People Puzzles

Leadership and Management Development are essential for the long term success of your business. For your team to be better at their jobs next year than this, you need to invest in them. Our approach to leadership and management training and development will ensure that they are, enhancing performance, employee engagement and management capability across your business.

Imagine this: every employee not only knows exactly what is expected of them and are fully competent in every area of their job role, but they are well-trained to do the right thing every time and have fantastic people skills. Sounds familiar?

For most ambitious businesses, people need to learn new practical skills and develop their commercial and people skills every year. This is not limited to the junior staff, but should include everyone, right up to the senior leaders.

A good training and development programme will identify training needs for employees to help them perform better within their roles. In turn, this leads to better performance across the business, increases staff engagement and boosts motivation so that they are more likely to give their best in your business.

One American study from 2500 firms suggested that companies with comprehensive training have a 218% higher income per employee than those with less, and enjoy a 24% higher profit margin than those who spend less on training.

With such a significant increase in business performance, investing in training is a no-brainer!

Employee development starts on day one with a good induction process, but it can’t stop there. Whether it’s broadening general skills, preparing ambitious employees for management, or deepening expertise in their field; having a plan in place will help them to learn and grow within your business and work to the best of their ability.

It can be tricky getting to grips with exercises such as skills matrices, competency frameworks and skills GAP analysis – all of which are key to improving employee performance. With our help, you can ensure the right training and development is provided, ensuring employees can progress within their specific roles to help drive business growth.

Our Skills Development Process
Our experience informs us that focusing on technical, leadership and people skills is a good approach to fostering learning development in the workplace.

At People Puzzles we have a suite of offerings for SMEs and mid-tier businesses, delivered by our experienced People Directors, that can be personalised to your unique business and deliver the improvements that you need so you can reap the benefits. These include:

Employee training and development
Employee training for teams
Leadership training
Corporate training

We do this having understood your business and as part of your overall people plan, maximising the impact of investing in training & development. Contact us to find out how we can partner with you to develop your team.

Your most talented people can unexpectedly walk out the door and have a huge impact on your business. We can help you keep your best performers – critical to business success.

Employees with a good fit, high engagement and 10+ years at an organisation perform 18% higher than the average employee and 35% higher than a worker who lacks all three elements.

All of those three elements can be tricky to find! Finding a good fit is the first challenge. The second is keeping them motivated and engaged, and the third is keeping them for a long time.

Employees don’t leave a job, they leave a manager, and your managers can have a huge impact on the most common reasons why people choose to leave:

Career advancement or promotional opportunities: 32%
Pay/Benefits: 22%
Lack of fit to the job: 20%
Management or the general work environment: 17%
Flexibility/scheduling: 8%
Job security: 2%

Improving Talent Retention

People Puzzles are experts in improving talent retention. It isn’t an overnight fix but requires an employee retention strategy and careful planning.

Our interventions include:

• Ensure people with the right skills are in the right roles

• Train and develop managers to improve their skills and approach

• Improve work/life balance including methods such as flexible working times or remote working where possible

• Improve communication and engagement across the business

• Define and share a culture that suits the business

• Upskill your staff to provide career advancement opportunities

Succession Planning

Healthy businesses don’t just focus on who is working today and what skills they have now; they keep an eye on the future, and where the business is going. That means a focus on both managing performance and looking ahead at succession planning.

Our succession planning process

Our UK-based People Directors can help you with succession planning in the workplace. We will work with you to:

• Understand and articulate what makes a great supervisor, team leader or manager

• Evaluate staff – where they are today and where they could get to

• Give opportunities to people to test and develop their leadership and management skills

• Provide training and development to your star performers

• Move people up in the organisation – it’s crucial to have strong deputies in place as you expand or in case people leave

Benefits of succession planning for your business

Succession planning and talent management are crucial for:

• Business contingency and continuity

• Giving your staff career development opportunities

• Making the most of your brightest and best team members

• Building loyalty and long-term knowledge in the team

• Steering a steady ship with low staff turnover

• Improving employee retention

Contact us to see how we can help to improve talent in your business, ensuring your people are perfectly placed, and that they stick around.

Outsourced HR provides you with local, senior level support when you need it. With no long-term contracts or tie-ins: we are as good as our last day’s work.

Effective management and motivation of people requires time and attention. Growing businesses often don’t have the resources to maintain or build an effective in-house solution.

By outsourcing HR and bringing in an embedded, part-time HR advisor from People Puzzles, you can get one of the UK’s top HR Directors for a fraction of the cost.
Our specialist People Directors will get to grips with what makes your business unique and special. Our Discovery methodology gives us an understanding of your business and the people within it, allowing us to develop proactive solutions quickly so your business can grow. By enlisting outsourced HR support, you bring in an outside perspective and energy for change.

We know HR can be a headache. There are operational demands, complex employment law to navigate, and the tricky business of managing and motivating people. As a growing business, you need to get all this right, whilst trying to build a great place to work.

