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What got you here, won't get you there - an open letter to HR

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Posted by Sarah Lardner on 29 July 2020

What got you here, won't get you there - an open letter to HR

Reward Intelligence | Pay & Reward | Pay Structure | Reward Strategy | Productivity

Your organisation is long-established, but possibly through acquisitions of new businesses, and with various events such as takeovers, your new goals call for changes in direction which are starting to re-shape the philosophy and culture of the organisation. The original landscape is not as fit for purpose as it once was. From performance to behaviours to competence, the new strategy is no longer supported by Leadership and Management in the way that is needed to be able to transition and deliver goals within your new phase. With this, comes a huge opportunity to create something which inspires and turns the Leadership dial. Something which is also distinctive and works hard to make your business irresistible to talented employees of all levels and enable your business to stand out and be heard amongst the noise of other companies in your sector.

Focus on the leadership team
The biggest strategic challenge is creating a transition in culture whereby you will be under scrutiny from the new shareholders and results will be king.  A ‘one culture’ shift, breadth, scale, and potentially wider scope will prove to be the greatest factors in ensuring your reward architecture aligns with the goal of achieving growth, expanding, and developing products and services and profit. 

How you will reach your goals is important and for this to happen it needs to be explicitly defined. Just as product development is innovation, improving the processes and being focused on goals that underpin your value can be too, and may provide just as great a shift in business performance.

Defining this is important as it will determine where you seek to find innovation - from either external hires and new ideas, or internal enablement and streamlining. If it is the former, recruiting superstars who will unlock new ground is an obvious means to an end; if however it is the latter, the focus will turn to enabling and incentivising the current core of middling performance employees and the Leadership team to work at a greater level of productivity which could have just as profound an impact on your organisations value growth.

Innecto suggests that a staged approach is taken in resetting and establishing the new world. The approach in the first instance could be via an online survey (through a tool such as Amplify). This is different to the typical employee survey, as the aim is to get to the nub of how individuals and cohorts of Leaders (plus all employees if desired) are feeling and why they do what they do. Combined with overlaying analytics and performance measures/KPI’s can show where aspects such as confidence may be impacting delivery and behaviours. The second stage will be to analyse the results and identify any key themes and individual issues. The third will be facilitating a session, in which you can start to align purpose, explore needs and wants and start to map the new world.  Finally, the creation an action plan to address negative cause and effect and monitor achievement and change of culture and attitudes. The element that will require a considered approach will be to create the environment where they own their responsibility's and are held accountable.

Innecto’s goal is to help you think through your strategy as a Reward professional in your organisation. To achieve that goal, you must edit ruthlessly, clear the arteries, and simplify to give yourself time to create a strategy which delivers thoughtful reward for your employees and business. To give time and energy to focus on the important stuff.  

The basics of the reward architecture need to create a strong foundation from which the revolution in culture, performance management and shift in focus to innovation and leadership capability and behaviours can emerge.

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