Why might people have said that?

I recall this question from working with engagement surveys over the years. You learn that the revelation comes when you dig into the data and open it up, rather than assume you know what it means.

‘Why might people have said that?’ is also a brilliant question when you’re seeking to understand feedback on the HR function.

Take an HR function we’ve been working with. They kept hearing that business stakeholders were really critical about ‘recruitment’.

This was pretty hard on the recruitment team, and they put their energy into improving on key measures such as time to hire. But the problem didn’t go away.

By partnering with the client to gather more data, we learned (among other things) that the main issue causing frustration across the business was not the recruitment itself at all, but the process of getting approvals to recruit.

Would you like to understand more about how your function is seen and how to ensure that you’re investing in the right areas – and avoid making assumptions?

Our Strategic Roadmap tool helps you to find out from business leaders what they want from HR. It illuminates how they rank the priorities (importance) and how well HR are performing in those areas right now (effectiveness).

At first glance, the data might be challenging. But it presents a huge opportunity to co-create a new vision and purpose for HR with business leaders.

It also creates a huge leadership opportunity for HR, and so we build the capabilities and confidence of your HR leaders to lead that conversation across the business.

We help them to swallow defensive responses and open up discussions that can lead to a complete renewal of the relationship between HR and the business.

This also provides a vital opportunity to explore where the accountability really should be, and where it shouldn’t.

Contact us to explore how you’d like to shift HR’s relationship with the business.