We’ve spoken with hundreds of HR professionals, from first HR hires in tech to people who have been leading people departments for decades, and one of the questions they struggle to answer is simply “what’s your workspace?”
We’ve seen HR professionals keep track of their responsibilities in written planners, in their heads, across sticky notes, and retrofitting platforms to serve their strategic planning needs. The fact that HR work lives in so many different places, makes a complex business function all the more complicated.
Where are you tracking your department goals? Your overall business goals? This may be one reason it’s hard for HR to tell its value story - it’s not that work isn’t being done, it’s just that it’s hard to pull a narrative around it when it exists in so many disparate places and isn’t tied to goals and outcomes.
The most incredible workplace we’ve seen from HR leaders comes in the form of elaborate spreadsheets, built from scratch based on a lifetime of competence and care in HR work.
We also know spreadsheets work in one dimension. You can cross-reference two content types and come to new conclusions, but what happens when you need to make sweeping changes to your strategy?
We’ve heard PowerPoint almost 100% of the time, not only as the presentation style but as the work platform where you make the business case. Sure, PowerPoint can be a great tool to share a business case, but building the business case retroactively in this format is a lot of wasted time and effort.
