Fay Wallis 00:00:
Welcome back to HR Coffee Time. It's wonderful to have you listening today. I'm your host, Fay Wallis, a career and leadership coach for HR and People professionals, and I've made this podcast especially for you to help you have a successful and fulfilling HR or people career. This episode is here to help you find time for strategic work when you're in a busy HR or people role because I know how incredibly challenging it can feel to achieve this when there's always so much to do and you'll have issues cropping up all the time that need your attention.
But it's so incredibly important because the strategic work is what will usually have the greatest impact. It's the work that helps you craft an organization where people are proud to work, where they can thrive, and where they're empowered to drive the organization forward, making it a success. Before I dive into sharing the five tips with you, I wanted to make sure that I take a moment to say a heartfelt thank you to Christine Bischoff and Jack Cumming, who have both written lovely posts recommending this podcast on LinkedIn over the past couple of weeks.
Fay Wallis 00:01:
It has been such a wonderful surprise to see those posts pop up in my LinkedIn feed because I was tagged in the post, so that's how come I got to see them. Thank you both so much. Word of mouth and recommendations on social media are such powerful ways of helping spread the word about the podcast. I really appreciate it because it means that this free resource can reach and help even more people in the HR community, which is just amazing.
In fact, I need to say a double thank you to Christine because after sharing the post recommending HR Coffee Time, a few days later, she created a video about The Essential HR Planner and shared that on LinkedIn too. So thank you so much, Christine. And thank you again, Jack. And now let's move on to the main part of the show and dive into those tips that are going to help you find time to be more strategic at work.
Fay Wallis 00:02:
The first tip is to build your confidence about being strategic and what that actually means. Because I've realised that when it comes to carving out time for strategic work, I've noticed that a lot of the time when people say they haven't got time to be strategic, that's actually only partially true.
Yes, they are really busy, but I know once I start talking to them about it, that the main thing that's holding them back is actually a fear around what being strategic really means and whether they are capable of doing it. So whether they're capable of being strategic and that is such a natural fear to have because most of us are never formally taught what strategy and what being strategic mean or how to do them.
Fay Wallis 00:03:
And of course, if we're unsure or nervous about something, it's It's just natural that we'll put off making time for it. It may be that you're not doing it consciously. It often happens with things like this that we do it subconsciously. If you've ever found yourself procrastinating about something, you'll notice afterwards that It might be because you're not 100 percent sure of all of the steps that are involved in the task you need to do, or an aspect of the task feels hard so you just find yourself putting off doing it, and it's exactly the same thing with being strategic.
So the first step, my first bit of advice, is to take a moment to ask yourself how confident you feel about being strategic at work. If you're listening to this and you're thinking, It's okay, Fay. I'm really confident with how to create a strategy and I'm really confident with what being strategic means and what it looks like.
Fay Wallis 00:04:
Then you can just move along from this first tip, move along to the second tip straight away. But if your answer is, um, actually I'm not very confident, then don't worry, you are certainly not alone. I meet so many HR professionals who feel this way and I have lots of things to help you with building up that confidence.
There's a whole playlist of HR Coffee Time podcast episodes that are focused on being strategic. You can find them on my website, which is Bright Sky Career Coaching. You then just need to go to the HR Coffee Time page and scroll down to the bottom. You'll see all the playlists are listed on there and you can access the one about being strategic.
But out of all the episodes that are on that playlist, the ones that I think you'll find most helpful are three. So the first one is Episode 102, which is called Boosting Your Strategic Knowledge to Step Up in Your HR Role. The second one is called Episode 108, How to Create a Simple but Powerful One Page Strategy with Dr.
Fay Wallis 00:05:
Max Mckeown. And then the third one is episode 134, creating an HR strategy, how to get started when you're feeling stuck. There's also The Essential HR Planner, which is available in a digital format, which you can find on the Essential HR Planner website. And there's also a hardback version of it, which is available on Amazon.
So, The Essential HR Planner has got lots of tools in there to help you with boosting your thinking around being strategic. So I'll make sure that I pop the links to all of those things. I'll pop the links to the playlist, to the separate episodes, and to The Essential HR Planner in the show notes for you, just so that they're nice and easy to find, because I know you might be out and about listening to this episode where it's not easy to jot notes down while you're listening.
