In our personal lives, we often use January as a time to set new years resolutions and plans and business are no different.
We have business plans but it is also important to have a People Strategy. This blog will help you to create or review your People Strategy for the year.
What Went Well Last Year?
Before we can even begin to make plans for the future it is important for you to look back at your Strengths.
What went really well in your people strategy? Did you recruit staff, did you retain staff, do you have great skills within your team? If you can answer yes to any of these questions then give yourself and your team a pat on the back.
Ask your team what they think went well last year. The answers of your staff might surprise you or they may have the same thoughts that you had.
Once you have identified the good things make sure you do not leave things to chance. Think about how you can ensure that those good things continue to happen this year and put actions, policies and procedures in place to keep that good practice.
If the business has more than one manager or supervisor, or more than one team you can share best practices with other teams to improve the whole business.
What are your weaknesses?
Let’s be honest we all have weaknesses and we all want to turn our business from good to great. People are the centre of this.
Documents
Now is a good time to do an HR review, you may need to refresh your employment contracts or your policies to ensure that you are still compliant with Employment Law.
HR skill set
If your business does not have an HR Team or HR manager you may want to consider outsourced support to help maintain and grow the business.
If the business has an HR team you might consider an outsourced HR Legal team who HR can turn to in those more challenging situations.
Staffing levels
Take a look at your staffing levels but do this by asking these two questions:
- Does the business and each department have too many staff, not enough staff or the right amount of staff?
- When looking at the staff I do have, do I have the correct level of skills?
- What would happen if a member of staff left the business?
These questions may tell you that everything is just fine as it is or they could lead you to think about restructuring, redundancies, promotions or recruitment. Once you have had these thoughts start making a plan.
Recurring themes:
Often in business, we see recurring themes long before they become an Employment Tribunal matter. Examples of this include, persistent lateness, excessive sickness, performance issues, informal complaints and personality clashes.
Managers often overlook these niggling concerns and this can lead to them becoming big problems. If you do see recurring themes you may want to address them in the form of training for an individual or the whole team. You may need to use the disciplinary process even if it only results in a first warning or you might choose to formally monitor someone’s performance. Doing these things early can help reduce the risk of having a successful Employment Tribunal Claim against the company.
Always be on the lookout for staff
One of the takeaways in the book Hyper Sales Growth by Jack Daly is that you should always be recruiting.
The reason for this is that recruiting when you are in need can lead to picking people that are not perfect for the role or the company. However, if you are constantly on the lookout for great talent you are likely to end up with better skills and people.
You might be thinking, there is no point in looking if you don’t have a budget or vacancy for that person but you can build a rapport with people in anticipation of when the business will be ready for them.
The same goes for recruiting internally, keep an eye out for key qualities in existing staff so that you can promote them if and when the need arises.
How we can help?
Orchard Employment Law can help support you or your HR team with Employment Law advice, documents and training. For more information contact us at [email protected]
www.orchardemploymentlaw.co.uk