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Diagnosing The Workplace: Not Just An HR Podcast
Join James and Coby from Roman 3 as they diagnose issues and prescribe solutions to today's most important workplace challenges.
Diagnosing The Workplace: Not Just An HR Podcast
What Happens When There Is A Disconnect Between HR Strategy And Operational Strategy?
In this episode, we dig into how important the connection between HR and Operations is to an organization's success and scalability.
Our prescription for this episode is to take a hard look at who HR reports to and what HR's role in the organization is. This will be your guide to how you can better align your operational strategy with your human capital strategy.
Past Episode Referenced:
Season 3 Episode 2: What Are Common Stumbling Blocks To Business Growth?
Season 2 Episode 18: What Does HR Stand For In Your Company?
Season 1 Episode 20: How Does HR Influence A Company’s Profitability?
To talk more about organizational and HR strategy, just reach out to us at info@roman3.ca or through our LinkedIn page at https://www.linkedin.com/company/roman3
Don't forget to sign up for our New Quarterly Newsletter that launched this fall!
About Our Hosts!
James is an experienced business coach with a specialization in HR management and talent attraction and retention.
Coby is a skilled educator and has an extensive background in building workforce and organizational capacity.
For a little more on our ideas and concepts, check out our Knowledge Suite or our YouTube Channel, Solutions Explained by Roman 3.
Breaking down everyday workplace issues and diagnosing the hidden sickness, not just the obvious symptom. Our hosts, James and Coby.
[COBY]:Did we lose a patient?
[JAMES]:No, that's just my lunch.
[COBY]:Hey, thanks for joining us. I'm Coby, he's James. And let's get started with a question. What happens when there's a disconnect between HR strategy and operational strategy?
[JAMES]:Yeah, so this is a topic I've wanted to get to for a while now because helping to align HR strategy and operational strategy, it's dominated pretty much every conversation that I've had with clients and prospective clients over the last like eight to ten months. rarely are the two actually interconnected. usually at best we see that there's a, ah, human capital strategy that's being kind of acknowledged as important to the operations, but basically from a sense of we need to keep bums and seats in order to keep the company operational. So there's really kind of, that disconnect is pretty much present in every conversation that we're having. often we're having these conversations where there's no human capital strategy in place at all or being thought of. And operational strategy really boils down to a couple broad goals of wanting to accomplish X, Y or Z objective without any form of strategic plan for how we're actually going to accomplish these things. So what I'd like is, I want our conversation today to really focus on what happens when that disconnect between the two happens. and unsurprisingly, the answer is you will waste time, energy and resources, if you don't have a clear plan for how your human capital strategy and your operational strategy need to be mutually dependent. and really honestly, the success that you will achieve often is going to take longer and is going to cost you more. So anyways, let's jump into our conversation and talk about why is it so rare to have these two core elements disconnected from each other?
[COBY]:Yeah, because it's something that, like you say something, something that we, we see a lot with the different kind of businesses that we work with. And what's interesting is again, we work with a lot of different kinds of businesses in a lot of different industries, a lot of different sizes. I mean, we work with you private sector, nonprofit, quadi government and mean, we work re kind of across North America. So it's not like it's a, you know, it's not like this disconnect is common between just like, you know, certain types of businesses or certain size businesses or certain industry businesses. I mean this is the thing about like HR situations and problems are kind of like agnostic. Like they don't. They're not. They, they're everywhere. It's any. If you've got people, then you've got problems. I guess so. Well, you have people, you're susceptible to all of these common issues. And no one that hires people, no industry that hires people or Norwegian that hires people is immune to these issues. And I think that it's why it's.
[JAMES]:So often the distinction is how those issues play out. Right. How they play out in different industries is somewhat unique. How they play out in different regions is somewhat unique. But the overarching challenges that are experienced are often experienced regardless of what industry, oftentimes even regardless of what size of business we're talking about as well.
