipelines and assess potential recruits. Yet there remains a 27.9 percent employment gap between disabled and non disabled people, alongside widening pay gaps. These inequalities often begin long before formal recruitment.

Placements are frequently a student’s first interaction with an employer. This makes HR teams central to shaping experiences that can influence confidence, skills development and long term career outcomes. Inclusive placements are therefore not just beneficial for students, they are critical for fair workforce planning.

Four key barriers HR should address

Our review of the existing literature identified four connected themes that affect disabled students’ access to and experiences of placements.

1. Organisational processes and systems: The most significant barrier is the lack of timely and effective reasonable adjustments. While the Equality Act 2010 places a legal duty on employers to remove barriers, this duty is often reactive and poorly understood.

Students describe delays, inconsistent support and anxiety about disclosing a disability. For HR professionals, this points to the importance of proactive policies, clear communication and training for managers so adjustments are put in place quickly and confidently.

2. Low expectations: Disabled students often face assumptions about what they can or cannot do. These low expectations can damage confidence and limit opportunities to learn and progress.

Employers who underestimate students’ potential risk missing out on skilled and motivated talent. HR professionals can help by challenging bias, promoting inclusive recruitment practices and designing placements that focus on strengths rather than perceived limitations.

3. Bio-social factors: Many students manage health related needs alongside placement demands. Balancing work and impairment can be particularly difficult when placements are inflexible.

Rigid schedules and limited understanding from supervisors can make challenges worse. HR teams can reduce these pressures by supporting flexible working, enabling access to healthcare where possible and recognising that disability often intersects with factors such as gender, age or cultural background.

4. The nature of the placement: Some placements involve poorly defined tasks, pressure to over perform or feelings of isolation. These conditions can be especially challenging for disabled students.

Inclusive placement design can make a significant difference. This includes meaningful tasks, clear expectations and visible support networks. When placements are well structured, both students and employers benefit.

Implications for HR practice

These barriers reflect wider patterns of disablism in the labour market. For HR professionals, the message is clear. Inclusive placement practices are not only about legal compliance, they are a strategic priority.

By building accessibility and equity into early career programmes, organisations can reach a wider talent pool, improve diversity and strengthen their reputation as inclusive employers.

Our next steps: empirical research

Before starting the systematic review, we established an Advisory Group that brought together placement officers, academics and employer representatives. This helped ensure the research was grounded in practical experience and informed by different perspectives.

As we move into the next phase of our research, we will continue working with this group to gather lived experiences from disabled students and placement providers. This collaborative approach will allow future recommendations to reflect real world insights and support the development of HR policies, employer training and inclusive placement design.

^{Read the full article here:
William, L., & Lowe, H. (2025). Barriers and challenges for disabled students when engaging with non-compulsory placements: a systematic literature review. Studies in Higher Education, 1–16.} ↩︎

Can industrial relations and trade unions be ‘smart’ in the digital world of work? Insights from three cases: Industry 4.0, e-commerce, and digital platforms in Italy

ripleywk | 28 February 202313 March 2023

Dr Stefano Gasparri

The effect of digitalization

Digitalization has become the ‘buzzword’ that captures all aspects of technological change associated with the increasing use of digital technology in organizational and productive processes, especially after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and the diffusion of remote work that followed.

The business case seems straightforward: Digitalization drives productivity and, therefore, organisational growth and profitability (Forbes 2022; WEF 2023). However, we know that the digital transformation of workplaces is not a neutral process for the people involved and, in particular, it affects how workers and their managers interact. Indeed, digitalization is leading to standardization, work intensification, monitoring and surveillance of workers in an increasing number of workplaces. The spread of digital ‘labour platforms’ is also conducive to novel transformations of the ‘standard’ type of employment contract and presents trade unions with further difficulties in representing new groups of ‘atypical’ workers, such as ‘gig’ workers. Furthermore, the labour-replacing impact of digitalization may be considerable, especially for low skilled workers in low pay sectors and in countries with low levels of digital infrastructure and e-skills development.