Fay Wallis 00:06:
My second tip is going to feel obvious and feel really simple but I'm going to share it anyway because I know how easy it is to know about something obvious but not put it into action and that is to set dedicated time for your strategic work in your calendar because if it's not in there and you're just hoping that you'll find the time to do it you'll end up just squeezing it into the cracks of time that may or may not open up in your day.
And it is so much harder then to get to that strategic work or to really make meaningful progress with it. If you've already tried putting dedicated time in your calendar, but you find yourself working on something else instead, or you end up letting other people interrupt that time or set meetings across it, again, don't worry about it.
Oh my goodness, so many of us do that. I know that. I have definitely been guilty of all of those things. If that's the case, there are two other HR Coffee Time episodes that you might find helpful to listen to next after you've finished listening to this one.
Fay Wallis 00:07:
Those episodes share lots of practical advice on how to overcome this and protect that time. And they are episode seven, which is called What to do when you don't have enough hours in the day, and episode 92. Time management tips to stay on top of your busy day. One other thing that I've found really helped me is instead of just blocking out time for being strategic, I make a really basic project plan.
And I mean, it's just so simple. It is literally just a list of steps. So I make a basic project plan for each key project I'm working on over the year. I'll try and break it down into small steps, and then I figure out how much time, roughly, do I need for each of these small steps, and then I put all of those in my calendar.
So that means that I know exactly what I'm going to be using those chunks of time I've blocked out in my calendar for. I also I aim to give myself the occasional full day that is completely blocked out for either doing strategic planning or completing the strategic work that I need to get done. For those days, I'll often book somewhere that's different to work, so I'm not in my home office, or, for you, if you're going to follow this tip, it may be you're not in your regular office.
Fay Wallis 00:08:
Or you're not in your home office either. And then you'll find that that helps it feel like it's a special separate day to your regular work. And I plan all of this out at the beginning of the year, so I don't suddenly find myself halfway through the year and massively behind where I would like to be with my important projects.
It has made such a huge difference and I really hope that if you try this it helps you too. And of course, if you're listening to this episode quite soon to when it goes out, you are very welcome to come along to my HR Planning Day, which I'm running on the 29th of November in London. It's a whole day dedicated to you and setting your goals for the year, so your professional goals, what you would like to achieve to help boost your career and help you feel fulfilled by your work, but also to make time for thinking about planning out those important HR projects and those everyday tasks that have got to get done. So there is all the detail about the planning day on my website. I actually seem to now have two websites. I have to say a big thank you to my sister Holly, who's a website designer and built me a second one, which is for The Essential HR planner.
Fay Wallis 00:09:
So at the moment, you can actually find the details about the planning day on both websites. So that's the Bright Sky Career Coaching one or the Essential HR Planner one. And again, I'll make sure that I pop a link with all the information for you in the show notes, but it would be lovely to see you there if you can join me, there are a few tickets left at the time of recording this episode, and it would be fantastic to help you plan out for a brilliant 2025.
Fay Wallis 00:10:
But let's move along now to tip three, so my third tip is to make the most of AI to free up some of your time. Now, I'm recording this episode of HR Coffee Time in November 2024. It's really funny to think that if you're listening to this episode several years in the future, it may feel like old fashioned advice because everyone will be doing this so well by then. I went to the CIPD Festival of Work in London earlier this year and I got to see Angela Moyle.
She was there demonstrating a new AI tool called ELLA that her company elementsuite has created. If you've been listening to HR Coffee Time for a while, you may remember Angela because she was my guest for episode 58, which was called How to Feel More Confident Using Data and Analytics in Your HR Role.
Fay Wallis 00:10:
We had recorded that episode online, so I was really excited to meet her in real life, and I knew that she was going to be there and exhibiting, so I made sure that I went over to say hello. And Angela asked me after I said hello if I wanted to see her AI tool ELLA in action. And oh my goodness, I was absolutely blown away.
Fay Wallis 00:11:
I had never seen anything like this. ELLA was the first AI chatbot that I'd ever seen that's been created specifically with HR in mind. It was just incredible. I could immediately see just what a huge difference AI tools like ELLA
are going to make to the profession when everyone starts adopting them. So with this particular tool, this particular chatbot ELLA, it's programmed to learn about all your organization's policies and it can access everything in your HRIS system securely. It means that it can then instantly answer any questions that any employee in the organization might have that they would normally come to you for or come to one of your HR colleagues for.
