As a small business, it’s sometimes hard to find a balance between working on your business and working in it. Ultimately, as any decent business coach will tell you, you want to be working towards doing more of the former and less of the latter.

If you’re continuously working in your business – by which I mean carrying out the day-to-day activities that are directly linked to revenue generation (for example, making sales calls) – the chances are you’re not paying enough attention to the things that actually impact on financial performance.

In conversations I’ve been having recently I’ve noticed a growing trend in how people respond when they’re asked about their job.

Where once they might talk about their ambitions, or their achievements, their responsibilities, or the challenges they face, they now tend to talk about their level of happiness. Or, expressed differently, their contentment.

What has been significant in that, though, is the degree of investment that employees have in their workplace.

If you were to run a survey of 100 HR professionals today, asking what their top three priorities are right now, I’d be very surprised if almost all of them didn’t have talent acquisition and retention in there.

In the last few years there has been an increasing sense of understanding within the business community that losing (and, consequently, hiring) talent is a costly business – and that it pays to hang on to your best people.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out that the economic downturn seen in the last 2 years has meant we’re all having to do more for less. A situation that is at best turbulent and far from ideal.

And against that background, it also won’t come as a surprise that for HR teams, the key trends for 2024 look like they’re going to focus on technology and the desire to automate more practices in order to devote as much ‘human’ time to key strategic tasks as possible

We all know the story of the vain and self-absorbed Emperor whose preoccupation with finery puts him at the mercy of two swindlers posing as weavers who sell him the most magnificent new clothes that are visible only to the cleverest and most competent people in the land.

Even though they cannot see the clothes as they are being ‘made’, the emperor and a succession of his advisers pretend otherwise so as not to be thought fools. The story ends (spoiler alert) with the emperor parading naked in the streets to the derision of the city folk while the conmen depart very much richer than when they arrived.