HR Transition Consulting

This UK market operator engaged Practicus for HR consultancy support through major change and transition.

Employee Relations

This market operator announced a plan to relocate its HQ from London to another city seriously impacting morale. We created a staff retention programme, set-up an employee consultation committee of staff representatives, and chaired weekly meetings to engage employees on myriad impacts and decisions, from severance and retention compensation to location selection. We co-designed three offsite workshops and co-wrote key CEO transition communications. We ran a programme to embed company values and concurrently designed and implemented new appraisal and bonus schemes to energise existing and new employees.

Organisational design and/or workforce planning

The relocation meant losing 85% of its workforce disinclined to move. We led a complete review of operational functions and processes and designed a new target operating model (TOM) for future state post relocation, including changes to roles, reporting lines and responsibilities. We supported the Chairman by leading the strengthening of the senior executive team, through replacement of the incumbent CEO, CFO and CIO. We analysed and mapped future workforce needs in Southampton, created a plan for transition and led its implementation. To achieve the HR strategy, we implemented solutions on everything from a traffic light system to measure and control knowledge transfer to designing and establishing new recruitment structures and methods.

HR functions, process and design

Practicus developed appropriate and best-practice HR functions with supporting policies for the organisation including recruitment, employee relations and compensation and benefits. We designed, documented and embedded consistent processes and procedures to support the HR function ensuring staff awareness, comprehension and compliance. We created the organisational design for the organisation’s future state TOM, aligning the new structure to the organisation’s objectives and implemented a host of HR solutions to efficiently achieve delivery of it.

Diversity & Inclusion

Practicus performed a risk assessment around Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) and when running a gender pay report, identified an imbalance in overall pay between female and male staff and an all-male senior leadership team. We wrote a D&I strategy and implemented policies and processes including, ensuring gender pay gap data was considered during all recruitment. We also implemented the policy requirement that market data would be reviewed ahead of pay reviews to avoid gender discrepancies and bias. We advised the Board’s remuneration committee on remuneration best practice including D&I considerations.

HR Policy

We wrote a best practice whistleblowing policy and CEO communications for it to support an open and transparent culture. We set up policy and operating procedures and an independent third-party whistle-blower helpline, ensuring quarterly reporting on the subject to
the Board. We designed recruitment policy and procedures to cover everything from D&I awareness to vacancy approval and assessment tools, ability tests and personality profiling, to support better hiring decisions. We wrote and implemented appraisal guidelines, ensuring the organisation’s values were incorporated into twice-yearly reviews. We re-designed the remuneration policy, promoting market-based pay awards and set-up a health plan as part of our design of a broader wellbeing policy.

Find out more about our HR consultancy work.

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