Strategic People Ops
Fowke Consulting offers 'Strategic People Ops Services', which bring people, organization design and culture to a strategic level.
We use a wide range of methodologies that predict dysfunction, which allows us to co-develop 'People Strategy' that works for you.
We often focus on matching human capability to the complexity of the work, which in our experience has yielded the best results of any approach.
There are 7 Pillars of Strategic People Ops that all interrelate to take your business to the next level:
Attract and select the right people for your needs.
People
Help spur personal and professional growth in your employees and manage your leadership pipeline so you have the right talent for the future.
Development
Clarify the accountabilities, authorities, and ways that people work together in your company.
Structure & Processes
Set up the incentive structures that is felt-fair and aligns your employees with your purpose.
Compensation
Developing a healthy culture allows your company to be agile in pursuit of your organization's purpose.
Culture
Gain clarity about your next steps and big picture as a business leader.
Strategic Clarity
Business Life-Cycle Timing
Balance your Strategic People Ops plan with what you business needs right now
Right People
Attract & Select the Right People
We make sure that you get people who are capable of the work that needs to be done and that fits your company.
We look at many aspects of the fit of a person to their role, including; horsepower, knowledge, skills, experience, social-emotional maturity, management style and interest in the work and the organization's purpose.
The most overlooked and powerful aspect of fitting a person to their role is horsepower. We match a person with the right level of challenge based on their ability to processes information, and the requirement of information processing in their role.
We also help you attract the top talent, and the next generation of workers. Millenials and Gen Z want different things out of their work than their predecessors. Learn how to attract top young talent.
Additionally we are in the process of developing a talent bank of people who are interested in their personal and professional development, which will cut down search times and increase the changes of good alignment between the new recruit and the company.
Structure & Processes
The Ways You Work Together
We help you design how the people in your company work together, and make sure that the work gets done at the right level of complexity.
What are the roles in your organization, and what accountabilities and authorities do they have? How are people matched to roles? How are meetings run? Are you self-organizing? These are they types of questions that we help you answer.
We help you balance accountability, with flexibility in a way that develops adult-to-adult relationships between your team members and invites the best parts of the person to work.
Culture
It is important to co-create any changes in culture with everyone in the organization so that there is a sense of ownership and authentic adoption of change.
We have a practical approach to culture that involves everyone in the organization getting to talk about culture, values and purpose. Out of that comes specific action-based recommendations that can move the company from one set of cultural norms to another. This helps the business be agile as a group, responding together to external changes.
We also suggest rituals, artifacts and stories that help foster the desired culture.
In addition to the unique aspects of every culture, there are elements that are universal to all healthy cultures. We identify and help implement these cultural features.
Culture lives in narratives, we help you articulate your stories so that slogans turn and talking points turn into a common identity.
Fostering Healthy Norms
We help you design a developmental plan for your employees, making sure that their knowledge, skills, experience, social-emotional maturity, leadership etc. keep up with their increasing horsepower.
By being able to accurately predict transitions in horsepower over time we can help them prepare for and manage the transitions. Simply making people aware of their potential can be a huge motivating factor.
Our Thrive Leadership Development Program provides coaching and developmental resources. Wether it is helping people reach their best performance now, or preparing the future leaders of your company, we can help people reach their potential.
In terms of succession planning we are able to project the capability of your current staff as much as 40 years into the future, allowing you to identify possible successors. Such projects also allow you to identify possible opportunities with excess capability, or holes in your talent pool that you need to fill.
For entrepreneurs scaling their business we also offer developmental support to help you transition from founder to executive.
Development
Take Your Talent To The Next Level
Depending on where you are in the business life-cycle, some needs are more pressing than others.
As your strategic partner we help you balance your competing needs. Sometimes cost is most important, sometimes speed is most important.
Likewise, it is most pressing to get the right talent in the door as you are scaling. Sometimes it is more important to design the systems and processes when you have multiplied your workforce several times. Sometimes it is most important to bring everyone in the organization together to develop a new, organizational purpose or direction.
Like all the other pillars of 'Strategic People Ops' the timing of specific components is interconnected with, and needs to be balanced with all of the other pillars.
We recognize the complex nature of the system you are building and offer flexibility and expertise to make your company's change successful.
It doesn't Need to Happen All At Once
Business Life-Cycle Timing
Our role in providing strategic clarity is to:
1. To provide you the time and space to think about broad level strategy.
2. To ask insightful questions as an external sounding board.
3. To bring people, organization and culture to the strategic level.
4. To explore and validate various business models that may support organizational growth and pivots.
5. To keep you focused on working the business instead of in the business.
We are not in a position to have the answers to your strategy, only you have the context to find them. We help bring clarity to your questions and provide you the space to find them.
Poking your Head Above the Chaotic Cloud
Strategic Clarity
Fair Pay that Aligns a Group of People
Our felt-fair pay system allows us to identify how much a role is worth, in a way that feels fair.
We can use this system to provide guidance for how much to offer for new employees, how to handle raises and how much to budget for planning purposes.
We also design the compensation packages so that there is alignment between the person and the company and so that it fits with the culture.