Yiuwin Tsang from the Beautiful Business community meets with Lisa Seagroatt, the Founder and Managing Director of HR Fit for Purpose. Lisa’s particular expertise is around helping business leaders and the HR practitioners of the future understand why a healthy workplace culture will future-proof any business in terms of attracting and retaining good talent.
Lisa is the Founder and Managing Director of HR Fit for Purpose. She launched her HR consultancy business in January 2017 following a mental health breakdown caused by bullying and workplace stress. She previously lectured in HR Management for Capital City College Group and has over 40 clients across the UK and internationally whom she supports with their HR needs.
Yiuwin Tsang from the Beautiful Business community meets with Lisa Seagroatt, the Founder and Managing Director of HR Fit for Purpose. Lisa’s particular expertise is around helping business leaders and the HR practitioners of the future understand why a healthy workplace culture will future-proof any business in terms of attracting and retaining good talent.
Lisa is the Founder and Managing Director of HR Fit for Purpose. She launched her HR consultancy business in January 2017 following a mental health breakdown caused by bullying and workplace stress. She previously lectured in HR Management for Capital City College Group and has over 40 clients across the UK and internationally whom she supports with their HR needs.
My name is Yiuwin Tsang. And in this episode, I got the chance to speak with Lisa Seagroatt. Lisa is a Founder and Managing Director of HR Fit for Purpose. She launched her HR consultancy business in January, 2017, following a mental health breakdown cause by bullying and workplace stress. She previously lectured in HR management for Capital City College Group and has over 40 clients across the UK and internationally whom she supports with their HR needs. Lisa's expertise is around helping business leaders understand why a healthy workplace culture will future-proof any business in terms of attracting and retaining good talent. I hope you enjoy our discussions. So Lisa, you must see lots of your clients at HR for the purpose that strive to create positive impact in their communities and at the same time, I imagine you probably see plenty of clients that, that don't do that, or who don't see that as being really, really important, but from your experience and, and your observations, what differences do you see in that cultural identity of of businesses that look at impact, look at creating impact in our local communities compared to those that don't.
Lisa Seagroatt:I mean, I suppose the first thing that always leaps to mind, whenever I'm talking to anyone about their business, you know, new clients, existing clients, whatever, and, and tackling that kind of issue is the key thing to remember is people are your business. So if you want your business to be a reflection of what you want to achieve in the community, for example then it's about recruiting the right people that share your ethos, your vision, mission, values, whatever you want to call it. So that, you know, when you come to recruit and it's all about the right people in the right places for me as an HR practitioner, And where, where recruitment often falls down with that is we, we create a job and we interview against the job description. We don't think about the person. So the person's specification is so important. I'm always banging on about that to clients, to probably tell you that stick of hearing it. But if you are looking for specific types of people to reflect your business, particularly if you want it to be something that's making an impact in, in the local community, however, that might be. Then you need to make sure that that's in the, the creation of the role and the person that you are looking for as part of your overall recruitment strategy. And, you know, and generally then you will get the right person in the right role that will align to your ethos and values as a business. And they will go out there and be a great ambassador for you in the local community and beyond which then drives other people to want to come and work for you, hopefully, or buy your service. Simple as that,
Yiuwin Tsang:Does that come into the whole concept of employer brand? People talk about it a lot. And it was probably one of the best pieces of advice that I was giving was that even, even if a candidate comes in and they're not the right person for the job or, or for whatever reason you want them to leave and really wanting to join, you know, you want 'em to leave. Oh, I wish I got that. I wish I got that role because you, you never know who they might be talking to down at the pub, wherever it might be. And I feel like just, just what you said there, it sounds like in order to make that recruitment piece less challenging, cuz I imagine it's really challenging at the moment. It's hard enough as anyway, but even with
Lisa Seagroatt:it's even harder now
Yiuwin Tsang:yeah, yeah, indeed. If part of your values and part of what you want to do is to create positive impact, be that in the local community or, or wider than that, then you, it, it feels like you need that identity as part of your corporate identity, part of your business identity.
Lisa Seagroatt:Absolutely.