Fay Wallis 00:12:
So all those questions that can take up so much time end up being asked to the chatbot instead of to you. Some of the examples of questions might be things like, what are the company regulations for maternity leave? Or how many holidays do I have left? But it can also help you with your day to day tasks as well.
So you can ask it to do things like draft a job advert for a vacancy that you need to advertise, or draft a personalised mortgage reference for a particular employee. It's incredible, honestly, I'd really encourage you, if you haven't already started diving into the world of AI and how it can help you as an HR professional, I'd really encourage you to do it.
It's just so exciting to see how much time we can all start to save by becoming more familiar with AI tools and using them. And actually I phoned Angela while I was planning out this episode to ask her if she had any resources that she could share to help you take more of a deep dive into AI if you'd like to.
Fay Wallis 00:13:
And she said yes. She has got three ebooks which are about AI, AI for HR, and how HR can help the wider business with AI. And she's going to send the links to them over to me, so I will make sure that I pop those links in the show notes for you. Just in case AI is something that you are keen to learn more about.
Gosh, I feel like I'm saying every couple of minutes, I'll put the links in the show notes. I think these show notes are going to be absolutely packed full of links this week. If you're listening and thinking, what on earth is Fay talking about? What are the show notes? They are just some helpful notes that give you an idea of what this episode is about.
It shows you the different chapters in it so that you can jump to different parts if you want to, and it also has got links to all of the things that I'm mentioning and talking about. You can normally find the show notes by looking at the app you're listening to this podcast on, just tap on the episode and they should come up.
Fay Wallis 00:14:
But sometimes it's not always easy to find them. So if you're struggling at all to see them in an app, then all you've got to do is hop over to my website, Bright Sky Career Coaching, go to the HR Coffee Time section and find this episode. When you click on the episode, you can see all the show notes are there.
And there's also actually a transcript for the episode there too, in case you want to read through it rather than listen to it. For my fourth tip, I'm going to share the saying less is more.
Because HR encompasses so many different things, it means that there's the potential for you to focus on absolutely loads of different things. So maybe you want to install an HRIS system to help make your department more efficient and you want to design and roll out a new leadership development programme because you know that management capability needs to be strengthened and you want to overhaul your organisation's total rewards offering to modernise it and make sure it's optimised to meet the diverse needs of everyone in the workforce, And you want to overhaul your employer brand, the problem is that unless you're overseeing a large HR team with capacity to tackle all of these things at the same time, this is going to very quickly feel overwhelming.
Fay Wallis 00:15:
Trying to work on lots of projects at once while staying on top of all of your normal business as usual work and your everyday responsibilities can very quickly start to feel like you're wading through treacle. I know that's exactly how I feel if I start trying to do too many important things at once.
It's really hard not to do this because I know you're really passionate about doing a great job and you can see all these great ways that you can improve the organization. But the problem is that there just aren't enough hours in the day to be able to make quality progress on multiple projects if you're working on them at the same time.
Fay Wallis 00:16:
And it can also be really hard to switch your focus from one project to another. Instead, if you're ruthless about picking the projects that will have the biggest impact on the organization and tackle them one at a time, It is much, much easier to make faster progress. And then that means you're more likely to stay on track with your strategic work.
You're more likely to find the time to work on it because you're feeling motivated about keeping on going with it, because you can see you're making all this great progress. And this idea of really trying to laser in on the most important things or the most important thing and just doing that or them, Is something that I talked about in episode 102, which was boosting your strategic knowledge to step up in your HR role.
In fact, I already mentioned that episode right at the beginning of today's episode. So I feel like that's probably a good one for me to recommend to you if you do want to take more of a deep dive into this whole area of being strategic. And in that episode I talk you through some of the key insights from Richard Rummelt's brilliant book.
Fay Wallis 00:17:
Good strategy, bad strategy, the difference and why it matters. He really emphasizes how organizations that succeed with strategy are ones that have a focus on a core thing, like the core challenges that need to be addressed within the organization. Otherwise he talks about there being a risk that you just create a shopping list of projects and ideas you want to work on and no one ever gets through any of them.
I also read a book this year called The One Thing, which is written by Gary Keller. I'd had that book recommended so many times that I thought, okay, come on, Fay, you've got to actually read it.