To engage with these emerging issues, Arianna Tassinari and I investigated the capability of trade unions in Italy to actively govern and respond to the challenges of digitalization in the regulation and reordering of work and employment or, very simply put, to be tech-savvy and ‘smart’. The resulting research led to an article, published in the journal Relations Industrielles – Industrial Relations and now ( open access) exploring three illustrative issue areas that encapsulate the main challenges and opportunities of digitalization.

The research

We began by considering the role of trade unions in policy discussion surrounding the technological restructuring that digitalization imposes across the economy (e.g., Industry 4.0). We followed by examining trade union efforts to bargain with disruptive players, such as e-commerce platforms (e.g., Amazon). We then investigated trade union responses to the spread of ‘platform work’ as a novel model of work organization and contracting (e.g., food-delivery digital platforms). In general, upon a review of the literature and interviews with trade union officials and industrial relations experts; we note that union strategies and their effectiveness have been significantly shaped by the interplay between the political opportunity structure unions face at different levels and the power resources and capabilities they can mobilize.

First, the depth of trade union involvement in national policy initiatives such as Industry 4.0 remained limited, akin to ‘cosmetic’ consultation rather than substantive negotiation. Trade unions have thus sought to make use of their resilient power resources—especially network embeddedness and narrative resources—to develop their framing and learning capability. They have invested considerable resources, in both their production of knowledge to influence public debate about digitalization and their capability for intermediation and articulation. Simultaneously they work with employer organizations to extract concessions from the government on issues such as skill development.

Second, trade unions aiming to bring to the negotiating table key players in e-commerce such as Amazon took advantage of the degree of resilience that collective bargaining still enjoys in the country but, at the same time, faced difficulties due to the unilateral approach to industrial relations by management and the differences in the employment contract model between, first of all, warehouse workers and drivers. Results, as expected, were mixed: major agreements to regulate work and employment at Amazon were signed, but fragmentation between segments within sectors persisted, i.e., between those who are covered by protective institutions and those who are not.

Thirdly, given that digital platforms fall outside the scope of existing workplace representation and collective bargaining institutions, established trade unions have been limited in the channels of action available to them. Because of this, they have not yet managed to intervene effectively in the emerging platform economy through traditional, grassroots unionization. Instead, in the case of drivers, they have focused on strengthening their framing and intermediation capabilities by amplifying the demands of self-organized riders and pursuing novel collaborations and strategic alliances with the riders’ organizations. In this regard, they have shown themselves able to adapt their repertoires of action to compensate for their weaknesses.

Our conclusion

Overall, our findings suggest that unions have been able to respond to and manage digitalization. They have expanded already established institutions and utilised collective bargaining by investing considerable resources and by using their varied capabilities. The desirability of strengthening collective bargaining is unmistakable. It remains to be seen however, if such adaptive approaches are ‘smart’ enough to effectively govern the digital transformation of work for the whole supply chain or, if more radical institutional experimentation will become necessary. In particular, will this be enough for areas with weaker labour markets and areas with more hostility to organized labour? Either way, even if the goal of ‘smart’ industrial relations might be achieved in ways that are far from straightforward, trade unions still have an active role to play.

References

Gasparri, S. and Tassinari, A. (2020), ‘Smart’ Industrial Relations in the Making? Insights from Analysis of Union Responses to Digitalization in Italy, Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 75(4): 796-817.

WEF (2023), Why we need to prioritize digital transformation – even in a downturn

Forbes (2022), The Path To Digital Transformation For Businesses

The “Necessary evil” of a compliance role for HR: Examining the day-to-day realities of human resources (HR) practice

ripleywk | 8 November 20229 November 2022

Dr Helen Mortimore and Dr Catherine Mackintosh

The problem for HR practitioners

When was the last time you heard somebody praise their HR department: “oh, they’re so helpful” or “they’re great at what they do”? HR professionals battle for credibility in organisations and struggle to convince others of their contribution. Many organisational members probably do not really know or have any interest in knowing what HR practitioners actually do on a day-to-day basis, never mind understand what doing it “well” might look like. Even more challenging for HR professionals though, is this lack of understanding and interest in the realities of HR practice is arguably just as true of many of the academics who study it.

