HR Lunch Club Series

September marked the final HR lunch club  in our series with Morag Hutchison and team at Shepperd & Wedderburn. We held a series of lunches across Edinburgh, Glasgow and St Andrews across the Summer of 2026 bringing together HR Directors from a broad spread of sectors to discuss the challenges facing the function. With nearly every sector represented and contributing across the 3 events, it was clear that the Employment Rights Bill is playing a key role in the demands on HR teams. Overall, organisations are supportive of the intent, but concerned about the scale, cost and pace of implementation. The operational burden can seem huge particularly across the SME landscape which employs over half of Scotland’s private sector workforce. 

Most employers accept the direction of travel on better employment standards, but there is significant concern about cumulative cost, complexity and reduced flexibility, particularly among SMEs and labour-intensive sectors.

Despite the burden on operational HR teams, it was noted through our discussions that both Executive Committees and Boards are experiencing a need for HR expertise in the room, which is resulting in an increase in mandates for NXD roles with a strong HR skillset and in organisations where HR hasn’t typically played a part of ExCo, HR leaders are being relied on more than ever. There also exists a huge opportunity to automate and adopt AI across the People and HR function, whilst retaining the human approach – this absolutely is an area that most organisations are tackling at various paces.

Commenting on the HR Lunch Club series, our Head of HR practice, Jaclyn Needham said “ It has been great to partner with Morag again, her candour and insight is invaluable in these settings, Morag and the team bring a realness to the issues at hand, it was a pleasure”.

If you would like more information around our HR practice, including event series such as this, please reach out to jaclyn@fwbltd.com or events@fwbltd.com