Business Strategy

Over the last five years, there has been a major overhaul of how HR provides services to employees, also known as HR Service Delivery.

Companies have transformed the way they interact with employees and best serve them over the life of their relationship with the organization.

An HR Service Delivery platform not only helps you to meet employees’ consumer-level expectations, but it also enables your HR team to provide the best possible services to employees - creating positive interactions and fostering the employee experience.

I was talking to a friend the other day and, as usual, asked how it was all going. She said it'd been busy at work, very busy in fact and for all the right reasons, but it had meant that she’d had to put an out of office on her Email to say that she may be a while responding and for people to phone if it was important. One such person, who had been waiting and chasing for a response, cheekily found a slot in her diary and chanced their arm for a chat. She accepted.

One of the constant urban-myths about the Business Analyst role is the common assumption/assertion (invariably by non-BAs) that all we do is ‘run meetings’. I’ve heard this a few times during my career and it really exercises me. There is a lot more to the BA role than that; in fact there is a lot more to running meetings! As part of my current role I devise a lot of training material and someone recently asked how I go about running a meeting. It wasn’t until I was asked that I attempted to document my thought processes and it proved surprisingly more difficult than I imagined!

Digital Transformation is now a number one priority for many businesses. Over the past two years, businesses have put increased focus on digitally transforming their brands from the inside out.

It is an ongoing process of change based on the market and needs of the customers. To deliver this change successfully, there is a need to establish a clear vision with objectives & expected outcomes.

Intentional conversations are based on conscious design of the purpose, with forethought given to context and timing. Planned to happen in a setting and way, that is purposeful. In sharp contrast, Make It an Intentional Conversation share how 'unintentional' conversations can run off the rails.

Culture doesn't eat strategy for breakfast!

Culture suffocates under the weight of strategy that cares more about the bottom line than it does about its people.

How a business does strategy is a truer representation of what a culture really is than aspirational sound bites hung on walls or spun out in talent development conversations. 

It's why leadership programs over time don't live up to the hype. Affirmations, no matter how heartfelt, do not create the required cultural change if they are not embedded in the way strategy is created, languaged and executed. 

As one of the most globally recognized brands in the world, this client had challenges within one of its biggest hiring profit centers in Sales. Their prior decentralized Talent Acquisition structure placed a heavy staffing burden on line managers who struggled to get the hiring results and achieve a balance between staffing and their functional business responsibilities. This combination of missed hires and lost productivity time from line leadership put revenue at risk. In 2013, this client turned to Sevenstep to drive a laser-focused TA strategy for this high impact hiring area.

We have talked about being of service in prior posts, today I want to take it a step further and talk about seeing the system.  For our techie friends, we don’t mean computer systems or apps, we are talking about the dynamics at play, the situational system.  Perhaps an example will help.

It’s not about you.  Suppose your boss shuts down your idea.  You don’t understand why your boss shut it down. 

• Maybe your boss is too stupid to recognize your great idea.  

• Maybe you didn’t communicate it effectively.  

This organisation is a stock-market quoted firm owned by shareholders rather than being a family-owned business. The dilemma faced by the C-Suite was whether decisions should be made to benefit themselves, benefit the shareholders or benefit the long-term sustainability of the enterprise, which would have positively affected a much wider range of stakeholders.

My esteemed colleague Adrian Reed put a fascinating post on his blog this week regarding thinking beyond customer journey maps which was a great read for two reasons; first, it was a good provocation for anyone doing journey mapping (I particularly liked the concept of ‘service’ journeys and secondly because I was running a mentoring group that very afternoon and had not got anything to hand. Once I’d read Adrian’s article I knew I had a topic!