And if you'd like any more convincing about the power of focusing on one thing instead of lots and lots and lots of different objectives, I'd really encourage you to give it a read. I enjoyed it and it has definitely helped me as well to try and slow down and stop doing quite so many things at the same time Then my fifth and final tip is to communicate clearly what your strategic priorities are in HR.
Fay Wallis 00:18:
So make sure that the rest of the organisation knows. It can help make it so much easier to push back when you're asked to start a new initiative or a new project that isn't as high a priority for you. I've seen one Head of People come up with a powerful and effective but simple way of doing this.
Amongst the slides he had created to present his people strategy to the rest of the organisation, he had one slide that was just filled with different words. All of the words represented everything that can possibly fall within HR's scope of responsibility. So there were words like well being, talent acquisition, succession planning, employer branding, workforce planning, leadership development, learning and development, compensation and benefits, financial well being, recognition scheme, engagement survey, performance management, employee handbook, policies, diversity and inclusion, people analytics, change management.
Fay Wallis 00:19:
It just went on and on and on all of these words on the slide. He had then faded out the words that didn't form part of his strategic priorities and then he put the words that were strategic priorities in bold. He was then able to explain that although, of course, his team would still be responsible for all of the aspects that were on that slide, the ones that were being proactively focused on improving were the strategic priorities that were in bold.
I thought it was unbelievably clever because I think that so many people outside of the HR and people function just don't realise how many things HR covers.
Fay Wallis 00:20:
I could visualize being able to use a simple slide like this whenever someone comes up to you telling you they've got a great idea for a request that they'd like you to focus on, that there's something new that they think is really important for you to start working on straight away, because you'll be able to say, I agree, that sounds like it would be a valuable thing for us to do, but right now my strategic priorities are x, y, and z, and you can show them on the slide, you can remind them, I'll make a note of your request and we can revisit it when we're doing our strategic planning next year.
Of course, you'll need more than one slide to help everyone understand the breadth of your role and what your priorities are and for the message to really land. So there are so many other ways that you can be communicating consistently about the work that you're doing. But I thought I'd mention that slide example because it really stood out at me when I saw it.
I'd never seen anyone doing something like that before. And it's a simple, quick and easy thing that you can put into action and try for yourself if you'd like to. Now we're coming to the end of the episode. I thought it would be helpful to just quickly recap what we've covered today, because I know from all the podcasts that I love listening to, that by the time you get to the end, you can really easily have forgotten everything you heard at the beginning.
Fay Wallis 00:21:
So Firstly, we talked about addressing any fears or uncertainty that you might have about being strategic. So really building up your confidence about being strategic because then you'll find that you're much more likely to start making time to actually do the strategic work because you're not scared of it anymore.
Then secondly, we covered the importance of actually scheduling dedicated time for your strategic work in your calendar. The third tip was all about maximizing AI in your organization and using tools like ELLA to help free up your time by handling all the routine queries and tasks.
Fay Wallis 00:22:
It's so exciting to think what technology is making possible for us now. The fourth tip was the power of less is more. So being ruthless about focusing on fewer strategic projects so that you can have the biggest impact possible, rather than trying to do everything at once. And then finally we looked at how important it is to clearly communicate your strategic priorities to the wider organization because that's going to help you manage expectations and protect your strategic time.
So I hope you've enjoyed the episode and that it's given you some practical takeaways you can go and start using straight away. I would love to hear from you if any of these ideas resonate or if you're going to give any of them a try or perhaps you've already tried them out. You can always reach me through my website or by contacting me on LinkedIn, you can find me there. I'm Fay Wallis, so that's Fay, F A Y, I haven't got an E on the end of my name, and Wallis is spelt with an I S on the end instead of A C E. And if you've enjoyed the episode and found it useful,
Fay Wallis 00:23:
I would be so incredibly grateful if you're happy to leave a rating or review for me. You'll see that whatever app you're listening to this on, if you're listening in a podcasting app, there's normally a function where you can just tap to give it a rating, or you can write out a review. It is such a wonderful signal to other people to give give the podcast a try if they're considering it so it really does help the show reach even more people and I'm just so grateful for everyone who's ever taken the time to leave a rating and review.
Thank you if you are one of the people who's already done it. That's it for me for today. I'm looking forward to being back again soon with the next episode of HR Coffee Time for you. Take care in the meantime.