HR professionals must step up to the challenge of providing “good work”, giving unemployed people a chance and equipping their people to cope with a rapidly changing working environment, delegates at the CIPD’s conference in Manchester heard.

In the closing keynote session, employment minister Chris Grayling called on the HR audience to get behind the government’s ‘Work Programme’ unveiled this week, which will see private and voluntary sector providers working with employers to offer opportunities for the long-term unemployed.

Grayling admitted that the programme was “sell-job” in the current economic environment but he stressed that giving local out-of-work people a chance held real benefits for employers. “I’ve met very few employers who would rather employ someone from abroad than somebody from their local area, who will have the local knowledge to connect with customers and may offer better service as a result,” he said.

He defended the government’s strategy of carrying out public spending cuts at the same time as trying to stimulate private-sector employment. “We are not going to get businesses investing in the future unless they have the sense that the economic situation is becoming more stable, and my view is that if to achieve that, the deficit needs to be seen to be addressed,” said Grayling.

CIPD chief economist John Philpott, who has been a vocal critic of the spending cuts, said that one the main role that employers could play to was to offer “good work” and engagement, and he wanted to see the government talk about this aspect more. “The quality of management is not really part of the public policy conversation at the moment – one of the challenges for the coalition is to raise it up the agenda,” he said.

And he added: “Engagement’s got to come first. You can’t say – we’re coming for your job, we’re coming for your pay and pensions, and by the way if you are unemployed then you are a scrounger and we are coming for your benefits. That’s no way to approach engagement. It’s akin to somebody mugging you and expecting to shake your hand afterwards,” he said.

Lucy Adams, director, BBC People, told delegates that constant change meant that HR now has a moral duty to invest in staff and give them skills and confidence. “There’s no such thing as a change management programme any more with a start, middle and end. These days, you haven’t got to the end of the change programme before something else happens. We all have to cope with a level of uncertainty that we’ve never known before. As HR professionals we have to ask – what are we doing to equip our leaders to deal with this turbulence?”

She also called for a new emphasis on performance management. “I don’t think we have got the time, and we certainly haven’t got the money, to allow people to perform at a mediocre level any longer. It’s not fair to them, it’s not fair to organisations, and it’s not fair to shareholders – or in our case, license-fee payers.”

Gail Cartmell, assistant general secretary for public services at the union Unite, called for more public investment in skills, saying that manufacturing and science are vital areas and it was unrealistic to “take people off the dole queue and plonk them into high skilled jobs”. She added that public-sector workers now face a “cocktail” of challenges on pay, pensions and most importantly job cuts, but that unions would not be seeking conflict for its own sake.

“Job cuts are going to define the industrial relations landscape for some time, and we will be focusing on reducing the flow of our members into joblessness,” she said.

The panel discussion was chaired by Krishnan Guru-Murthy of Channel 4 News.