People Operations
Practical thinking for Heads of People and HR Operations professionals building better teams.
What a Head of People actually needs from software
Most HR software is designed for administrators. The people who make strategic decisions about talent are still working from spreadsheets and institutional memory.
Why five HR tools is worse than one
The standard advice is to buy the best tool for each problem. In practice, this produces a specific kind of problem that compounds over time.
Your HR team is spending 20% of their time on document requests. Here's the proof.
Employment confirmation letters. Salary confirmations. Visa support letters. These requests arrive every week, at every company, and almost all of them are still handled manually.
The Organisational Graph
The ideas behind workplace intelligence -- what it is, why it matters, and how to build it with integrity.
Why workplace intelligence needs to earn trust before it earns authority
AI-generated insights about people carry higher stakes than AI-generated insights about almost anything else. The design of these systems has to reflect that.
The difference between recording work and understanding it.
Every company has systems that record work. Very few have systems that understand it. This distinction matters more than most people realise.
The Employee Journey
Seven essays on the moments that define how people join, grow and thrive at work.
The farewell nobody organised properly.
Every company has a story about a departure that deserved more. Here's why it keeps happening -- and how to fix it.
Recognition that only happens in December isn't recognition. It's paperwork.
The moment someone does something worth celebrating is the moment to celebrate it. Annual reviews are neither.
What happens when an employee can't see their next step.
The conversations that prevent great people from leaving are rarely about money. They're about direction.
The best work your company does is probably invisible.
Most organisations have an innovation problem that isn't actually an innovation problem. It's a visibility problem.
Why your remote team feels like strangers -- and what to do about it.
The people directory hasn't been reinvented since it was a binder on a shelf. Most companies still treat it that way.
Your company's best knowledge is locked inside someone's head. Here's how to free it.
Every organisation has people who know things nobody else knows. The problem isn't that the knowledge exists -- it's that nobody can find it.
The first 90 days decide everything. Most companies waste them.
The experience a new hire has in their first three months predicts almost everything about whether they'll stay, contribute and grow.