Yiuwin Tsang:And that will help shape the candidates that are coming through as well.
Lisa Seagroatt:Absolutely. And where often I find things get missed is, you know, businesses create a wonderful vision and a strategy, you know, that they then want to implement, which is fabulous and great, but we don't include some of those core values in the interviewing process. So then we are measuring the person at interview. And then secondly, quite often when we appoint them, we then forget all about the strategy, the vision and the mission, and we just give them the job to do. And then we don't communicate the overall aims and objectives of the organisation. So people forget. Why are they actually there? What what's it all about? And I remember when I was teaching and I'm sure my students would come out with a number of things that I always used to try out to them. But for example, if you are in an industry where you are looking to provide services, like caring, for example, then don't recruit someone that doesn't have, and maybe an interest cares about that type of environment, cause we're all driven by different things. So yeah, forgetting to kind of communicate what we are here for as a business. What are we here for? If we're a community organisation, what's our mission in terms of what we are providing. We forget to build that into either interviewing or beyond once we onboard. We don't put that in the objectives. So people then get a bit lost in an organisation and they disconnect a bit from the brand. And the other thing to be mindful of too, is when you have got people coming to you for interview, first and foremost, they interested in working for you. That's why they've applied. So even if they're not the right fit, ethos and whatever it is that you feel is not quite right. And you have to turn them down. My approach has always been to give feedback to people while they weren't successful, but also to ask them because they've shown an interest in working for us. Would you like us to keep in touch with you for future opportunities because they might go away and have a rethink on the feedback, why they didn't get the job, then they might reapply again and think differently about how they approach the interview. But you know, when people are coming to you anyway, that's great. It means they wanna work for you. So don't lose them completely. Is what I'm saying. Even if they're not successful at, I. It's good to keep in touch.
Yiuwin Tsang:Definitely and Peter Czapp and Paul Bulpitt, the Founders of The Wow Company. And I remember talking to those guys a long time ago, and again, it's one of the and I'm paraphrasing here, but they're always recruiting, even if they don't have vacancies, they're always recruiting and the way I interpret that is that they talk about that relationship with potential candidates, even candidates or unsuccessful in the past, but nurturing that relationship because again, it's that word of mouthpiece. And I feel like, you know, to bring it back to that thing about creating positive impact, if you've got this kind of brand, this employer brand, and you've got this ethos that aligns with people because people they hang around with, and they're connected to people that have similar interests that have similar values and stuff like this. So whilst that individual might not have been perfect for the role, if there is such a thing as being perfect for the role.
Lisa Seagroatt:Yeah.
Yiuwin Tsang:The likelihood is that their network and their extended network may well have candidates in there and again comes back to that thing. Doesn't it? It's like, wish I got that job with Lisa, you know, I wish I tick those enough bit enough boxes to get that role because it just aligned with, what, I, as an individual wanted to do. And you mentioned it's harder now compared to how it was perhaps even pre pandemic. And it was tough before. What do you think has changed? What makes you say it's it's it's harder, what's it like now.
Lisa Seagroatt:Dare I mention Brexit that everyone forgot that started really the tsunami? And even yesterday there was something on the the news about recruiting overseas labour because of the process. That changed because of Brexit has made it so much harder. So you know, that obviously had a significant impact even before COVID and of course, since COVID a lot of people have reassessed, how they want to work. We know that cause we keep reading about it and huge emphasis on even more so on work, life balance, and how that affects your mental health and wellbeing and how that impacts upon your relationships in your family and your friends and all the rest of it. So we've had this kind of almost a tsunami of change, really as if Brexit wasn't enough to try and cope within the recruitment side of things. Then we had COVID and it, everything really for me, Has kind of almost turned on its head when it comes to the labour force. And you know, once upon a time we, we had lots and lots of people going for, for one job now we've got, you know, I heard, I think on the news the other day in the aviation industry, they've got 12,000 vacancies that they're trying to fill. I mean, that's like. Thousand vacancies is enough to send you over the edge, but 12,000, I thought, gosh, that poor woman who was talking about it, because the key point she was talking about as well, is that we've lost a lot of skills and experience because in aviation, of course, a lot were furloughed and that was great that maybe people did get furlough in lots of industries, but again, because they reassess their work life balance, they reassessed their future, aviation didn't look at like it was coming back anytime soon. So they've all gone off and changed their lives and gone on worked somewhere else or set their own businesses up. Lots of people did that. So we've had this huge change in terms of people's attitudes to work in and what they actually want to get from work. And what makes me really smile is the agile working I'm banging on about that for about 15 years. And when I did have a large team of people to manage, we operated agile working, flexible working, whatever you wanna call it and it worked really well, particularly with retention because you are flexing to allow people to work according to their own challenges outside of work, and let's face it more and more of us have got caring responsibilities and all kinds of stuff. So. You know, there's the agile workforce is great, but the driver has clearly been Brexit first followed by COVID and then that massive reassessment of people's futures and what they want.
