In the past few years, anyone leading an organization must have noticed that there has been a higher focus on improving organizational culture, redefining the employee experience, and leading with positive impact.

And one of the strategies used to help organizations implement transformational initiatives is to craft a solid people strategy.

For leaders who know that they should have a people strategy but don't know where to start, here are a few ideas that can help.

Break down the journey

The first thing to do is to break down the journey into sections and work on one aspect of it at a time.

Create a targeted talent acquisition strategy 

The first section to start with is creating a targeted talent acquisition strategy. Why would you want to create a targeted talent acquisition strategy? To make sure that you're attracting the candidates who are most likely to be successful within your organization.

The “right talent” is not the same for everyone. Not everyone has...

Most of us love a good personality assessment. They’re usually fun, can help us understand ourselves better and, at times, may even have implementable tips for us.

To be clear, I’m not talking about the suspicious ones that pop up in social media feeds and may or may not be gathering security question information.

I’m talking about the DiSC assessment, MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator), CliftonStrengths (formerly Clifton StrengthsFinder), and others in the same vein.

It seems every organization I’ve ever worked at had me take one of these as part of the onboarding. I took the test, enjoyed reading the results, and that was as far as it went. The organization didn’t seem to care much about it.

A REVELATORY TOOL

Although I have no first-hand knowledge of how these assessments were created, I’m pretty sure it’s safe to assume that Isabel Myers, Katharine Briggs, Donald Clifton, and others did not invest so much...

For the longest time, just using the words “fully remote position” was enough for some small businesses to be flooded with resumes from top talent. Now, with big names such as Twitter and Slack embracing remote work for the long-term, this will likely no longer be the case.

Such massive changes in the remote landscape might have some small-business owners wondering what they can do to prepare themselves. After all, larger organizations might be able to offer various career paths, higher salaries, fully paid medical and dental benefits, unlimited vacation, equipment, paid-for internet, covered accounting costs and so much more. If the recruiting space is now filled with such employers, how can a small organization compete?

Does that mean small businesses have to sit back, wait and be grateful for whatever leftovers come their...

Nintendo started out producing handmade playing cards. Netflix was selling and renting DVDs by mail. Starbucks used to only sell high-quality coffee beans and equipment (no brewed coffee or delicious handcrafted espresso drinks!).

As different as their businesses were – and still are – they all managed to pivot/strengthen, expand and thrive. Even without firsthand knowledge on the details of how they went about these changes, it’s not hard to imagine that experimentation and a desire to constantly improve was somehow involved.

Anyone who has spent any amount of time visiting the Corgibytes website (where I am COO), reading the blog or listening to our podcast (Legacy Code Rocks!) knows that we’re constantly talking about reducing technical debt to make codebases stable, scaleable and secure.

What you likely don’t know is that we also apply those same concepts to our operations.

Just like we do code health checks, we do operational health checks....