Author: Caia

Why building a solid people foundation for your business is key

Posted on by Caia

HR should be at the centre of helping companies achieve their long-term business goals, while also taking care of their people.

Your business starts with your employees – if they thrive, your business will thrive, it’s as simple as that. 

You may intuitively sense to move from surviving to thriving, you need to invest in the people aspects of your business but are unclear where or how to start.

In this blog, we are sharing 5 key areas to focus on, to improve your employee experience and therefore elevate the service they are providing to your customers.

‘You don’t need to be a genius or even a college graduate to be successful, you just need a framework and a dream’ – Michael Dell

foundation pic

Setting up for Success – Introduction

As a leader, you probably know or recognise there will be legal compliance issues from the very first day you employ someone. Often, as a leader you take on these responsibilities, even though it may be something you’ve never done before. While this can be good for broadening your personal experience and skill set, it may be distracting you from your core focus and using too much of your valuable time.

‘Focus is key. Spreading your resources and attention across too many fronts can affect your business growth’ – John Colman

You may intuitively sense that to move from surviving to thriving, you’ll need to invest in the people aspects, but you may be unclear what that looks like and are too busy to spend time figuring it out.

In this blog, we are sharing our thoughts on how having a solid people foundation in place will not only protect you and your business from unnecessary risk but also create a more engaged and productive team, which in turn makes (and saves) your business money.

What do we mean when we say strong people foundations?

Your business starts with your employees – if they thrive, your business will thrive, it’s as simple as that.

Making your business somewhere your employees and future talent want to work is key. Your people foundations are the HR policies and procedures that determine how people experience your business.

Therefore, establishing solid people foundations (or an HR framework), will ensure your business can attract and retain the right people you need, into the right roles, at the right time to enable your business to flourish. Without it, you’ll find yourself reacting to people issues on a rolling basis, putting you on the back foot and detracting from your ability to meet your business goals.

Having appropriate people management support makes good business sense. However, if your business is small, say fewer than 500 employees, you may not be able to afford or have a requirement for a permanent HR specialist, so buying in the expertise you need as and when you need it may be a perfect peace of mind option.

As business owners and leaders of teams, we recognise the need to juggle a range of priorities to fit everything in, so if there is an opportunity to put in place measures to run things more efficiently, that isn’t overly time-consuming or complex, isn’t this something worth considering? A review of your people infrastructure and a focused action plan to address the key gaps can do this for you.

Here is a summary of what we believe are the 5 fundamental elements needed to provide a solid foundation from which to build. Getting these right when your business is small, means it will just be a matter of making minor adjustments as you grow and your needs start to change.

The Fundamentals

1. Legal Stuff

Let’s start with the basics – the importance of getting your legal compliance in place is your number one priority.

Ensuring compliance with employment law is an absolute pre-requisite for running a business. In the same way you need to ensure you meet health and safety requirements, getting this aspect wrong could have devastating consequences for you.

Ensuring your people practices are not only aligned to the legal requirements but are set up in the spirit of the law, will save you time and expense down the road investigating and responding to audit findings or mitigating against an employee issue that could become more serious.

Some good examples of what we mean by this can be summarised as follows:

  • Protecting your business and the rights of your employees through the provision of robust people policies and procedures
  • Role descriptions clearly describing the accountabilities, skills and behaviours associated with each role
  • Employment contracts outlining the expectations of the employee and the ‘deal’ with the employer
  • Ensuring any people decisions you make are done on grounds of merit and without any bias (unconscious or otherwise)

An employee handbook is a good starting place for any business seeking to formalise its employment practices and ensure consistency of treatment. Another top tip is to have standard HR operating procedures to document processes that occur infrequently, making it easier to be consistent over time.

2. Recruitment

Recruiting people well-suited to the role and the company culture, is key to the success of any business.  It’s essential you find new recruits who buy into what you are trying to achieve and therefore bring their energy and passion for the product or service to bear for the good of the business and your customers.

‘Bringing great people onto your team is about demonstrating that size really doesn’t matter – people do’ – Jess Campbell

If one or two key roles are vacant for any length of time, the temptation may be to compromise on what you are looking for and to just fill the position. However, taking the time to find the right person will save you a bigger headache further down the line. 

Creating a good hiring process is an essential part of your people framework, alongside coaching and guidance for anyone involved in the hiring process. The ability to make well rounded decisions quickly is key in the current climate, and as any candidate will tell you, the hiring process tells you a lot about the company you are thinking about joining.

Remember it’s as much about the candidate forming an opinion about you and your business, as it is about you finding the right person, so a process designed around the experience for the individual will set you apart from the competition.

