Sometimes all that is needed is a one-off message to staff and Tenadel can draft that and revise it to your specifications for a delivery-ready piece. But most organizations benefit from visioning and implementing an intentional internal communications plan that establishes ownership’s or management’s commitment to strategic transparency and an informed and empowered workforce. Let’s work together to determine your needs, what employees are voicing, and the types of information that will inspire engagement, productivity, and a safe and healthy work environment.

Effective onboarding entails more than payroll data entry, I-9, and W-2, and of course where the restrooms are! A comprehensive onboarding program begins with the job offer and supports a new employee all the way to full job competency. But comprehensive does not mean onerous and time-consuming. Tenadel can work with you to identify a path, and therefore the steps to employee success and engagement. Many of those steps are brief and many can and should be delegated to a variety of people with a vested interest in a new employee’s success.

If your organization can realistically outline a prospective career track for an employee, or even for a position regardless of the incumbent, it can result in increased motivation, engagement, and innovation. Employer commitment is often matched by employee commitment. Succession planning can be applied at any position level, but is particularly important at the professional and executive levels, ensuring that a plan is in place to develop and match talent to take on successive responsibilities. Both are great talent retention tools, especially when used prudently and wisely together.

The best way to learn why employees stay or go? Ask them. Retention or stay interviews, exit and post-exit interviews all have unique purposes, but all can contribute to an understanding of whether an organization’s employment value proposition is balanced and effective, or just a myth. Selecting these methods with purpose and planning and implementing them consistently can not only yield true and valuable information on employee motivation and satisfaction, but can also establish a reputation for organizational integrity.

Rewards and incentives are non-salary ways of providing additional, hopefully motivating compensation as a reward for one-off achievements, exceeded production goals, completing projects before deadline or underbudget, or many other circumstances where heightened needs are met, or extraordinary circumstances are risen to; rewards for work especially well done. Non-salary awards highlight the particular achievement, demonstrate a willingness to recognize exceptional effort, and don’t inflate regular wages year over year. Tenadel can help you design a plan by tailoring its features to your specific needs.

The most basic reason you offer employees benefits is to achieve competitive parity or advantage. Many organizations also feel that they can truly enhance work-life balance through group purchasing and negotiating power that would not be available to employees buying benefits individually. Benefits, however well designed or strategically purchased, do little if they are underutilized. Tenadel can look at how, when, and how widely your people are using their benefits and find ways to boost utilization, improving, in turn, employee satisfaction.

Tenadel does not conduct surveys, but we can help plan, implement, and use the data derived by third-party surveys.  This is important because employees should understand why a survey is being done, should be asked, not directed to participate, should be encouraged and thanked as the survey is live, and should be confident that survey results will be believed and used. These are high-touch steps that Tenadel can take or direct to help ensure that value is received by organizations and transparency is experienced by employees.

To define what ethical practices mean in your organization and what constitutes a conflict of interest safeguards both employee and employer. Tenadel can explore with you your sector’s vulnerabilities to conflicting interests and ethical hazards and how those relate to more generally called-for guardrails. Then let’s reason how best to offer these practices to your employees. No one wants to think that they could act unethically, or fall into a conflict, so it is critical to put policies in place in ways that don’t communicate or imply mistrust.

When an organization grows, adds service or product lines, diversifies processes, it becomes imperative to document jobs; what duties they entail, what qualifications are needed to fulfil them, what tools and resources the organization needs to provide for employees in these roles to perform them. Job descriptions do all of this and benefit both employees and their employers. Establishing a process for writing, revising, and updating a library of job descriptions also helps to support continuity and reproduceable desired results.

A true and soundly built pay structure takes an organization out of the thrall of anecdotal pay information and rumors and into the realm of data derived, accountable, and reliable guidelines for pay rates. Tenadel will work with you to identify reliable and accurate sources of data, discover what competitive stance is right for you, review your current workforce and compensation, and then will draft a structure. When finalized, your custom pay structure will be based on sound data, built for career mobility, defensible and even shareable with employees, and updateable annually with new data and other inputs.

The best time to formalize performance management and performance improvement formats and delivery procedures is before you hire your first employee, but that’s pretty uncommon. A close second is when you have some employees, but no apparent performance issues. It gets treacherous, though, if there are no processes in place and an employer has to deal with an employee’s performance issue. In all three cases Tenadel can help. We can establish formats and procedures from scratch, we can revise existing ones for greater usefulness, and we can help you navigate when you have nothing in place. In each situation the goal is mutual benefit. For the employee we offer performance feedback and metrics, as well as a predictable rubric and timeframe for improvement. For the employer, it’s policies and procedures that are constructive and defensible.

From a policy perspective succession planning is about business continuity and execution. The continuity aspect is very powerful because it allows an organization to identify which positions are critical to operations and to plan for competent staffing when talent is reassigned, promoted, or leaves. A plan can track current employees, or positions to fill possible needs. It can also plan an approach to temporary or permanent placement, and a sourcing strategy. Importantly, a succession plan must be seen as fluid and must be revisited in strategic planning, whether that planning is informal, or formal; whether it involves a small business owner, or a senior management team or board. All the elements are in HR’s wheelhouse and Tenadel can help.