[COBY]:Yeah. No you're right. It's how it looks, how amplified it is, how like devastating the, that like, like you said before, the wasted time and resources and money and kind of stuff like that. I think that that like the symptoms are absolutely different and maybe that's more what we're getting back to right root. The root causes are the same, but the symptoms are, are very different. Which is why you know, again we go in and we like to diagnose workplaces with the issues that we can help them identify the problems that they wantna solve. and I think that a reason for it, for there rarely being that connection, why it's as rare as it is, has a lot to do with kind of who HR reports to. Right. Because I mean it's the idea of ah, what is it and what is it that HR, what is HR's role in the organization and how is it viewed. And like again we've talked about this in a few other episodes. Right. But we talked about the idea of like who HR reports to has a big influence on so many things. But when it comes to the disconnect and the silos of HR and other sides of the business, there's again commonality in who HR reports to. We always. There's unique challenges when each have reports to the CFO and the finance department. Right. When the seem's like part of the administrative arm or that piece too. Because then it's about cost savings. It's a budget item. HR is a, is align on the balance sheet staffing. It's a cost has to be mitigated.
[JAMES]:Yeah. And what's interesting about. So I just like to reiterate some of the points that we've made like we have talked about this topic before and we're going to talk about it again because it is a really important kind of placeholder or indicator of how HR is viewed or how human capital in general is viewed within an organization. and it's not that you can't have really great effective HR report to finance or you can't have really great effective HR reporting to operations. It's what we tend to see is that when, like you were saying Coby, when HR is directly reporting to the cfo, then there's very much a cost saving mentality. When we see that cost saving mentality, there's a number of challenges that go along with that mentality. When they report to operations, it's a bit different. Right. It presents different types of challenges when, but really what we, the situation that we love to see, that we push for, that we advocate for and that we help clients move towards is having HR have a seat at the table. Because when they are fully integrated into your senior leadership team, when you have HR being able to speak into operational decisions from the persective perspective of how is this going to impact our employee base, how is this going to you know, how do we actually need to bring our employees along with whatever decision that we're trying to accomplish. You that's well, and now we're getting, we're giving away the secret sauce. But this is how you integrate the two. Right. By having HR have the ability to speak into operational need.
[COBY]:Yeah, because I mean like it's the idea of like if HR is seen as a function for cost savings or seen of a function for like efficiency and process, then it's a tool in the toolbox of those that have a seat at the table. but that's often where there's a common reason for the disconnect is because HR is not seen as kind of the co ownership, the co creation of the business. In all strategies it's seen as again a risk to mitigate or it's seen as a pathway for better efficiencies or improved processes. It's seen as that it's a component instead of it being kind of the, kind of one of the key voices in all strategy, Right. Because it's kind of like saying, well like if so if there's a CEO, a COO and a CFO, the COO talking about operations gets input from the CFO on the budget constraints for operations. Right. So those strategies are often more aligned because they co develop those strategies together at that Table and that's again why the, often why HR is disconnected. Because they're not sitting around that table. They're saying that the person who HR reports to is saying well I'll have HR mitigate that or will, you know what I mean? And then again it's a, it's a tool in the toolbox rather than equal voice.
[JAMES]:Yeah. And that's, that's really at the heart of why it happens. Right. so I don't, I understand how this happens organically. Like we've worked with enough. This is not, never have I seen it as an play out, as an intentional slight. Right. It's not design, it's not a malicious thing. It's not a, it's really a. From a cent, from a place of oh well, we haven't thought about it in that way before.
[COBY]:Right. Or we got here organically and that's.
[JAMES]:Why we're, we grew quickly over the last five years. We've had to scale up quickly. We brought in HR so that you know, we could do something and maintain our legal compliance and make sure that our employees have what they need. But we haven't moved beyond the mentality that ah, HR is more than a risk mitigation center, that it is about stabilizing our revenue and it's a long term cost savings strategy rather than a short term cost saving strategies from a risk mitigation or risk management standpoint.
[COBY]:Yeah, absolutely. And I mean so like, so I guess the next question is. So again no't. We don't want to say if H reports to sit at the table, all problems are solved. It's, we're just trying to say that this is often a common reason for why it. There's rarely this alignment. But I mean and this is often why we get brought into these conversations is there's a problem, there's issues with scalability, there's issues with being able to like meet the kind of the business goals or there's issues with retention or all there's money being wasted or.
[JAMES]:Operational strategies are not actually having the impact on the storefront, on the frontline, that they should.
