2.146 HR for Small Business — From To Do List to People Strategy

If your HR tasks are living on sticky notes or inside your head, this episode is for you. 

Many small business owners do not lack effort when it comes to their people. What they often lack is a clear people strategy. Instead of building intentionally, they are reacting to hiring needs, performance issues, contracts, onboarding gaps and compliance questions as they arise. 

In this episode, I walk you through how to move from a never ending HR to do list to a simple, practical people strategy that supports your business growth. 

You will learn: 

• The difference between HR tasks and a true people strategy 
• The three outcomes every small and medium sized business should focus on using the Find Grow Keep framework 
• A simple five step planning process you can complete in two hours 
• How to turn strategy into action with a ninety day execution rhythm 
• What to keep in house and when to consider external HR support 

We also touch on practical HR for small business essentials such as hiring your first employee, basic compliance foundations, running performance conversations, and knowing when it is time to bring in HR support services or on demand HR expertise. 

If you want to protect your business, reduce people related stress, and build a team that helps you find, grow and keep great people, this episode will give you a clear starting point. 

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Visit amplifyhr.com.au for more insights and resources.  

Get our free eBook packed with practical strategies to attract, engage, and retain top talent. Perfect for business owners and leaders focused on building a thriving team. Download it at amplifyhr.com.au/downloadable/find-grow-keep