3. Organisation

A well thought out and organised people structure enabling employees to work efficiently and effectively, will pay dividends.  This is just as important in a small business as it is in a large multinational, since it is the people that provide the service that differentiates you from your competitors.

‘Spend time upfront to invest in systems and processes to make long-term growth sustainable’ – Jeff Platt

Organisation charts visually represent the internal structure of a business, by detailing the roles, responsibilities and relationships between individuals.  Role descriptions help employees to understand their responsibilities and how their work contributes to the overall goals of your business. They are also useful for recruitment decisions, ensuring you find the individual best suited to each role.  Without role descriptions it is usually difficult for a person to properly commit to or be held accountable for a role.

A tip if you are on a budget, is to use the tools available to you to optimise and maintain your people structure, for example, using a spreadsheet to track employee information, create checklists and store employee data.

4. Performance Management and Reward

‘High achievement always takes place in the framework of high expectation’ – Charles Kettering 

Performance management is a mechanism your business can incorporate to ensure employees feel connected to and can contribute towards business goals.  Tailoring an approach and framework for your business, supported by the provision of training for people managers is a good investment.

Done effectively, performance management is about having great conversations as regularly as you can, with a structure that enables you to hold employees to account for their performance and contribution, as well as identifying individual development needs, and linking performance to reward and progression.

The ability to create and communicate a salary and benefits package to attract and retain the people you need is critical.  A review of what others are paying, e.g. some benchmarking for equivalent roles in the area and beyond, will ensure your rates are competitive, plus if your overall package has some flexibility to be tailored to meet individual’s needs, then all the better.

Roles are often advertised without mentioning salary as it can be a contentious area, particularly if you are not able to offer premium salaries. However, we would recommend being up front and sharing what you can offer to potential applicants, as this will help manage expectations and ensure only those applicants genuinely interested in your role will apply.

Having in place a simple pay structure that recognises the skills, experience and attributes you are looking for in candidates, should help make negotiating offers a breeze and ensures that you are compensating existing employees equitably. 

5. Communications

Retaining great people is dependent upon having strong employee engagement.  If your employees feel connected to the business and understand how their role links to the overarching goals of the business, then they are far more likely to stay.  

Creating a strong narrative about your business and what you are trying to achieve will help attract the right candidates. Coupled with a well thought out induction process, will reap the benefit of new joiners feeling engaged, informed, supported and able to start contributing straight away.  

With day-to-day demands hitting you at work, it is all too easy to neglect communicating with your employees. Having a regular drumbeat for your people updates doesn’t take long to set up and will ensure your employees are in the loop and have a clear understanding of business performance and expectations of them. In our experience, even the most difficult news is easier for employees to accept when they feel their employer has been transparent and they have a good grasp of the business rationale for the decision.

Employee Experience

‘You don’t build a business, you build people, then people build the business.  Your people are the builders of your business’ – Zig Ziglar

The design of your people foundations or framework should reflect the culture, employee and customer experience you would like to create.  If you feel your current people policies or processes are not aligned to this purpose, then perhaps a review of your existing practices may be helpful in identifying what you need to redesign and do differently for maximum impact.  A review could also identify opportunities to better align your people practices to support your business priorities.  

A useful lens for completing a review of your people framework is to measure your employee engagement level at different stages throughout the employment lifecycle.  Some examples of the sort questions we may ask and why, as part of our health check service are shared below:

  • Does your business have a stated purpose, mission or values?  If yes, are your employees clear on what they are and how their role contributes to them?  Giving employees a real sense of purpose in their role and an understanding of how they can make a difference, can be very motivational and impactful for your business.
  • Do you recognise your employees for hard work and sharing ideas, as well as results?  Recognition of behaviours aligned to your goals will boost motivation by letting employees know they are appreciated.
  • How do you avoid new employees joining your business from feeling overwhelmed?  By assigning a ‘buddy’ to show a new joiner the ropes, answer any questions they may have and introduce them to others, is an effective way of boosting their confidence and productivity early on in their employment with you.
  • Do you invest in your employees? Supporting your employees to learn and develop new skills, not only demonstrates your commitment to them it will also enable them to work more effectively and boosts their loyalty towards your business.
  • Have you put any mechanisms in place to gather employee feedback and ideas?  Focus groups, suggestion schemes or an employee survey will enable employees to get involved in creative problem solving and make a difference by sharing their ideas.