[COBY]:Yeah, absolutely. So that's often why we come into it because we're able to look at the kind, the different strategies and the different components of the organizations and look for that way to start to form those connections and start to actually have them feed off each other. And that'again at the heart of what we do is trying toign the HR strategy with operational strategy and that's why people kind of come to us. And that's again, like I say, that's the unique role that we play is we understand enough about all the different aspects and how it all plays off each other. Because again, we're empowered by the question, what needs to exist first before this can be effective? And being able to do the diagnostics and go in there and actually, kick over the rocks and figure out, okay, here's the symptoms, or, sorry, here are the sicknesses that are causing your symptoms. Less address those. So it's something that we love to do and it's so neat, the stuff that we end up finding. But it's usually because there's problems happening that are again, again, disconnected from the causes. Right? There's the symptoms that are just from the sicknesses. These are things like the isolation of HR as a department or really, or when change management stuff is not working, is or has not been done properly. You know, so there are so these problems of what happens when this disconnect is going on. That is why we get brought into these conversations. But again, we see these, you know, like, costly and unsustainable growth is probably one of the biggest, you know, like, pain points that, you know, is a catalyst for a lot of our early conversations.
[JAMES]:So it's one that's kind of coming up for me right now is a, client we have in the. The primary resource extraction, sector. And you know, they're a fairly, small company in the industry. It is a fairly volatile, industry that it has a lot of external factors that contribute. Tariffs, trade wars, all that stuff heavily, impact the industry. you know, fairly tight margins. Like, there's a lot. And with this, the desire is there, the leadership, they have the right frame of reference in terms of wanting. They know that they need to support their people and they want to support their people'the. Challenge that happens is that they're constantly fighting fires. They're constantly jumping from one massive reactionary piece to another to another to another. And so there's. We see this commonly in smaller businesses that maybe don't have formalized HR at all. And they look at, you know, doing it off the side of the desk as a cost savings. I talked a little bit about cost savings a second ago and that's. This is kind of the. This. The example that pops up for me because with this client in particular, there's such a desire from leadership to do things well, to treat people well and to do things right. But there's these Dual pressures of we are in a very turbulent market with a lot of external factors that in 2025 there's been a lot of disruptions in international trade. They've got all of these different pieces that are in place. So they need to, and with fairly thin margins they need to look for cost savings. So they're looking at cost savings as well. We can't bring on an HR person department, whatever because we need to be, we don't know what tomorrow is going to bring. So we need to be very cautious and careful with what we're doing today. Not recognizing that the long term cost savings that comes from having an integrated HR department that not only can help to mitigate these problems, that the COO is responsible for running around and trying to put out in and Amongst doing the 101 other things that they are responsible for having an integrated HR strategy. That work that is employee focused, that is focused on the employee experience and growing and developing people is a revenue stabilizing acc. It is a long term cost savings activity. They have the right perspective, they have the right desire and drive. Our job now is to help them realize where their focus and their efforts need to be placed.
[COBY]:Yeah, because the thing that, and we hear this a lot, especially with small businesses in highly volatile or externally compl complex industries is that they you know, are constantly trying to deal with what's being thrown at them and they're doing their best but every day is about putting on fires. But this is I think like the like to me this is like you're missing the essential way you can do that. Because in an industry when you're, you know, if you're in industry and you're not overly big then you need to be the most agile you possibly can be. You need to be able to pivot, you need to be able to adjust, you need to be able to have the stuff that you can rely on and plan a and through ZED to be able to kind of react effectively and always kind of know what to do in what situation. And the only way you can do that is with a clearly defined operational strategy that allows you to be agile with the HR strategy M that is empowering it to make sure that you've got the right people in the right places, you've got the right ability to hold on to kind of key personnel. Your recruitment pieces, your talent pipelines are effective. You like that you have the internal infrastructure to pivot and adjust and to be agile in this volatile environment.
[JAMES]:Also, you need to be able to manage that change because if you are going to be asking your employees to be agile and nimble and to change on a regular basis, you need to be communicating with them. You need to be, you need to have, be managing those expectations. You need to be bringing people along with you. And that can't be done off the side of your desk.
[COBY]:And that's the whole thing, is it? Like, so again, like good communication, good internal comms is an essential component to a good HR strategy. If you don't have that, how are you effectively adjusting to the complex market you work in? Right? Like this is the stuff. to me it is. This is a weird example, but to me it's kind of like people that are like, you know, man, you know, eating is so expensive, but no one knows how to cooks. We're always getting takeout and we're just spending all this money on it where no one has time to learn how to cook. But we're just like o. We're always over in our food budget. We're blowing all this money and wasting this money on food. But no one has the time to learn how to cook. It's like, well, how else are you going to get there unless you take the time, right? How can you ever have time if you don't take time or make time?
