HR case studies
We’ve done lots of exciting work but by the nature of what we do, talking about it can be tough! We managed to sneak a few through though, to give you a flavour of what we can do for your business…
Building efficiencies
A client that had rapidly grown from 150 to 230 employees was suffering from extreme burn out in both the HR team and the leadership team.
When the business was established effective procedures were in place that worked well. However, the rapid growth meant that what had once worked e.g. Excel spreadsheets to capture time and attendance, and payroll calculations, or emails to communicate queries, request leave or get approvals were no longer suitable.
It caused confusion at all levels and left the HR team drowning in paperwork and procedures, so much so that they didn’t have time to do something differently.
In addition, the senior team were focused on fighting these fires by managing people to the current procedures they couldn’t see the advantage of taking a different approach to enable them to focus on the business.
We conducted an audit to show where the processes were showing risk, and held focus groups with both HR and the leadership team to understand where they wanted their energies to be focused (and where they were wasting it!).
Using Agile project management methods, we focused on the outcome that everyone wanted – easy input for the employees, and easy compliance checking for the HR team. We tested a Human Resources Information System (HRIS) with a pilot group and fed back the results before fully integrating.
The HR team is now able to focus on aligning the people strategy with the business strategy to be a strategic partner in growing the business.
Breaking free!
A client of 250 employees had nearly 70 policies. Every time an employee did something wrong, a policy was added or an existing policy was tightened. Whilst it made the business super-compliant, it caused three major issues:
1) The onboarding of new employees became long and drawn out as there were lots of touch points to go through all the things they MUST NOT DO. This was coupled with a large stack of papers that they had to sign to prove that they knew they MUST NOT DO these things.
2)The leadership team tended to roll eyes when enforcing policies and state ‘it’s HR, not me!’, which de-valued the point of the policies in the first place. This caused a them/us problem with HR and the company.
3) It created a culture of clipped wings and parent-child management from both HR and the business leaders.
This business had a high turnover, in particular in the first 6 months.
We took a cross-section of the employees from all levels and created a project team to look at the EVP. We used Agile methodologies to plan, be accountable, be transparent and most importantly drive that change effectively. This included creating an onboarding about culture and values, individualising the onboarding in a cost/time-effective way, and publishing guidelines that explain the impact when particular actions are followed (or they aren’t) rather than pages of policies. As a welcome side-effect, the use of Agile methodologies has now been adopted for all project work to grow the business.