Yiuwin Tsang:So I fully agree with you and I feel like Brexit, and COVID accelerated a change that was happening anyway and you I'm sure know better than I do. From my experience. And it's a short, one at that, of employing people when I was working for a bigger company and we employed people that are coming through there was big pressure on salaries, first from a budgetary perspective. And from a profit perspective you know, it felt like we were just coming out of the financial crash and we're just starting to see the fruits of some pretty fallow years and they were coming through, there was still pressure on that trying to balance that growing the size of the team in capacity whilst keeping your salary and salary costs as lean as possible. And I think that that fundamentally shifted, especially younger people that are coming through and joining the workforce, their mentality towards work. I think it already started shifting compared to,
Lisa Seagroatt:oh, definitely.
Yiuwin Tsang:Yeah. Like generationally because, you know, They, they face so many different pressures compared to, and I don't think whether myself really old, but I do think of myself as incredibly privileged in the sense that, you know, I'm on the housing ladder and so on and so forth and a lot of things, that I, you know, they're not perfect, but, I think how difficult it is to get to that point, that kind of stability. And I think that's had its ramifications that started years ago. And I feel like, as you say, Brexit and COVID has really accelerated that.
Lisa Seagroatt:Yeah.
Yiuwin Tsang:and I guess, what are your thoughts then for employers? Because again, there's that concept of quite kind of transitory jobs, people kind of looking at a job as a, a year, 18 months, and then moving on, which I think, it feels like just a few years ago, people were looking to keep into a role for a few years, at least, whereas I feel like now the norm perhaps is much more transitory. What does that mean for employers? What does that mean for businesses from a, as you say, from a retention perspective and also from a talent attraction perspective?
Lisa Seagroatt:Going back again to pre Brexit, let's talk a little bit sort of just over two years ago. And when I was still teaching the HR Level Five qualification. Lots of discussion was always around, you know, once you've recruited and you've got good talent in your business. We want to keep people and I think it's still the same now, as far as I'm concerned and yes, we have seen all these seismic changes for the reasons we've just discussed. But for me, I still think, and talking to my clients and new clients and existing ones, if we've got good people, and I don't mean they're perfect in every sense of the word, but they're, they want to be working for us they're making a positive contribution. They like coming to work, we don't all out of bed on a Monday morning and go great. It's Monday. But if we can feel reasonably good about going to work, then you're gonna get that psychological contract coming into play anyway. Cause people wanna be there. So, but coming back to what you were just talking about, the, the salary and keeping those things lean and all the rest of it is that balance, but I'm always saying to clients. It's not just about the salary. And I know probably I could get shot for saying that right at the moment with all the rising costs, I know it's horrific. We're all trying to rob Peter to pay Paul right now because everything's going up. So I appreciate that salary is important and I'm not saying it isn't but there are often many ways and some of the work that you know, I've been doing with clients around looking outside, what else are you offering to these people to keep them working for you and not wanting to go and work for a competitor down the road or in central London or whatever, you know, silly little things like have you got free parking on site? So if I'm driving to work, it's one of my benefits gonna be that I haven't got stress to park or pay to park or get a train, which is gonna cost me even more money now. So on and so forth. Although I haven't said that, of course, running a car is expensive as well, but just stuff like that, where I try to go in and have dialogue around. Okay. So you are happy with the team. You don't wanna lose them. You are conscious that people are more likely to move on much quicker at the moment. So let's look at what else are we offering to keep them outside of the salary? What are those additional benefits? But quite often, when you have that dialogue as an outsider, going into to a client there's stuff going on in their business, that they haven't even realised is a benefit that they can offer. And I am talking agile, working home, working with, you know, free parking, season ticket loans, not even a gym membership now, cause not everybody wants that. So Perkbox where you can flexible once upon a time you could flex buy different sort of types of benefits, all that kind of stuff. It, and another really important thing that gets missed increasing annual leave for length of service to say, thank you. That in my experience is a good way of helping people to stay in your business because you know, after three years, if we say right, we're gonna give you another couple of days leave, or, you know, whatever up to five more, maybe in the next three years or something like that, people might tend to stop and think, oh, hang on a minute. Don't really wanna go somewhere else and start all over again. With 20 plus eight. Quite like where I'm at, stuff like that. There's lots of small changes that you can make that can have quite a big impact in terms of retention is what I'm saying.