[JAMES]:It's about making, it's about prioritization, right? Is your priority to shove food in your face? Well, mine often, yes. Okay, yeah, I totally lost my train of thought on that one. So I got to stop with wisecrack. but yes, it's prioritization, right? yes, there's a cost that comes from learning how to cook, right? There's an opportunity cost. It takes time, energy, resources to do that. But if you do that, if you make the time, if you pr, if you want it to be a priority, you have to prioritize it. And if you do that and you invest in the foundational elements to make it successful, what needs to exist first is you need to at least know how to use your stove. Maybe even we can just start with, you can learn how to use your microwave, right? There are small steps that we can take to move you towards greater understanding, greater clarity and greater self sufficiency so that you are not reliant on takeout or whatever you want to use.
[COBY]:But that's just it. Like there's an upfront cost in time and opportunity. You and money effectively too, right? And then, but it's about the short term investment it short term loss for a long term gain. Right. That's what investments are. Right. And this is the other thing too is it's like the, it's funny, we've talked to businesses and they've used the term investments as kind of synonyms for spending. But we're just like an investment is a short term loss for a long term gain. And'and if you're not willing to actually invest in these types of infrastructural pieces that will pay dividends down the road and you're always, you're just grabbing take out every single day on the way home. It's the idea of you're just really, you're really too focused on the short term and that that short term thinking is due to a lack of strategy. You have no strategy, you're just reacting every day and you can't react your way out of that situation.
[JAMES]:Yeah. And I mean we talked about revenue stabilizing which is kind of one of the core fundamental truths of business. the other one that you just talked about is action. We often delude ourselves into believing that by reacting to things constantly we are taking action in our business.
[COBY]:Right.
[JAMES]:And those two things are not the same. Reacting to things as they come m is the opposite of strategy. Right. A strategy is about setting a future facing goal, creating a plan of how you're going to get there. You need to react to things as they come, but it's about moving around the obstacle and then getting back on course. Right. If you're just constantly bobbing and weaving, if you're just constantly moving to the side each time something comes out your way, you're going to be far off your intended path. If you don't have a plan, Plan beats no plan every day of the week.
[COBY]:Right? Yeah. Yeah. so I just want take a step back and we should. Yeah. So we've talked about past episodes and content that we should probably just make sure that the people know that. We'll put links in the show notes to the episode around, who HR reports to and how that impacts operations. The idea around. Yeah, so we talked about the threatening truths of business and so the revenue stabilizing blind spot which you can refer to a number of times and then the action is reaction fallacy. so we'll put, so we'll make sure that there's some the episodes that we reference those, if those are interesting to you, they go back and listen to those or you can.
[JAMES]:Binge listen to three years of us.
[COBY]:Talking to avoid you kind of giving yourself kind of a headache doing that. I'll make sure, we'll make sure that those are put into the show notes. But, but, but, but you're right. And this is the thing that you know, when businesses are growing and like again it's the biggest, the biggest challenge is smaller businesses that are growing and then hit, they kind of hit that wall where organic growth is going to start taking them down if they don't actually put strategies into place. But there's no like you know, alert that goes off on your phone of hey, you've hired this many people now you need to have a strategy. Right.
[JAMES]:And you just stepped off a cliff and you don't know it.
[COBY]:Exactly. So which is why we always say if a business is growth oriented, which most are, but if you're actually moving towards that growth, take your head out of the everyday, please, just for a week and think about all the stuff that you need to prepare for in order to keep that growth going.
[JAMES]:I'm glad you went with the every day because that's not where my mind originally went. But let's just move past that.
[COBY]:Okay, Moving on. Yeah. So again, business, this client OFS you talked about that's kind of in primary resource extraction, they want to do it, they have the desire and the right attitude to do it. It's just a matter of them prioritizing. As you said to take a step back figured. Okay, we actually need a strategy to avoid just thinking that reacting is good enough.
[JAMES]:Yeah. And the strategy needs to be be accompanied by outmes and how are those outcomes going to save the company money? Right. They we need to get, be better in HR in general of connecting what we do with how it impacts the bottom line.
[COBY]:Right.
[JAMES]:And those conversations are essential to be able to make the business case for this. Yes. This is going to cost you in resour, in time, in energy and honestly in money. It's going to cost you this much upro front and it's going to take, we're projecting, it's going to take this long to get this new whatever up to speed and then we're expecting these types of outcomes and here's how we're going to make sure that we accomplish these types of outcomes. That's a strategy, that is a bare bone strategy. Right. We've got where we want to go, we've got where we need to start and we've got how we want to get there.
