Issue: A previously stable sales force began to lose employees to lesser competitors who offered slight increases to base salaries despite a lucrative total compensation and industry leading benefit & equity package.
Finding: Employees were unable to accurately evaluate total compensation package due to inadequate personal financial knowledge & were suffering from "product fatigue."
Solution: Financial Education Seminar focusing on value of company benefits; customized benefit/equity marketing/Introduction of product/job rotation.
Impact: 75% reduction in following quarter's turnover; 50% increase in 401K contributions.

Issue: Company failed to complete Incentive plan design/redesign prior to the January 1st rollout deadline; plan components didn't map to strategic business objectives and were overall too complicated to motivate participants.
Finding: Lack of senior management input/overview/input during design process; lack of consistent design methodology; HR lacked strong project/client management skills.
Solution: Consistent company wide design process including corporate objectives & payouts linked to achievement of corporate goals; senior management participation/review/sign-off during design process; HR training on project/client management/use of business objective as plan components.
Impact:. Shortened, focused design process; faster approval & adoption of incentive plans prior to deadlines; participants had motivational tools before commencement of year/incentive; higher ROI on incentive payments.

Issue: Lawyers in a in-house legal department were unhappy with their job titles and salary setting, seeing little opportunity for career growth.
Findings: Lawyers were benchmarking themselves on outside laws firms; wanted career path, titles, criteria for salary increases to mirror private practice.
Solution: Training on salary surveys, compensation principles; establish job families more like outside firms; establish & educate training on career progression & salary increase criteria.
Impact: Lawyers understood how salary administration, career progression and titles differentiate between outside & corporate lawyers; felt career progression was more in their control; improved morale and less management time spent dealing with issues.

Issue: Influencing an employee population, with an average age of 31 and not focused on retirement benefits, to participate in a new 401K plan during the Internet gold rush.
Findings: Most employees were not interested as they expected their stock options to fund their retirement; general lack of personal financial knowledge.
Solution: Using a "Pay Yourself or Pay Uncle Sam" focused "marketing" campaign on how to lower individual taxes; 1:1 communications to ensure benefits were clear.
Impact: 76% of overall population participated in 401K leveraging cost of implementing plan & retention value.

Issue: Despite three recruiters and spending over $500M during the last 12 months, this company's staffing function was not filling key positions in a timely and cost effective manner, with the result that the company missed important funding milestones.
Finding: Lack of guidelines/service level agreements/alignment with business units; overuse of contract recruiters; most applicants coming from contingency recruiters.
Solution: Develop internal processes, service level agreements; exchange offsite contract recruiters with 1 strong client/business focused staffing consultant; implement web-based recruiting database solution.
Impact: 28% expense reduction; 50% reduction in contractor expense company-wide; higher client satisfaction; decreased time to fill/cost per hire; improved technology resulted in increase level of recruiting support with fewer resources at less costs.

Issue: In a very aggressive employment market, constrained by a limited budget and without adding additional resources, this company needed a creative, cost effective way to generate additional top tier candidates.
Finding: Sourcing from the Internet, networking, referrals were not producing the ideal candidates which was still employed & needed to be recruited by direct sourcing.
Solution: Developed a "Dialing for Candidates" contest utilizing the cold calling abilities of the business development team for candidate generation.
Impact: Immediate influx of target candidates; recognition & rewards for business development group; improved cross-functional teamwork raised understanding/respect for company's recruiters.

Issue: With a 48 hour notice, company needed to implement a reduction in force (RIF) for 160 employees nationwide, while minimizing negative press, avoiding legal action and stabilizing the remaining 2/3 of the employee base.
Finding: Prior RIFcommunications had leaked, messages inconsistent that caused poor morale and employee relationship issues; senior management were not involved in RIF planning & had variety of experience & philosophies implementing RIF's.
Solution: Detailed implementation plan including timetables/communication methodology/scripts/group meetings were developed & presented to management team for input, buy-in & practice, 1:1 coaching meetings for consistent communication.
Impact: All communications took place delivering a consistent message within a 2-hour window/internal & external rumors controlled (no negative press, litigation threats) remaining employees stabilized.

Issue: A large, diverse administrative group expressed frustration that priorities were constantly changing. As a result they often felt 'out of the loop," with their work marginalized and their effort/work negated.
Finding: Senior executive was rapidly changing initiatives but without communicating business context; employees felt like order takers vs. professionals who anticipated & initiated solutions.
Solution: A on-going quarterly meeting for each subgroup was initiated to: set next quarters' objectives/mapping them to revised corporate objectives; review preceding quarter's progress against goals and communicate changes in corporate strategy.
Impact: Formalized method to discuss context of corporate direction/priorities allowing employees to self manage priorities; recognition for past work; employees felt they had tools to make strategic decisions and contributions.

Issue: A large company needed to integrate a new web-based recruiting technology into a redesigned corporate web site.
Finding: Field & headquarters recruiting were using dramatically different technology application/ manual processes; new application had to be integrated into two other HRIS applications.
Solution: Comprehensive business process re-engineering addressing the integration of 3 applications adopting consistent recruiting process eliminating inefficiencies, centralizing data input and automating distribution of recruiting information.
Impact: Standardized, more efficient and less costly recruiting process minimizing time spent screening, routing resumes; improved & shared candidate flow; automated transfer of information between applications.

Issue: Employees in this large marketing department had lost trust and respect for each other, were confused, competing with one another and duplicating functional work. The group's roles or structures were unclear in the rest of the organization.
Finding: A recent reorganization and change in leadership contributed to lack of consensus on cross-departmental mapping of roles & responsibilities.
Solution: Facilitated off-site to raise issues, obtain clarification of group's "operating principles" for conflict resolution; development/buy-in of roles & responsibilities; consensus to share information & self-monitor compliance with new agreements.
Impact: Enhanced teamwork, group productivity and improved intra-company credibility.

Issue: A generic 95 page "off the shelf" HR manual needed to revised to reflect recent changes to employment laws and company culture/practices.
Finding: Manual not user friendly due to it's length and difficult layout and style. Solution : Reorganizing the manual into logical order, eliminating the redundant sections (to 46 pages)and rewriting based on a friendlier style.
Impact: Easy to use "self service" tool referred to by managers/employees to answer most questions; reduction of employee relations issues/poor morale as a result of communicating inconsistent or incorrect policies; compliance with labor, wage & hour laws.

Issue: Without hiring additional resources, develop a self-supporting Human Resource infrastructure for a fast growing start-up reducing existing staff and bring the company into legal compliance.
Finding: Lack of documented/no processes, internal knowledge of labor, wage & hour laws resulting in frequent errors in pay and benefits coverage; managers/employees unsatisfied with HR support.
Solution: Conduct HR audit to bring company into compliance with applicable laws. Develop compensation, policy guidelines, online HR manual, procedure checklists and Q & A's for self-education; parcel out & train other support staff on new hire, termination, benefits & equity compliance.
Impact: While reducing staff by 60% created a self-sustaining compliant, smooth running HR function supported by less expense resources; employees had easy to use resource for self service problem resolution; career development for support employees.

Disclaimer: While all these scenarios are based on real experience, due to the sensitive and confidential nature of any organization's human capital issues, we have not identified our clients or other organization when citing examples, problems or solutions.