How we can help and next steps

With an understanding of the importance of having a solid HR framework (people foundations) and an outline of the essentials, what will you put in place this year? Please leave your thoughts below.  By openly sharing your intention, it creates higher accountability and increases the likelihood you’ll get it done!

Ensuring your business is built on strong foundations is our purpose. We’re passionate about working with leaders like you to optimise your business. If you think your business would benefit from having a health check, please get in touch.

Why 2022 is THE YEAR for Strategic Workforce Planning!

Posted on by Caia

The ability to develop, implement and adapt new business strategies in a fast-paced, agile way has become essential to business survival.  In practice, business strategies often fail, not because they are wrong, but because they are not implemented effectively. Adopting a more strategic approach to workforce planning could help you navigate through uncertainty and volatility; ensuring you have the skills and capabilities you need (now and in the future) to execute your strategy successfully.

Why 2022 is the year for strategic workforce planning 1

Why now?

Over the past 2 years, businesses of all sizes have faced into many, many challenges, and the stark reality is, working in an uncertain environment is now the new normal. In our Organisation Design blog we introduced the term VUCA, to describe the ever-growing volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity of our macro environment. Whilst some challenges may be reflective of the industry that you’re operating within, it’s likely you are grappling with some or all of the following factors: 

why now is the time for SWP 1

For example, whilst the shift to changing consumer behaviour – towards online retail, was already underway, as a result of the pandemic growth, this has increased with internet sales now equating to 30.1% of total retail sales with predictions this will grow further. Technology will also continue to challenge existing business strategies and models and may change how your organisation needs to operate as consumers demand more frictionless processes.

From a people perspective there are growing concerns about skills shortages and increased competition to attract talent to organisations, so creating an engaged workforce where you are able to retain the skills and people you need now, and in the future will be key. 

Implications for your business

These macro factors could have significant implications for your business, for example you may be finding:

  • You are stuck in a cycle of reducing headcount to find 12-18 months down the line it is creeping back up again, or the roles you thought you didn’t need and let go are being re-recruited to;
  • Your strategy and/or business model has changed (perhaps in response to Covid19) and you need to identify where you have critical gaps in the people/skills needed;
  • Your recruitment activity is reactive – addressing immediate requirements, rather than proactive, which is resulting in a reliance on (often more expensive!) contingent resource such as temps or contractors, to fill key roles;
  • Your ability to attract and retain particular skills is impacting on your ability to innovate, your costs, quality and the growth of your business; and the pandemic has only exacerbated these problems. 

If this sounds familiar, a more strategic approach to your people planning could help ensure you have the appropriate people and organisation contingency plans to align with whatever direction you need to take in the future.

In the face of ever-changing challenges, you may feel being reactive is the only option. After all, no one has a crystal ball!  While this may be true, the need to have the capabilities, skills and flexibility within your organisation has never been more important.  And the good news is, there are tools and techniques which can be used to help mitigate and help navigate through any uncertainty and volatility.

So what is Strategic Workforce Planning and why should your business introduce it?  Read on to find out more…

What is Strategic Workforce Planning (SWP)?

‘Strategic Workforce Planning is about getting the right number of people with the right skills employed in the right place at the right time, at the right cost and on the right contract to deliver an organisation’s short and long-term objectives’. (CIPD)

SWP planning is different to resource planning, which tends to focus on in-year resource targets for all roles based on budgets built around anticipated demand at the start of the year.  SWP will typically seek to identify plans to build and create the capabilities an organisation needs in a 1-3 year cycle.  

SWP is a critical element of any business strategy feasibility study, helping to inform where people investment should be focused.  This could include developing and retaining critical roles, potentially where readily available resource is scarce (and possibly only just emerging) in the marketplace, as well as attracting external talent.

strategic workforce planning in context 1

Whilst SWP can support your long-term resource planning for critical roles, we believe it should also play a more pivotal role in the business planning cycle, to inform your people response to the business strategy.  

In our experience, a collaborative approach to SWP is most effective and those organisations who devolve the activity solely to HR are missing a trick.  By engaging a wider group such as HR, Operations, Finance and Strategic Planning, you’ll ensure your thinking and discussions are well rounded.  Considering a more diverse range of insights and perspectives, enhances the robustness of your assumptions and scenario planning.

How does Strategic Workforce Planning work?

SWP is not an exact science. Instead, it aims to capture and forecast likely outcomes for different scenarios, effectively serving as a playbook you can revisit, re-baseline and adjust as your understanding of the future evolves.  It should not be a separate activity, nor one that sits solely within the HR team.  