[COBY]:Right. and the measurements in place to keep us on track. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like it's, and this is just it like doesn't need, you know, a lot of these things don't have to be about a week long retreat to build a five year big picture document with a consultant that you never really read. Strategy. We're talking about an actual functional intent.
[JAMES]:Useful that is looking at, you know, what are we doing over the next 6 12, 18 months. Projecting further than that. I mean there s, there's value in stating, you know, where do we want to be as an organization in five years? Because it gives you a long term vision to work towards. But think back on the last five years.
[COBY]:Right.
[JAMES]:If you had made a plan in 2020 m about where you want it to be five years from now and you created all the steps that you were going to follow to get there.
[COBY]:Yeah.
[JAMES]:The world changes quickly. So projecting out five years is probably not going to be the best use of your time and energy. Six months, 12 months, 18 months. Absolutely. you're still going to have to readjust, you're going to have to react to things as they come. But at least now you've got a vision of here's what we're doing and why and when you need to readjust you can say here's what we're doing and why.
[COBY]:Yeah. You know, so that actually that brings me, another pest client, another client that we, we started working with a while ago. But it was a client that they had a very good growth strategy. They had an acquisition model and they were purchasing new locations and they were trying to scale their business to kind of like a pretty aggressive plan. and they had good metrics around what they wanted to accomplish and how big they wanted to get, with how many clients and but they really like, it was kind of surprising to us how they really didn't put any kind of thought into the people needed to achieve those goals. Remember you know what I'm talking about?
[JAMES]:Yeah, I know where you're going with this. yeah, I mean going from a single location, with an acquisition model, you know, over a course of 18 months to go to three locations and four locations with the plan to actually build a fifth location, very, very aggressive growth strategy. They were successful in accomplishing their operation. I, this is their operational strategy. We, we want to be multi, site. We want five locations within two years. We're going to do this through mergers, or sorry through acquisition and through new construction. they had a plan within the first six months. We are going to identify know potential opportunities for acquisition. They had a pretty good growth strategy, operational strategy to get them there. The problem is they got there and then they had no idea what to do. They had no idea how to support they didn't have the infrastructure built to allow people to be supported through this growth. All people saw was unending growth, unending chaos, unending change with no end in sight. And what, because there was no connected human capital strategy to that of how do we actually help people bring, how do we bring people along with this? How do we make sure that as we are going from you know, 15 to 20 staff to 90 staff to more than that, do we have the right infrastructure in place? Do we have the right people in place? Are our managers trained to do that? Like all of these different elements? So it, yeah was a very challenging time for them.
[COBY]:Yeah. And what's funny is that like ye. So the CEO was like it was almost like they never really thought that they'd have to delegate management to other people. They were expecting to have all of the employees when they hit 90 report to them directly.
[JAMES]:Yeah.
[COBY]:Because they just hadn't thought.
[JAMES]:Well, they had been operating as a single site for a very long time and the CEO was, knew every person by name. They knew their dogs, they knew their families. And it was very natural for this person because they were incredibly personable, caring about their people and what they really. One of the things that they really enjoyed about being the CEO was being able to interact with their people. But as the organization, as you go from that's fine when you've got 15 to 20 people who you can, who are all in the same site and you can spend your time with, when you triple, quadruple or more that staff in a very short period of time, you are not going to have the ability to do that. It's not the respons, it's also not the responsibility of the CEO. The CEO in this type of situation needs to be the visionary, needs to be setting the course, needs to be moving obstacles out of the way for the rest of their team unfortunately they weren't prepared to let go of that personal connection with people. It did cause some friction.
[COBY]:Yeah but the idea of like just having. But again there was zero real HR strategy about what would be the roles of a management team where they need team leads or middle managers kind of to kind of build a bit of a hierarchy. it was almost, it was kind of like they just were like oh well we'll just figure out all the People that are essential to operating our services, keeping our customers happy and that will occupy all these sites later. Let's just get to the site goals, the tangible goals.
[JAMES]:Having more sites means more money, which means we win.
