Why Plan and Strategize? Does It Kill the Dream? (Part 2)

The SuffolkWire recently featured Part 1 of Petaurum Solutions article ‘Why Plan and Strategize? Does It Kill the Dream?’ Discussing the need for planning and strategy in your business growth. In this second part of the article Petaurum investigate how to ask the right interview questions to grow your team with the right people.

“Instead of asking questions where anyone can make up the answers (strengths and weakness, etc), the interview focusses on situations that have occurred in the past, how they were viewed and how they were dealt with…..”

Behavioural Principles

An example of how to develop questioning around behaviours, is to first have a definition of what the behavioural principles are that are integral to the organisation’s values and culture.  A sample of these could be the following, which were developed for a client whose culture was one of mutual respect, openness and support.

Driven to Achieve

• Being individually, and as a team member, committed to achieving goals and maintaining the guiding principles
• Taking ownership and getting things done
• Being rigorous and always looking to innovate and improve
• Being always customer focussed

Flexibility

• Helping other members of the team
• Making things happen
• Making the most of every opportunity
• Creating a sense of community

Respectfulness

• Treating everyone with respect
• Treating everyone as you would be wanted to be treated
• Good communication
• Adhering to high standards of personal and professional conduct

Once these are in place, a set of interview questions based around experience of former situations will be enlightening as how each individual will behave and perform in the organisation.

Of course, no company has ever had the perfect fault-free interview but these two above are the best two building blocks.

What happened to Tom’?  (see part one) “We were able to help the business, which got its money back, but left the business owner with a headache and a sore heart.  Fortunately, he was a sufficiently sensible man to see where he had gone wrong and willing to learn how to avoid it in future”.

Keep ‘em: 

This element is about reward.  Organisations with a positive reputation in the jobs market, for taking care of its workforce, face fewer barriers to effective recruitment.  A reward strategy isn’t just about pay.  How the business chooses to place itself with regard to pay in the local and national market will play some part in attracting the right candidates. But a business that offers not just pay related benefits, but care for health and wellbeing, will see less turnover.

It is estimated that the cost of turnover is anything from 30% to 150% of the salary of the role holder. Inevitably some people will leave for non-business-related reasons but gaining a reputation as a caring employer means that people will stay and is good for the bottom line.

For a business whose culture is fast and furious, is open and honest about how it operates and recruits staff with offers of high reward for quick success, a lack of welfare concern can be made up for by top range salaries, bonuses and other financial inducements.  And if staff joining such an organisation know that this is what they are facing, then they will not be too interested in non-financial issues.

If such an organisation is happy with the high turnover that comes with this brand of culture, then it will thrive.  But even so, given our growing understanding and appreciation of stress and mental health in the workplace, there should still be a caveat about lack of care in these areas and issues and incidents can still come back to bite these employers in a place where it hurts.

Use ‘em: 

To ensure that all staff recruited can benefit from a successful and growing career with the organisation they will need to know not only what to do to succeed in their current job, but what additional skills, knowledge and experience they will need to grow.  In today’s market there is fierce competition for exceptional and rare skills, so effective on-boarding, training and development will be an essential inclusion in the budget and strategy for staff retention.

As the business gets into its stride and starts to take on board the right people, the need to ensure the above three facets of its people strategy become more sophisticated.

In terms of the right salary to pay, the business must decide where it will set itself in relation to the market, which can be determined by looking at salary surveys locally and nationally.  These surveys can be done on the internet or can be bought in from specialist organisations.  These latter can also deliver information on what benefits are the best to offer for the roles and for the organisation.  As the staff numbers increase, there may also be the issue of ‘job families’, where roles will need to be compared to see which jobs fit into similar categories that will fit into a job ‘family’ and thus define correct levels of salary.

For individual roles, too, these will at an early stage need to be defined.  A well written role profile helps both the role holder and the organisation to understand how the role fits into the business plan and what is required for the holder to be successful.  When the organisation has a good set of profiles, it makes designing a fair and effective review system a relatively easy task.

Delivering the Strategy and Strategic Outcomes

In order to align the HR strategy to the business strategy, strategic HR aims could be defined in this example:

• Recognised (internally and externally) as a great place to work.
• An adaptable multi skilled workforce that continually improves business performance through the effective use of staff resources.
• An engaged and high performing organisation where results are recognised and rewarded.
• A workforce that is skilled and resourced to meet the current and future needs of the business.
• A workforce that identifies and can adapt to change.
• The wellbeing of the workforce is core to the approach.
• An employee offering that sets the organisation apart from its competitors to ensure they continue to attract key talent.

Against each one of these key strategic objectives, a target can be set for each level of the business plan (e.g. 1 year, 3 years, 5 years) to take the organisation from the ‘now’ state to the desired state. The strategic HR plan can then be designed in terms of budget/finance and people in how and when these aims can be delivered.

An important follow-up aspect of the HR strategic plan will be how to assess its impact, so the plan must be based on SMART objectives so that it can be appropriate, affordable and sustainable.  The ability of HR professionals to work at an equal level with the business leaders will give the People Plan a far greater chance of effectiveness than HR having to play catch-up.

The fact that most mature businesses have an HR input at a high level is evidence that recognition of the role that HR can play in defining how best to find and use the right people within the business is paying off.  For a small business, it may seem like a significant and unnecessary investment. But anyone who has started a business and found the ‘dream’ to be going south due to having to spend too much time with ‘people problems’ would be well advised to start to think about the importance of Human Resources expertise and experience, if only in the smallest of ways to start with.

For further information please visit the Petaurum website.