Employee/Industrial Relations
ER/IR Network: Going Viral: Social Media, AI and the New ER Playbook
Wednesday 21 October, 10.00 – 15.00 BST
As organisations face rising ER caseloads, lower engagement and faster escalation of workplace conflict, many are reassessing not just how they manage individual cases, but how their overall approach to employee relations is evolving in a more networked landscape.
Repeated reorganisation is fracturing the informal networks through which early warning signals travel. At the same time, social media is colonising the structural vacuum before networks can recover, with grievances that would once have been raised internally now travelling laterally and reaching audiences organisations never anticipated. AI is arriving on top of both, eroding the information asymmetry that once gave the ER function a structural advantage and amplifying the ungoverned network social media has already created.
This ER/IR Network event will take a strategic view of how reorganisation, social media and AI are creating new employee relations risks. The discussion will be led by experts in the field of social networks and psychology, alongside senior HR/ER practitioners. We will explore how informal networks affect employee behaviours, how digital activism and internal organising are changing the speed and visibility of workplace issues, and how employers can develop strategies and approaches for working in a networked world.
You’ll come away with practical insight, peer discussion and ideas to inform your own organisation’s approach to engagement and employee relations.
Paul Ormerod will talk about how social networks shape behaviour inside organisations, and why workplace issues can spread rapidly when people copy, validate and amplify one another’s concerns. He will explore what this means for ER leaders as reorganisation, social media and AI change how grievances travel, escalate and become collective narratives.
Learning Objectives:
- Understand the power of social networks and how these affect employee behaviours;
- Explore how reorganisation, social media and AI are creating new employee relations risks;
- Identify strategies and approaches for working in a networked world.
Who is this event for?
- HR and ER Leaders
- Legal Advisors
- Anyone managing Employee Relations or navigating Industrial Relations disputes
Speakers include
Paul Ormerod
Economist, Honorary Professor, Alliance Business School at the University of Manchester, and Author of Positive Linking: How Networks Can Revolutionise the World
Paul is an economist, entrepreneur and author.
Paul Ormerod will talk about how social networks shape behaviour inside organisations, and why workplace issues can spread rapidly when people copy, validate and amplify one another’s concerns. He will explore what this means for ER leaders as reorganisation, social media and AI change how grievances travel, escalate and become collective narratives.
After reading economics at Cambridge and taking the MPhil in economics at Oxford, Paul worked for a short time in academia.
He then moved to the Economist newspaper group before founding, with several colleagues, the Henley Centre for Forecasting. They sold this to WPP Group Plc in the early 1990s. Paul was a partner at Volterra Partners LLP for many years and was a founder of Cowry Consulting, a behavioural economics outfit which was sold to the global VCCP Group in the early 2020s.
He has written four best selling books on economics, including Why Most Things Fail, a Business Week US Business Book of the Year. He writes a regular column in City AM.
He is currently an Honorary Professor in the Alliance Business School, University of Manchester and was previously a Visiting Professor in the Department of Computer Science at UCL. In 2025 he was elected one of the first Fellows of the Royal Economic Society.
Paul was appointed in 2023 by Andy Burnham to Chair the Atom Valley Mayoral Development Zone in Greater Manchester.
John Whelan MBE
Director, CRF
John Whelan is a Director at Corporate Research Forum. Formerly UK HR Director of BAE Systems, the FTSE 100 defence, security, and aerospace company, John’s experience and strengths lie in business and HR Transformation, Organisation Development and Employee Relations. Prior to joining BAE, he held a variety of HR roles in engineering, technology and manufacturing businesses across the telecommunications and semi-conductor industries including Matra-Marconi Space where he was HR Director for the UK and, latterly, Group HRD.
Nick Dalton
Speaker, Author and Advocate & ER/IR Network Lead, CRF
Nick is a consultant, speaker, author, and advocate. Until end of 2020, he was Executive Vice President H.R. at Unilever.
After graduating with a degree in Politics and Economics from the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne and spending a year as a student politician (sabbatical secretary of the student Union), he joined Unilever in 1986. His first role was in Hull, UK, as an employee relations manager in a Bird’s Eye Walls
factory. He later became personnel manager for a bigger site covering Hull and Grimsby, where he managed large scale restructuring that became an ACAS case study of best practice.
After 15 years working in Bird’s Eye in various locations, he went off to Rotterdam, the Netherlands to work in Unilever’s ice cream and frozen food business in Europe. His role there was to scale and regionalise the business. Then he went to Switzerland to establish what is called the Unilever supply chain company, first on a European level than on a global level. Before becoming EVP HR for Business
Transformation, Nick was EVP HR for Europe and the Global Markets, having day to day responsibility for Unilever’s HR partnering globally.
The last 35 + years, has seen him covering all areas of H.R. ranging from introducing new HR information systems, recruitment, designing new reward systems for sales forces, working with marketing teams to speed up innovation times, through to setting up new Companies and troubleshooting industrial relations ‘crises’ across the globe.
His passion is for change management, Organisational development and industrial/ employee relations. He describes his ‘purpose’ as ‘ bringing creativity from conflict’. He is an H.R, professional because he believes that if ‘we change the workplace, we do change the world’. He has co-authored
the book HR (R) evolution, change the workplace, change the world (2019- Routledge), and has also co-authored an article for the Harvard Business Review (March/April 2022). His work on Unilever’s Future of Work programme has been captured in case studies currently used in programmes by the Harvard Business School and the London School of Economics.
Since 2020, Nick has worked as a consultant in the financial services sector, aviation sector, retail sector and software (AI development) sector, as well as for FMCG companies. Nick also speaks regularly at HR, business conferences and training events, advocating for the ‘Paradox wave’, by explaining the 7 Great Waves of people management. Starting from ‘Paternalism’ at the dawn of the industrial revolution, moving through the waves of ‘Power, Process, Profit, Purpose, Paradox and Planet’. Concepts explained fully in his co-authored book and manifesto for change –
‘H( R ) evolution, Change the workplace , change the world.’
Venue
30 Euston Square
London
NW1 2FB
Employee and Industrial Relations Network
The Employee Relations (ER) and Industrial Relations (IR) network builds on CRF’s 30+ year track record of enhancing knowledge, capability and effectiveness in the HR function by recognising the issues, challenges and opportunities directly related to this specialist area.