[COBY]:Yeah, exactly. And so. Yeah so. But again it was like, it was so funny because like looking at their operational strategy we re almost like where's, like it's almost like they had like, like I remember looking at it being like it's almost like every page should is missing like the other half of the page. Like it's almost like it was written in like one column and there should be a second column that's just sitting there empty because all of the. How are the people going to do this? So I was just screaming at us because they. It was totally divorced from it. But again our expectation wasn't that. Sorry, their plan wasn't the weirdest plan that no one else, everyone else would see it. It was a common style plan for most businesses in this realm because it's so common for the HR strategy to be divorced from the operational strategy. But to us, because we see them as integral, interconnected that it was less like it was so blatantly obvious to us and but it was, it was so.
[JAMES]:I mean we. I know exactly how it happened. Right. Because they were sitting around the leadership table developing this strategy. And when you've got 15 to 20 people you don't generally have a full time HR director who is sitting at the leadership table.
[COBY]:Right.
[JAMES]:So there was nobody with that context who was able to speak into how we need to bridge the gaps here. And that's, I mean going back to what we said right at the beginning, when you need strategy is good plan beats no plan. But when you are crafting your strategy, you need to have somebody who can speak into the human capital element, the human resources that are present in your organization. And it goes back to what we said around who does HR report to? Because whomever is responsible for that file, if it's the cfo, then the perspective on human capital is going to be generally speaking is going to be very cost focused. If it's operations then HR is going to be very process focused. But if they actually have, if you have somebody who is a you know, a chro. A chief human resources officer who has this strategic h capabilities and capacity to speak into operational strategy or to create a human capital strategy that is intimately connected and aligned with your operational strategy. It's just so much more powerful.
[COBY]:Yeah. Because this is just. It is that if That'if any growth plan does not include a strategic HR element to it, then the people involved will always show up to like know, always show as a priority way too late or after the fact or as a reactionary outcome's. Again, if HR is not at the table during the conversation, then the people part of the conversation will always be too late in the conversation to actually have a strategic value.
[JAMES]:And when you try to do these things as an afterthought, it comes across as you're doing this as an afterthought.
[COBY]:Yeah, right.
[JAMES]:It is recognizable to your staff and that's not a perception that you want to encourage.
[COBY]:Absolutely. I think though we should probably talk a little bit about what it looks like. So we talked about what it looks like when there's no like HR strategy and no operational strategy with that primary resource extraction company. and then we talked about with this example it happens when there's a growth strategy or operational strategy but no HR strategy. So let's talk about what happens when there is an HR department and there is an HR strategy and there is operational strategy but there they're siloed and they're not connected either at all or they're're not really connected by very much. And I have a couple examples of clients in my mind. of ones that again they have HR people, they have great HR people. they've got the right attitude at the leadership table. they again are growth oriented, acquisition oriented. at least one of them is. But. And they've got the right components.
[JAMES]:They just haven't brought them together yet. Yeah, yeah. And I think the what's coming up for me is a client in the transportation industry.
[COBY]:Yep. Yep.
[JAMES]:That's one of them mine, because phenomenal HR team, phenomenal HR leadership, phenomenal leadership in general. Actually I've been really impressed with I mean most of our conversations happen with the Director of Operations and the and HR manager. HR reports to operations in this situation, and the CEO. But the, the values, I love it there are a pleasure to talk to and to work with because they are very, while they are, they are, I mean they are very growth focused. They are very focused on. We have the opportunity to be a significant player in this region in this industry and we have the opportunity to be like. They're also looking at it from a, we want to be the best employer in this industry. We want to lead the pack, not follow others. We want to set what competitive looks like. We want to set the standard. And so that the values there are phenomenal but they have not yet connected the way in which HR operates on a daily basis with that overarching acquisition, mind growth, mindset. So there's all of the, it's funny, it's like a jigsaw puzzle. All of the pieces are right there and the picture coming together and it's just putting the last couple puzzle pieces in the right spot and making sure that they are connected and they're fitting and that they. We've got a really nice picture in the end rather than a jumble of pieces.
[COBY]:yeah, well and like to me, I mean we've talked and we've seen kind of the, we've had a number of conversations and seen a lot of the work they're making towards their operational goals and we've seen and we've actually had some input into a lot of the HR strategy goals. And I kind of see them as like, they're almost like two poles that are like that the company kind of has to kind of try and like achieve higher success and they're like slowly kind of like inching themselves up like separately on these two poless. The only place I would say that they're really connected and is often where we're brough in the conversation between the two is around they understand that they need to keep good people in order to, in order for their operational goals to be successful. Like they get that. But it's almost like those two poles between them, there's like one rung to kind of connect.