Yiuwin Tsang:It makes a huge amount of sense and the guys at Wow will know a lot more about this than I do, but all of the things that you mentioned there they quite cost efficient in the sense that, you know, rather than necessarily increasing in salary, which would then bring in the increase in national insurance and your employee contributions and pensions and stuff. So all of that makes. Financial fiscal sense. But I wonder if there's a wider bit there as well. And you talked a little bit about being thankful for the effort that your team puts in. And how you express that again in your line of work. I guess you see this kind of almost like positive kind of culture within the teams and again, from my limited experience, a lot of that comes from a place of mutual respect, you know, the leaders and the managers, there's a real healthy kind of respect for their teams. But what, what else have you seen in, in your experience and, what do you think helps employers and team leaders kind of shape that cultural identity within a team?
Lisa Seagroatt:For me, there's quite a simple answer to that communication. Right. So it needs to come from the top so that we are filtering down the information across the organisation or the business to keep people engaged with what's going on. So they understand if business is facing a challenge or if they're going for a good time, all of that kind of lovely dialogue, but good or bad, but communicating helps to build healthy culture in your business. If you don't tell people what's going on. Then they will start to feel quite disengaged with your business and they will also start to almost make up what they don't know. So then the rumour mill starts going and little snippets of information go around that, that get blown up into a great big, you know, fake news if you like. But that can then drive people out the door. So, you know, creating culture for me. Yes. It comes from the top in terms. Your leadership should be as open and transparent as possible as the leader at the top of the organisation, and then regularly communicating with the rest of the workforce and it doesn't matter where they sit on your layers upon layers of different shelves that you might have if it's a mechanistic organisation or whatever, that communication process is so important. But with all our modern technology we have now, there's no excuse not to communicate good or bad or indifferent, as long as we keep people informed what's going on, why they're there reminding them of what we do as a business and what we're all about and all the rest of it and how people are your business. So we can't do it without you. That's why we need you on board going through a difficult time or whatever. That's the sure way to gain employee engagement, get the buy-in from your people and keep them engaged and kind of energised to keep going. But if we don't communicate, that's one of the main failures in terms of creating a healthy workplace culture, which then has the impact on morale, retention, engagement, and so on. Sickness, absence, turnover, it all comes into it. And it's not hard to fix. It's really not hard to fix it's what I don't think its
Yiuwin Tsang:it's interesting. You said technology and not having an excuse because I think, there's lots of arguments to say that we're over reliant on technology and technology almost takes out some of that, that human factor.
Lisa Seagroatt:Yeah.