We exist to lighten this load for growing businesses. Instead of trying to do something you don’t enjoy or specialise in, you can spend more time on the day-to-day management of your business and leave the people headaches to the HRO experts.

We know every business is different, that is why we can build a solution that fits: regular on-site time and remote support can be blended into the right balance for you.
To find out more about our HR outsourcing services – or to discuss how we can help your business grow – simply contact us today.

Businesses with highly engaged teams are 21% more profitable than those without. We help you to create a supportive business culture to achieve success.

Company culture is talked about a lot. But what does it really mean?

We explain it as what people are doing when no one is watching. Are people intrinsically motivated to do a good job and see the business succeed, or does a manager need to be waving a carrot on a stick to get a reasonable level of performance?

Businesses today need employees who are engaged and dedicated to driving growth. It isn’t enough to have strong and satisfied employees in well-structured job roles. Your workforce needs to be engaged and committed to achieving success.

Our HR professionals work with businesses throughout the UK to cultivate a workplace where employees are:

• Enthusiastic and positive about their relationship with their employer and their work

• Can see future potential

• Helping the business to achieve its vision

We achieve this through the following services:

• Culture consultancy

• Values development

• Development of leadership culture

• Development of employee culture

A strong culture depends on getting a lot right: strong leaders, clear values, a corporate culture of development and support, transparent and fair people processes: get any part of this wrong and it could undo good work you do in other areas.

Make sure building the right organisational culture is part of your wider strategic people plan to see the impact of motivation and engagement on your profitability.

Contact the brilliant team at People Puzzles to explore how we can partner with you to build your business a culture that is strong, inclusive and engaging.

Wondering how to tackle ESG in your organisation?
We have trusted people experts on hand to support you every step of the way

ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) is essentially a set of standards set out by organisations to measure their impact on people and the planet. Based on the idea of “planet, people and prosperity,” it has been growing in urgency and importance in businesses across the UK in recent years in response to environmental, societal and political challenges. It is a framework to make an organisation’s impact measurable, and it is rapidly becoming an essential requirement for every business.

Finding ways to identify, implement and measure that impact can be complex, however. Organisations are under increasing pressure to be transparent about their policies, but where do you start? What’s right for your business? And how can you get your people on board?

We can help. Our nationwide team of trusted People Directors can work with you to explore what ESG means for your organisation, what you are already doing, and how you can take the next step. Strategic HR plays a vital role in supporting businesses to develop and deliver a customised ESG strategy. We have developed a comprehensive toolkit to help our clients navigate this complex but rewarding area more easily.

Every business will go through a number of changes in its lifetime and being able to adapt and respond to changing conditions is key to survival and long-term growth. Navigating that change can be challenging and for many smaller and mid-market businesses, it is not always viable to have in-house specialists to manage the process.

People Puzzles provides a nationwide team of expert HR Directors available on a flexible, part-time basis to help guide SMEs through their customised business transformation journeys.

Every business is unique, and your People Director will work with you to design a bespoke strategic plan to align with your business strategy and goals. This is likely to include a number of consistent phases including:

• Strategic alignment: Developing a deep understanding of your business and its goals to help create a clear roadmap for business transformation and growth, always with people at its heart.

• Organisational structure: Making sure you have the right people in the right seats to support your business needs both now and in the future, aligned with your growth targets and business goals.

• Talent attraction, retention and development: Building a people-focused approach to help develop your employer brand proposition to help you attract and retain the brightest talent, and design the right development, training and coaching programmes to help your people fulfil their potential.

• Communication frameworks: Creating the optimum communications frameworks and cultures to facilitate the effective delivery of change programmes and the evolution of your business

• Building diverse and inclusive cultures: Developing business culture to support fair and equitable work practices to enable change, drive engagement and boost performance.

Ultimately, we can support your business at a strategic level to fulfil its potential through proven people-centric methodologies. Whatever point of your growth journey you are at, our People Directors are perfectly positioned to provide trusted guidance and strategic insight to help your business thrive.

Mergers and acquisitions can be challenging for businesses of any size and scale. These circumstances require responsive leadership, excellent communication and clarity of direction throughout.

Our expert People Directors are available on a flexible, part-time basis to help you navigate these periods of change, offering expert guidance in defining and delivering your business strategy.

This may include:

• Clarifying strategy and vision

• Communication enhancement to ensure better employee engagement

• Strategic people alignment within organisational structure

• Establishing and communicating company values

• Embedding fair and equitable cultures in which everyone can thrive

• Continuous improvement of performance and productivity

• Leadership development

• Team dynamics and management training

• Evaluation and ongoing reporting

Mergers and acquisitions can be uniquely challenging for small and mid-market businesses but you are not alone. With a network of over 80 of the best People Directors in the UK, People Puzzles is the largest team of people experts in the country, available on a flexible, accessible basis to help with your business needs.