[JAMES]:You ve got a ladder with one rung.
[COBY]:Yeah. And so right now they're shimmying up the sides of the ladder to try get where they want to go. But if they understood how to connect the two they could have a full on ladder and have people kind of shooting up there on a regular basis to achieve the goals that they're trying to get to. Right.
[JAMES]:Yeah. And really where the missing piece is currently is like we've started a lot, there's been a lot of initiatives that we have been working with them on to improve the employee experience. The things around recognition and appreciation, workplace culture, psychological safety, I mean they've got some phenomenal foundational pieces in place. They're compliance like from our hierarchy, their compliance level, actions are solid and strong and we are working on building up through the workplace culture hierarchy. I had a point. I'm sure I'll think of it. but yes. So where I see the where we need to go now is taking all of these initiatives that have been started and operationalizing them. Yeah, that's how we integrate HR strategy, human capital strategy with our operations is by turning these things into. Not programs that are reliant on a consultant, not programs that are even necessarily reliant on any one person with. In the organization, but that they are fundamentally integrated into the operations of the organization. It becomes the standard operating procedure for how we move forward. We. That's what basically what we mean by operationalizing.
[COBY]:Yeah, I mean, and the language we've used with them is about. Is about like weaving these elements into the DNA of the organization. That's the language we've often used with them. because that's really about what it is, is to not make it like a. Steps to achieve or boxes that are like thick boxes. They have to make sure that they hit on a regular basis. It's about making them part of the DNA of the organization. It's just how they do their work. It's about that clear connection, an understanding that it's not just. It's not just important to connect them when there's disruptions that happen with their misalignment. It's about saying that it's about. Again, it's about climbing that ladder based on strong connections between the two and then again to climb towards the goals that they're trying to achieve.
[JAMES]:Yeah.
[COBY]:but yeah, so I do think that again, hopefully to you listening that this, those three examples are helpful to kind of understand again what common looks like when there's other disconnects between the strategies, where there's gaps in different strategies, but really just understanding how vital it is for any type of growth or real success or goal, goal accomplishment to actually. You really need to make sure that you're kind connecting those two. I know the one question that you're probably asking yourself is okay, I get that it's not common. I get sometimes that it has to do with who HR reports to. I think I get the value that's connected. But what do we need to do in order to actually make that connection happen? Like what is it that Like what is our.
[JAMES]:What needs to exist first?
[COBY]:Yeah, what needs to exist first? And I think for me, I'm going to do another callback to a past episode to build off of. But I think it really comes down to what does HR stand for in their organization. So the conversation that we had about the four faces of hr, like H and R stand for holding red tape. Does it stand for Highly reactive department. It stand for hovering in restricting or does it stand for the humans are required? And to me I think if you really want toa connect the HR strategy, operational strategy, you have to know are we in a position that we can actually sustainably do that? So if we were to say hey, our company wants to work with you Roman, three to help us connect these two pieces. Hopefully you're thinking that but if you are, can we jump in and start doing this stuff now? One of the things we are re going to want to figure out is again what does HRR stand for in your organization? Whether that's a person, whether that's a department or whether it's the duties on the side of someone's desk depending on your size. What does HR mean in your organization? Does it mean which of those four things? Because only one of them really will actually allow you to jump right into making that connection. The other ones you need to kind of start realign how HR is viewing your organization and utilize in order to move towards humans required. Otherwise it's not going to be sustainable to actually make connections because you don't have the infrastructure to actually leverage in order to get to where you want to go.
[JAMES]:Yeah. And I think what I would want to add to that is that there's two elements of moving towards that because you the how HR is viewed conversation is we can split into two different components. How it's valued in the organization and how it's run in the organization. so you m may be in a situation like the example that we talked earlier about the resource extraction ah company the value was very much humans required. It was very much that you know, they had the right values in place to get to that humans required standpoint. But the functions of how HR was functioning at the time is still very much a reactionary standpoint. So there's function and value that needs to align as well. And if I had to pick one, I will pick how it's valued every day of the week because it's so much easier for us to change and to support and build the capacity around how HR functions than it is to convince leadership of how HR needs to be valued. So if you have that humans required values we can help with so much easier than if you, if the value of H or the way that HR values sorry, the way that leadership values HR is more of a hovering and restricting or reactionary ah, method.