Yiuwin Tsang:But I feel like from what you're saying there, that we need to use technology to our advantage from a leadership perspective, from a team leader's perspective,
Lisa Seagroatt:people together around the, now that can cup of coffee and doughnut a or whatever, for a bit of a team check in. I mean no, the right environment, I came from our CEO used to do a regular Monday morning briefing. I think it was every other week coffee, doughnuts provided by the organisation as a way of saying, thanks very much for all your efforts so far. Now we're gonna update you with, you know, the state of the nation. This is what we are faced within the next few weeks. We need you on board for this. It goes such a long way. I appreciate large organisations. That might be a challenge, but there's nothing to stop teams getting together. And then if you have an away day or a corporate thank you day or something to just get people in a room, get them talking. And in the meantime, use the technology as well to communicate and keep them on topic. Keep them advised of why we need them, why you're here, how valuable they are.
Yiuwin Tsang:I guess bringing back to local communities and trying to make an impact in, in that kind of context, in that kind of space as well. It comes back to engagement, I guess, and people feeling like they're involved, feeling that they're contributing things like, polls on what kind of projects to be involved in? What kind of initiatives to commit time to, if it is a case that your organisation is gonna say, you know, two days a quarter is gonna be spent on local community projects or something.
Lisa Seagroatt:Yeah.
Yiuwin Tsang:Coming back to that brand identity bit. What's really coming through with all the people we're speaking to at the moment is you can't say that you are all about helping these projects or saving the world or helping create a fair society, unless you really mean it. It's more damaging almost to say and not mean it, so understanding how that manifests, how, if you are gonna get involved in local community projects, for example, what does that actually mean in practical terms? Well, what does that mean in engaging your staff and how you can use technology to help kind of drive that forward. And I just wanna just explore a little bit more around that bit around using tech for culture and for maintaining that healthy culture within an organisation. What practical advice would you give to your clients for example, in terms of, I suppose, almost kind of managing it, cause it. I think the challenge for a lot of people, when you talk about culture is it can mean lots of different things to different people, so if you're gonna try and measure it, or indeed, you know, my own mantra is you can't manage what you don't measure. So how do you measure something like culture? What kind of tactics have you seen or have you implemented.
Lisa Seagroatt:So when you are talking about maybe certain technology that you might be using certainly within speaking from the HR perspective you may run an HR software system that helps you monitor the temperature within the organisation as I call it. So what does that mean? So if you are running a particular system that records why people leave? Why people go off stick? How many concerns might have been raised. Like if we've got a high incidence of complaints coming through grievances, is it linked to a particular department? All kinds of software will throw out those kind of statistics for the HR team. And that's what I call taking the temperature and using the technology to do that. Because that will give you a clue as to how how's your culture doing. Cause if you are seeing lots of absenteeism and there are lots of people leaving and we have got a higher number of complaints, or should we say disputes that we are dealing with, which can all come from those kind of analytics, as long as we are running the software and analysing it properly and using it. Those are in my opinion amber flags that are coming up which of course you, if you are in an HR role, you would then need to go and discuss with an appropriate level in the organisation to say this is happening and we are concerned. The other way is obviously using technology to recall why people are exiting your business often gets missed that bit. People disappear out the door, but we don't ask them why they're going. We just accept the resignation, maybe feel sad about it for a few days, then it gets forgotten. So there are systems where you can recall what's going on with your exit interviews and you can then see patterns and trends appearing. Same as you can with absenteeism. You know, I can remember when I worked in the health service, we used a system that. I think it's called the Bradford factor score. And it used to flag up the, the regular absentees on particular days of the week, particularly Monday and Fri days, for example. But all of that stuff is giving you a clue about what's going on. So all the technology there that you can pull upon and craft and use to your advantage. And then you can almost try and head off some of these problems before they really become an issue for your business and then you've got high rates of turnover and absence going on, and that's really difficult to come back from. So I would definitely I've been used to, and I've, worked with clients and students around use that type of tech if you've got. To your full advantage, because you want to pull all that stuff out to take the temperature. It's built like a health check, what's going on. And it all links back to the culture. There's something not right. If you've got too much of that going on, essentially.
Yiuwin Tsang:Part, my brain's kind of thinking though and don't worry if you don't have an answer to this, but it's just made me think a lot of those, those indicators that you talked about, absenteeism and rate of leaving and obviously kind of exit interviews and stuff. In my kind of business development mode, they sound and they feel like lagging indicators, in the sense that, you know, these are things, and as you say, the amber so it's kinda, so we can, we can almost see if there's a problem coming down the line by, by keeping an eye on these lagging indicators. Is there anything in the HR world, which are leading indicators or anything that we can look at, which kind of indicate to us that we can see or we can measure that show us that we're going in the right direction.