Transcript

Karen Kirton    
Welcome to Episode 146, and if you have HR tasks that are living on sticky notes or inside your head, then today I'm going to show you a simple way To move from what seems like an endless people To Do List to having actually a clear people strategy so that you can find, grow and keep great people. So I'm going to talk through the difference between HR tasks and a people strategy. 
The three outcomes that every small and medium sized business should aim for, how you can use a five step planning framework and you can have that done within two hours and then having an execution plan over the next three months. 
So let's start with tasks versus strategy. Now a lot of owners and senior managers don't have a people strategy. What they have is a list of tasks. So things like we need to renew contracts, we need to write position descriptions. 
Fix the onboarding checklist. Hire a new person. Find a performance review template. Update the policies. Now none of these are wrong, it's just the problem is that without a strategy, the to-do never ends and sometimes it just never gets. 
Done, whereas a people strategy answers three questions, what do we want our team to look like and feel like in 12 months? What needs to be true for that to happen and what's the smallest set of actions that are going to make the biggest difference? 
And when you have answers on one page then decisions get easier. You'll have consistency. You'll stop reinventing the wheel. You'll stop going from what feels like crisis to crisis. Yeah. And this is where having a people strategy. 
Really does pay off because it takes you from reactive tasks to intentional action and that will support your revenue operations, your customer experience and overall your business goals. So 3 outcomes that matter for SMEs. 
You can write a complex people plan, but you don't need to. You know, I believe in keeping things to the most simple level, and so for small and medium sized businesses, 3 outcomes will cover 90% and you may not be surprised to learn. I'm going to give this to you in a find grow keep framework. 
So the first is finding great candidates and we attract the right people in. We have a fair and consistent process and the person that we hire understands the role, the expectations and our values on day one. You know that means that also a hiring manager knows what it looks like. So we've got. 
Consistency in that recruitment process outcome too is that we're growing our people faster, which means that new starters reach confident performers sooner. Managers have simple rhythms for feedback and coaching, and leadership capability improves without taking manager. 
Away from their day-to-day work for days at a time. 
An outcome through is that we're keeping our best people for longer. You know, people know what's expected. They feel supported. They can see how they contribute. Performance conversations are normal. Our values are visible in our daily behaviours. 
And so retention improves because our employee experience improves. 
So everything we build within our people strategy can come back to those 3 outcomes. So an easy way to do this is with having just a five step planning framework. So you can build a first draught of your people strategy in just a couple of hours. 
Is using these five steps, so step one is define your 12 month people goal. So this means looking at what is the 12 month goal for your business and then what does that mean that your people and culture needs to look like and just write 1 clear sentence that links. 
People to business priorities. So as an example, it could be we're going to scale to 40 people across two sites without losing our customer satisfaction score. We're going to build a dependable sales and service team with predictable onboarding. 
We're going to reduce voluntary turnover in year one through better hiring and coaching. Now just keep it simple and specific. One sentence is usually enough and then that's the heading on your one page plan. So Step 2 is actually. 
What's your current reality and think about it across find. Grow. Keep. Yeah. What is working that we should keep? What's missing or unclear. Where are we just wasting time or taking unnecessary risks. So for example in Find: our job ads the same as. 
Everyone else, because if they are, we're not going to attract the right people. 
Does our interview process change manager by a manager? Because then we're not consistent with who we're bringing into the business? Are reference checks rushed or not structured? 
In Grow; It could be that our onboarding varies, our new hires learn by guessing maybe our goals are not clear or they only exist in the owner's head. It could be that managers want to coach, but they're not confident in doing so. 
And in Keep; maybe it's that we have processes and policies, but no one can find them. Perhaps our one to ones are irregular and we're just talking about tasks. Perhaps performance issues are avoided until they get really big. 
So once you've done that, just choose three priorities and you may choose one under each of those find grow and keep pillars and we want to keep it to three because it just limits the chaos. It forces us to focus. 
So yeah, some practical options in that, you know find could be that we're clarifying role outcomes. We're writing more motivating different job ads. We're introducing A2 stage interview process with a short case study or work sample. 
Perhaps we're building a hiring pack with the advert. The selection criteria, the question pay and the score cuts and managers are going to interview consistently and grow. Let's get that standard onboarding like McDonald's. So in 90 days, everyone knows what everyone's doing. 
We're teaching managers a short coaching model and giving them conversation guides, enabling them to practise having difficult conversations. We're running short leadership development, workshops on feedback and expectation setting. 
In keep, perhaps we're introducing one on ones. We're refreshing our policies in plain language. We're setting up monthly pulse checks and we're sharing actions back to the team. 
So once we know what those are, our 4th step is to turn each priority into a tactic, and a tactic is a small, repeatable approach that produces a reliable outcome. So for example, find tactic could be to have a structured interview. 
Process and work samples, and then we're going to write down what's the purpose of this. So the purpose is that we want to hire for skill and values fit in a consistent way so that our steps are role scorecards that define success. First interview screens for values and core skills. 
Candidate completes a short work sample. Second interviews reviews the work sample, test decision making, and then the hiring team uses the simple scorecard with examples before making a decision. 
So once we know what that looks like, then we can assign it to an owner, so that could be the hiring manager and the measures of success. So in that could be things like time to offer, quality of hire after the first three months, candidate feedback. 
And then it grow. If we're going to look at our onboarding. So our purpose of having a consistent onboarding process is we want to get new hires to confident performance faster. So our steps day one, Week 1 checklist. 
Buddies assigned manager and new Hire creates 3 simple goals. We have checkpoints at seven days, 30 days, 60 days. We have conversation guides and managers for coaching and feedback, so maybe the owner of that is your people lead in the business or your HR consultant. 
Your measures around that is the time for new hires to get to competency, the amount of new hires that pass through probation, the feedback that we're getting from our new hires at 30 days and 90 days. 
And then it keep OK we want to do our one on ones we want to have quarterly goals. So our purpose is to build a regular rhythm for clarity. So our steps could be 15 minute, one on ones every two weeks with a consistent agenda, quarterly goals that it just limited three goals per person. 
A short monthly team meeting to celebrate wins the review progress and managers using scripts to praise and set expectations so the owner of that could be someone within the leadership team. The measures could be the amount of one on ones completed, the achievement of quarterly goals, the engagement pulse checks. 
So it's just thinking about what is it that is going to really push the dial because the more that we can get this strategy in place and have goals around it, the less likely we they're going to have a whole bunch of tasks that we have to do. 
And once we put this on a page and share it, then we let everyone see this is our 12 month people goal. These are our three priorities and their tactics. Here's the owner for each one. Here are the measures and here's the review date. 
Because when we're sharing that people start to understand, can come on board, maybe they can also help. You know it starts to anchor our decisions if we get a request for something that's not on the plan, we need to decide well, do we want to do that? Is it important enough to change it out for one of the existing things or does it need? 
To wait. So we want to make sure that we have the plan, but then we need to execute it. So we want a 90 day plan to actually make sure that we're executing and you know this can work well if you have ongoing HR support services. So you can keep that momentum if you don't have internal HR. 
So that's where you know in the first month you're just getting those foundations, you're communicating, you're talking about your plan. You're making sure that everyone understands what their roles are in that. So month two. Yeah, we should start to have implemented at least the first two tactics. So we're checking how are we going? Is that in place? Where are our blockers? What are we doing next? And then month three is when we're we're launching anything that's still left into the plan. And again we're asking for feedback. We'll get what's worked, what needs adjusting. 
And then we can get the one page plan back out, say, OK, well, what's the next quarter's focus? So by the end of month three, we not only have that strategy, but it's living. It's already achieved things for us. So you can run this internally and many smaller businesses prefer a partner they go to. 
Are consultants like us at Amplify HR to help them to save time, reduce risk and keep that momentum? But there are things you want to keep in house, so there are things you may want to outsource so things you're keeping in house are things like the actual decisions around who to hire, who to reward, what you believe. 
Leave it as a company. Your daily leadership behaviours are one on ones demonstration of values actually showing the stories and how you bring those to life. The things that you outsource are things like compliance and policy checks, hiring packs, structured interviews, scorecard documentation, the design of your  onboarding process, manager coaching, leadership development workshops, pulse checks with your staff so there can be a mixture of things that you're keeping internally and things that you're using an external HR or internal HR partner. 
If you have one, but the important thing is just having that regular cadence for strategy and actually looking at what is our plan and then every three months actually making sure did we achieve didn't we achieve and what do we need to do next now you do not need. 
Complex software to run this you know, depending on the size of your business you can start with shared folders, checklists, tool kits and use software. When you're ready and when you grow, you know sometimes we get so caught up in the software that we don't actually do the process. 
So we don't have software, don't worry about it, just start the process and then maybe software will come later and you know this is part of what builds a culture when we have our people processes consistent, that helps everyone to understand this is what we're trying to achieve from a people culture. 
Perspective. So being intentional about these things is only going to help us to have a great culture. So if you're ready to move from A to do list to a people strategy, take these steps this week. Write your 12 month people goal in one sentence. 
Choose one priority each under find grow keep and turn each priority into a tactic with the owner and a measure. Put everything onto one page and then book in a review with your leadership team. Schedule the month one actions. 
Lock in some manager practise sessions for coaching and one on ones, and then remember if you want a partner to move faster without missing the details then an outsourced HR provider like Amplify HR could help. We provide HR outsourcing, ongoing HR support services and on demand HR that can. 
It's small and medium sized businesses and we will help to Co create your one page plan, build your hiring and onboarding tactics, coach your managers so the change will stick. Now. If this episode was helpful, you can follow this podcast. You can share it with a fellow business owner and manager who's also building. 
Their team this year, you can also show us the love by leaving a rating or a review over Apple Podcasts or Spotify episodes released on Mondays. So click subscribe and you'll be notified of when it's available. Thanks so much for joining me if you have any feedback, questions or ideas for future episodes, head on over to amplifyhr.com.au or connect with me on LinkedIn and we can start a conversation.