[COBY]:Yeah, absolutely. And, and because, because the idea is, is that like you know the, there's a Lot of change management that's going to be required to start to align HR strategy, operational strategy. There's a lot of, there's work that put into it. There's time you have to really kind of like you got to kick over the rocks to make sure that you actually have the sustainable infrastructure to make this stuff happens. And again, when we work with a company one of the questions again we always ask the most important question when it comes to achieving their goals. What has to exist first before this will become effective? And sometimes it's we really have to try and like reframe or re utilize the value and the function of ah, HR in an organization before they can even come close to what they want to be. And that's often not a very fun conversation for them to hear from us because you know, we're like, we can take your money and we can do the actions that you think you need but the problem is what you want and what you need are often all.
[JAMES]:And you're going to be angry with us at the end because you're not going to get the outcomes that you think you should. Because we have not taken the time to look at what actually needs to exist before this can be successful. Not successful in the short termus Short term success is not what most of us are looking for. We're looking for long term stability, growth and sustainability.
[COBY]:Yeah, exactly. So, so part of it too is just to realize like you know that again these are big things, these are complex things. But I mean this is like we can tell you as a company that we do this stuff, this stuff is solvable, this stuff, this stuff works, this stuff does make a difference. This stuff has a huge impact on your ability to have a profitable and sustainable organization. And it's a matter of you got toa not be afraid to put the working and that's one of the things that again when we are kind of doing the initial relationship building with new clients that if we're getting the vibe that they're really not looking to put in the work, we often will kind of excuse ourselves from the conversation and maybe provide them a referral out because'we want to make sure that whatever organ wants to do that they're willing to actually see it through to the end. Because there are companies that can achieve amazing things if they have the infrastructure and the stability in place in order to scale and we love that stuff. So it's about making sure that we can actually help ah, and that they're actually willing to put the work in because if you really want to connect HR strategy and operational strategy, you have to not be afraid of the investment and the commitment that it takes to make that happen.
[JAMES]:Yep.
[COBY]:All right, so I think I'll just do a quick summary about Anything else you want to add?
[JAMES]:No, I think that's pretty good.
[COBY]:All right, so our question was what happens when there's a disconnect between HR strategy and operational strategy? Well, this is a pretty rare thing that there actually is a fair alignment. A lot of it has to do with who hr, reports to an organization and how it's viewed. Is it viewed as a cost center? Is it viewed as a process enabler? Or is it actually viewed as like the co creator of the business's strategy? And when we don't have those types of connections, we see isolation of our HR departments, we see poor change management practices, we see costly and unsustainable growth, and we often see really awful employee retention, situations. we talked about kind of what it looks like when we have companies that have the desire to connect them but that doesn't have the infrastructure to do that, where they have no, operational strategy or no HR strategy and the purely interactive mode, they're not able to be agile enough to react to the environment that they work in, which really in our mind puts their sustainability kind of into question. We talked about what happens when you have a growth strategy, an operational strategy, but no HR strategy, and how you're potentially putting yourself a situation where you're going to be set up to fail because you're not going to be able to sustain the success that you want to. You're going to have majorly costly problems down the road. And we talked about what happens like when you've got organizations that have both HR strategy and, and operational strategy but they don't connect them as well. Is we don't see the growth or we don't see the elimination of disruptions that we want to because we're not able to kind of connect the dots and kind of connect the rungs of the ladder and to actually climb towards success. But ultimately a real question you need to ask yourself is what does HR stand for our organization? Is it about holding re tape? Is it about being highly reactive? Is it about hovering and restricting? Or is it really the humans are required because how HR is valued and utilized, it has a lot to do with whether or not you can actually really effectively and sustainably connect your HR strategy and operational strategy. If you want to talk about any of this stuff with us, we love talking about this stuff, so please feel free to reach out to us.
[JAMES]:Even just if you haven't noticed, we enjoy talking.
[COBY]:Yes. And even to just pick our brains. We're always open to seeing how we can help because we see this stuff with a lot more clarity than what the average people who are working in the everyday do. And we're always happy to help illuminate kind of the realities to people and show them the path towards the goals that they want to achieve. All right, so that about does it for us. For a full archive of the podcast and access to the video version hosted on our YouTube channel, visit Roman3.ca/podcast. Thanks for joining us.
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