Lisa Seagroatt:Yeah, definitely. I mean, one area that you can see if you're getting things right, is are people applying to come and work for you? I mean, and cuz that can give you an indication that, that. Or, or if they're not, there may be something's wrong with the recruitment strategy, but if you're getting a good response, when you need to go out to recruit that's positive very old fashioned, but works every time. And again, something when I was teaching, we just have loads of dialogue about because everyone used to go. Yeah, we love it. Surveying, you are asking your team. Just ask your people, you know, what's it like to work here? Do it anonymously. Of course. So they feel comfortable. But you get so much valuable information from just by asking the people that are working for you. And that can include not just employees that can be, if you've got subcontractors, freelancers, volunteers, they often get forgotten. They're all part of the wider workforce if you like. So they're all having an experience of working with or for you. So by asking them some key questions around, what's it like to work here? What do you see as issues? There's lots of things often that can be going on in an organization at a lower level that the leadership don't know about, but it could be having a big impact somewhere else in the business. So by collating up that kind of data, real data from real people. HR can sit down and do a really good analysis from that and then you can look at areas that where you need to improve. And of course, don't ask people where you need to improve. If you're not prepared to do it. And if you can't do it, tell them why you can't, it might be a budget issue. It might just be impossible to, I dunno, you know, they might want day trips to the moon or something. We're not in a position to do that yet, but as a benefit, but I'm being, I'm, you know, I'm making fun, but, you know, there are certain things as a business, you can't fix to help improve your culture, but there will always be areas that will come up in those kind. Staff surveys, volunteer feedback or whatever, and you think, oh, didn't know about that. We can fix that straight away and it can impact can be huge. That can mean the difference between people sitting and grumbling and moaning over a cup of coffee and then thinking, oh, I've had enough of it here. I'm gonna leave to great to have a coffee break or later I'm, I've got a project I need to work on, I'm off -that kinda thing. It can be really easy to spin it around.
Yiuwin Tsang:Yeah. and that's almost like the best case scenario is where they say they're off. You know, the worst case would be, they stick around and they have this kind of downward kind of spiral.
Lisa Seagroatt:They're disruptive.
Yiuwin Tsang:So I remember when I was working for a phone shop for my sins and they did a similar sort of thing. They did an employee survey and the problems that they couldn't solve, they had a really nice term for it. They called it gravitational problems, you know, it's gravity. They can't actually do anything about it, but we will acknowledge it. You know, and, but it was those little things. And the example was, was that staff that were working in the shops, they got really fed up of waiting out in the cold and in the rain for key, for keyholder to arrive. Right. You know, so it was let's just get some more keys cut and have more keyholders.
Lisa Seagroatt:There you go.
Yiuwin Tsang:So that people can get into the warm and it's things like that, that as you say, from a management level, and as you get, you know, as more things, land on your plate as a business owner, business leader, and you're spinning more and more plates,
Lisa Seagroatt:you're not gonna know that.
Yiuwin Tsang:Yeah. Unless you ask.
Lisa Seagroatt:Exactly. So, you know, it comes back again. I'm always trotting it out, always banging on about it. I said it to you at the very beginning. People are your most valuable asset. They are your business. They're your most, normally your most expensive investment. Okay. And so we, so once we've got them and we are happy with the way they're working, we need to continually keep them if we can, in our business, by all those things, we've already discussed along with offering opportunity for progression, even if that's only a small progression, whatever we can manage within the business. But that's another reason why we lose people is because we don't give them a pathway and then they get a bit stale and they, they wanna want to move. So if we can do that, then it's great because that will also help retain talent that maybe you fought really hard to get in the first place. And it's an expensive process recruitment. So, you know, we wanna do it as little as often.
Yiuwin Tsang:Thanks so much, Lisa, for sharing your experiences and advice on how leaders can nurture their teams and create strong cultures in their businesses.