SWP is a key strategic tool that can help you as a business better understand how your workforce needs to evolve.   Good practice advocates it is incorporated within your business planning cycle.  The methodology need not be complex and generally includes the following steps:   

  • Strategic analysis and horizon scanning;
  • Consideration of your current and future workforce;
  • A gap analysis to identify areas of weakness;
  • Strategic action planning to address the gaps; and
  • A regular review mechanism to check whether assumptions should change and re-calibrate as needed.

Why wouldn’t you adopt a more strategic approach?

During our (many!) years of work we have watched new HR and management techniques come and go. Strategic workforce planning has been around for a while, but the adoption of the approach is not yet widespread. But, why is this given the potential value it can deliver?  Here are some of the misgivings and excuses we have heard, so it’s time to do some myth busting!

Interconnected plannng

‘We already do it’ – More often than not it is short term resource planning that’s undertaken.  A key difference between resource planning and SWP is the timescales they focus on, the former being 0-12 months and the latter 1-3 years. Also, SWP focuses on the roles that are most critical to your business, both now and in the future, rather than the whole workforce.  Therefore, by its very nature, SWP need not be onerous and time consuming but should be a core activity that informs your talent development and succession planning, as well as your talent acquisition strategy for the future.

‘It’s just too complicated and time consuming’ – SWP should be incorporated into your normal planning process and not be seen as a stand-alone activity.  At its heart SWP is just a series of simple steps.  It doesn’t have to be complicated and time consuming – remember you are focusing on the most critical roles that will add most value to your organisation in the future, not the whole workforce.

‘It’s a one and done activity’ – SWP should be a dynamic process and when integrated as part of your strategy planning activity, enables you to revisit any previous assumptions and predictions and adjust these to reflect current insight. 

‘It’s not relevant – my business is too small’ – You may think because your business is small SWP isn’t relevant to you, however, the events of the past 2 years have taught us the difficulty of managing people against a challenging backdrop.  SWP as an approach can be adapted, so you can pick the elements most appropriate to you as an organisation and build them into your existing processes and mechanisms.

‘You can’t predict the future – no one has a crystal ball’ – SWP is not an exact science, it enables you to work through scenarios, mitigate risks and stay agile, adjusting your workforce plan as needed.   It helps to evaluate the feasibility of different options.  It’s judgement based rather than scientific but with a robust decision-making trail that can be revisited and updated.  Workforce planning gives broad brush outcomes rather than detailed forecasts, it explores uncertainty to drive out alternative scenarios and decisions.  

‘It’s just something that HR does – it’s a separate people activity’ – SWP needs to be integral to the business planning process.  In the same way business design needs to enable your strategy, so does your people plan.  We recommend you develop your business strategy and use SWP as the bridge between the business plan and the people response.  It’s the foundation of the partnership between the business strategy and HR.

Need more convincing?

‘Workforce planning can enable sustainable organisation performance through better decision making about the future people needs of the business’. (CIPD)

In our experience, the benefits of Strategic Workforce Planning can be far reaching.

Benefits of Strategic Workforce Planning

At its heart, SWP is not just an approach – it’s a way of working.  The methodology can be used to help facilitate a more robust dialogue and challenge your organisation’s strategy.  By doing so, it not only helps to ensure clarity about the direction of travel and desired outcomes, but also provides a thorough evidence-base from which to design the people response.  

In the current environment, speed is of the essence. The rapidly changing environment requires insight to be readily available to enable agile decision making. 

The right workforce planning process continuously monitors key variables for your business, such as market conditions and sales and demand patterns.  Used in the right way, SWP can effectively manage costs in a way that reduces or eliminates the need for cost-cutting exercises.  Regularly reviewing your workforce planning assumptions will inform where you need to reduce or grow your workforce in an iterative way enabling you to be more dynamic.

A more strategic approach could also enable your business to make strategic choices about where to invest in people to retain and attract key talent.  SWP plays a critical part in informing other HR practices such as succession planning, recruitment, retention planning, talent management, job design, career planning, development, reward and recognition.

Closing reflections

The ability to develop, implement and adapt new business strategies in a fast-paced, agile way has become essential to business survival.  In practice, business strategies often fail, not because they are wrong, but because they are not implemented effectively.

And whilst it can feel daunting to make a start on adopting any new approach, our advice would be start small with a discrete team, experiment, generate some early wins and build out as you go.   

Irrespective of whether you have already started your strategic workforce planning journey but it’s just not landed and needs reviewing or if, like us, you’ve decided that 2022 is THE YEAR to do something to get on the front foot; we can help.

If you’d like to know more or need some help in defining and implementing an approach, get in touch or download our free step-by-step approach.

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