Keyword: whitepaper

A “people strategy” is a document that represents a number of key company decisions about its relationship with the employees.  It forces the company to pre-think a wide range of decisions relating to the people and codifies these decisions into a brief document.

Here is a brief (two pages) guide to developing a good people strategy:

Key Components of a Good People Strategy

I consider a good people strategy to be one of the first things a growing company should do, long before developing policy manuals, and other typical HR busy work.  It’s a good way to set the direction of your company.  And I recommend that people review and/or update it every year.  Right before or after they do their People Audit (more information on that here).

Immediately after an organization decides to do performance reviews, the first thing they ask is: how often should we do them?  There is very real tension between providing enough feedback to the employees, and making painful busy work for the management team.  Fortunately there is a good compromise that many people choose.

I recommend that you do performance reviews on a twice-a-year cycle that includes a comprehensive annual review with a mid-year “checkup” review.  This approach has several important advantages:

• Employees get feedback more than once a year, which is a real benefit.  Most managers simply never give enough feedback, and this kind of system forces it to happen.
• The burden on the team to go through the process is lessened by the lighter weight mid-year reviews.
• You can offer pay increases and other rewards more than once a year. (I firmly believe in tying pay changes to the performance review.)
• Practice makes perfect - if you only do reviews once a year, people get out of practice.  By doing them more frequently, managers get better at delivering both good and bad messages, and employees get used to getting feedback.

Reviews don’t have to be that hard.  If you would like to see examples of what I think performance reviews should look like, see the performance review whitepaper elsewhere on the site.