The current narrative of most HR academics, practitioners, and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) emphasises the value of HR professionals as business partners to line managers who carry out devolved people management activity (e.g., Guest, 1987; Ulrich, 1997). In other words, it is suggested that to be strategic, HR practitioners should advise but not intervene with line managers who “do” people management. This idea of the “devolution” of HR management (HRM) is broadly accepted (Purcell & Hutchinson, 2007) but, nevertheless, is problematic for practitioners. It creates a tension where they are required to relinquish power to line managers but the accountability for HR outcomes remains with them (Sheehan et al., 2014). Current research tends to under-play and under-examine the influence of national regulation on HR practice (Gilbert et al., 2015). In the UK, where our research was undertaken, this means there is not sufficient consideration of how protective employment law, such as the Equality Act (2010), influence the work of HR professionals. In the UK, tribunals are the enforcement option for handling employment rights and HR practitioners are tasked by their organisations with managing legal risk and avoiding claims. However, this aspect of HR practice is near impossible to fulfil if HR professionals fully embrace the logic of devolution. Instead, the regulatory context creates an “interventionary” compliance role for HR, yet the HRM narrative that promotes devolution delegitimises such activity and may leave HR practitioners reluctant to promote this element of their role.

Our research

To gain insight into how HR professionals understand and navigate this tension between devolving people management activity to line managers, and the need to ensure compliance with national regulation, in our study we focused on talking to HR practitioners about what they actually do day-to-day (rather than what HR work “ought” to be). Our findings indicate that HR practitioners frame their role as both advisory and interventionary: they take an advisory, non-interventionary role when line managers’ decision-making is within a ‘safe zone’ but intervene when line managers risk provoking a tribunal claim. Both HR and line managers, from the perspective of the HR professionals, accept the need and value of this compliance role, seeing it as a “necessary evil” to protect the organisation.

Our findings highlight the strategies HR practitioners use to encourage compliant behaviour from line managers. At times, HR practitioners need to involve and garner support from those higher up the organisational hierarchy (e.g., the senior management team) in order to compel line manager action. As such, our data reveals that even in scenarios where a HR practitioner does not have the power to dictate line manager decision making (e.g., because HR lacks status within the organisation or the individual practitioner is more junior) they still have methods of moving between an advisory and interventionary approach to working with their stakeholders. When they consider it necessary to intervene, HR practitioners will also highlight the risk of tribunal claims and/or procure specialist legal advice to persuade line managers to adopt a specific course of action. This evidences how line managers can be unwilling to accept the recommendations of HR practitioners without the reinforcement of external legal advice, and therefore the challenges HR professionals face in establishing credibility with organisational actors. Importantly, while HR practitioners have strategies for overcoming these challenges and to influence line manager behaviour, these tactics do not necessarily resolve their struggles for status.

Despite HR practitioners use of employment lawyers to persuade and appease line managers, they do not simply regurgitate the third-party advice they have sourced. Our findings also demonstrate how HR professionals add value through their own balancing of the legal position and the specific needs and context of their organisation (e.g., taking into account the employer’s management of previous similar cases). However, HR professionals will not necessarily disclose this value adding activity to line managers as it may undermine the force and influence of obtaining the third-party advice. As such, aspects of HR’s compliance role, the skills and knowledge that they use to support positive outcomes for organisations, can go unseen and undervalued.

So what?

Based on the findings of our study, we propose that the value of and craft involved in HR’s compliance role has been downplayed by academics and the profession. We bring into question the nature of HR business partnering in organisations by highlighting that in their day-to-day working lives practitioners move between interventionary or advisory approaches to working with managers. We therefore suggest that intervention is not incommensurate with a HR Business Partner role but can be an essential element of it, and a component of effective HRM. Consequently, we call for researchers and the CIPD to acknowledge the need for and value of HR’s regulatory and compliance responsibilities in support of HR departments and professionals more clearly demonstrating their contribution to organisations.

If you are interested in this research and would like to know more, please contact: helen.mortimore@uwe.ac.uk or catherine.mackintosh@uwe.ac.uk

Tag: HR Management

Breaking barriers: what HR professionals need to know about disabled students and placements