HR Strategy & ManagementOverview
Your business’s goals –its strategic imperatives – should sit at the heart of your HR strategy, because those goals are entirely dependent on your people. T.H. Easter Consulting works with you to align your HR strategy, systems and processes – your people and how they work— with your business goals. We assess your organization as it exists and ask one key question, “Can the way your organization works now achieve your business goals?” The answer to this question will guide every aspect of our engagement.
What We Do
What We Do
An organization’s workforce is its most important, and most expensive, asset. Despite its importance, businesses commonly fail to strategically approach how to assemble, prepare and equip their people to actually achieve their goals. Thus, the purpose of any workforce strategy is to align people, policies and processes to an organization’s ultimate objectives. T. H. Easter Consulting works with C-suite leaders to make workforce planning and data-driven decision-making a top priority for their organizations. Our approach aligns strategic planning with workforce planning to provide leaders with the right metrics to maximize talent and achieve business objectives.
The key to effective succession planning begins with defining your business’s strategic or long-term goals. Only when a clear vision has been established can the leadership qualities necessary to achieve that vision be identified. T. H. Easter Consulting approaches succession planning as one part of the business’s overall strategic planning. We work with clients to create a proactive plan for each key position, moving people into different areas to gain the necessary experience and training before they are needed in critical positions, rather than waiting for openings to occur.
In today’s global economy, where you plant your business flag may not seem to matter all that much. But location, location, location is not just a real estate maxim; your business location has a huge impact on your bottom line. Whether you are considering expansion into new markets, a merger or acquisition, or starting a new business, T. H. Easter Consulting analyzes location choices from a macro business perspective, looking at multiple factors that should be considered in decision making. These include:
- Skill level and suitability of the labor market
- Availability and cost of housing
- Adequacy of transport systems
- Access to suppliers and contractors
- Proximity to natural resources
- Position within the market for the company’s products or services
- General taxation and tax policies of the state
We provide the data and make recommendations to enable leaders to make informed and strategic decisions as to where they want to be and why.
At its most basic, a compensation strategy is a plan that dictates how employees are paid and rewarded for their work. But as your business’s biggest cost center, it is so much more! T. H. Easter Consulting crafts holistic and customized compensation strategies considering the myriad factors that play into compensation decisions, not the least of which is the ability to attract and retain top talent.
Approaching compensation strategically ensures that you are making choices based upon your values, as well as your competitive space in the marketplace. Most importantly, your compensation strategy must support the organization’s mission, goals and objectives and align with its culture.
Job classification systems serve a number of important purposes, not the least of which is to ensure compliance with federal and state labor laws. But compliance is only the tip of the iceberg. A robust job classification system facilitates employee compensation, training, promotions, transfers, and other myriad administrative functions. Job classification systems also define the knowledge, skills and abilities required for every position in an organization at every level of experience. At T. H. Easter Consulting, we believe the most important result of such a system is that it ensures that positions are not defined by the people who inhabit them. Rather, people are placed in positions based upon their ability to perform the defined job.
Mention performance reviews, and most people groan. Employees dread them because they are infrequent, vague, rote or unpleasant. Managers dread them because they are time consuming, administratively burdensome, and sometimes contentious. This is because most organizations do a poor job of managing performance.
Your performance management system should align with your overall business strategy. Performance management systems that work provide employees with on-going feedback about their performance vis a vis the business’s goals T. H. Easter Consulting designs performance management systems that align each employee's day-to-day actions with strategic business objectives, providing transparency and clarifying accountability related to performance expectations. And importantly, our systems support compensation and career planning decisions, as well as documentation to support employment decisions and mitigate the potential for legal disputes. Performance management done well should positively impact employee job satisfaction, retention and loyalty.
Change in business is inevitable and successful change happens at the employee level. This insight frequently gets lost in change management initiatives. Preparing an organization for change means preparing each individual person for the new strategic direction. This may seem daunting, but change management is really just another business process. Changing hearts and minds can be done systematically, and it requires as much data collection and analysis, planning, and implementation discipline as does a redesign of any other strategy, system, or process. That is the T. H. Easter Consulting approach. From the organizational readiness analysis to the communications strategy, our consultants methodically work through the elements to ensure a smooth, integrated and comprehensive change effort that engages at all levels.
Mergers and acquisitions could be characterized as change on steroids! Different companies, leaders, employees, cultures, policies, processes, locations, you name it, it’s all new and different. M&A engagements present special challenges that must be approached methodically. Integrating is a long and sometimes arduous process. It does not happen overnight, but the bumps can be minimized with careful planning and thoughtful implementation.
T. H. Easter Consulting’s approach is systematic but strategic. We consult with leadership to ensure that we have a clear and succinct idea of the deal's primary sources of value and its key risks. This allows clear priorities to be set for integration. Ideally, we begin working with clients before the deal is consummated so we can begin the integration process immediately upon the announcement of the deal. And we clarify leadership roles and responsibilities so that power dynamics between the merging entities are resolved and key people can be identified as the change agents for the integration.
These are only a few of the many decisions that await newly merged entities. T. H. Easter Consulting’s experienced consultants work with clients to build and navigate the roadmap of decisions that will maximize the merger or acquisition’s value proposition and simultaneously mitigate its risks.
