HR Consulting Services

Been-there, done-that

With extensive Canadian, US and Global experience, we offer a complete suite of HR consulting services.

Find out about our expertise in scalable HR.

Or contact us to find out how we can serve you.

All HR Services

Business Strategy

Situational Assessment & Facilitation

Getting clear and aligned on who you are, your differentiation and what you will and won’t do is vital. We can help you and your team create a vision of what success looks like for you; conduct your situational analysis; define your strategic imperatives and translate these into a plan and measurable actions.

Competitive Analysis

Have you taken the time to assess where the competitive power lies outside your organization and what might impact the future of your business?  Have you analyzed changes in the landscape and main trends that might affect your decision making and unveil opportunities and threats for the future? We can assist you.

Capability Analysis

Have you assessed your talent capabilities, defined your core competencies and in turn your competitive advantage in your marketplace? Do you know what competencies customers value? Do you know the gaps, and do you have plans and actions to close them?  We can help you assess your situation and develop practical approaches to enhance your position.

Change Management

How successful have you been implementing organization change programs? Did you anticipate everyone would understand the need for change, embrace and action it? Have you ever been surprised by employee reaction and resistance? We can help you better plan, prepare and execute needed change in a manner that improves the outcome for all.

VMOST

Is everyone in your company moving in the right direction? Do they understand where you want the company to be, how you intend to get there, what your targets are, what actions need to be taken and who does what? We can help you get clear.

Strategic HR

Organizational Planning, Design and Development

Pivoting off your vision and key strategic imperatives, we can lead you through a process of identifying organizational designs and structures to optimally support achievement of your business objectives. This can include resource capacity analysis and talent planning.

Talent Strategy

We can support you to develop a hiring & development strategy and tactical plan to identify, grow and attract the right talent to your Company. This can also include an assessment of talent quality and flight risks.

Culture Building & Branding

Are you winning the competitive struggle for customers and employees? Culture goes beyond great employee benefits, foosball tables and gym memberships. Weaving your differentiated culture and brand together will deliver aligned experiences for your employees and customers. We can help you assess how you function on the inside with how you want to be viewed on the outside and build alignment.

Total Rewards Strategy

This involves defining your philosophy and determining where you stand relative to market benchmark comparators. Using market-based surveys and analysis, we can help you develop a compensation strategy, components and system to enable attraction and retention of top talent.

Talent Acquisition

Capability & Needs Analysis

Is the talent you have today helping you succeed? Do you have the right people and skills mix? Will more and different capability be needed to help you grow and win? We can help you assess this and determine what action you should take and how.

Acquisition Planning, Execution & Selection

Who you hire is among the most important business decisions you will make. Do candidates have the right mix of skills, proven experience, attitude and style? Will they fit your culture or be a virus? While this isn’t a pure science, we can help improve the odds that you’ll make the right choice.

On-Boarding & Integration

We can also help you create an appropriate process for new employee orientation and integration. It’s common for new hires to question their decision to join a new company if this is not done well. Our significant experience in this area can help you get new hires feeling good about their decision and quickly be productive.

Immigration

With heightened global mobility and scarcity of talent, we can help you qualify people’s legal ability to work for you or become qualified. Our extensive experience in this area and our relationship with multi-jurisdictional advisors can help clarify and expedite an often murky situation.

Relocation

As businesses grow they are often challenged with determining what an appropriate package might be to relocate an employee or new hire. They might also need to move people across borders. We have significant experience in each of these areas and can assist you with determining what makes sense for your company.

Total Rewards

Compensation Market Benchmarking

Are you having problems attracting talent and keeping them? Do people really tell you why they won’t join or why they leave you? Are you confident you are competitive with your peer comparators? We have depth and breadth of experience in helping companies determine how they compare, identify the gaps and plans to close them.

Compensation Structure

Do you have or even need a structure? Do employees compare their pay and confront you with discrepancies? This can be awkward and uncomfortable for all. We have considerable experience designing simple, relatable structures that will provide confidence you have valued different jobs correctly and are paying people appropriately.

Position Descriptions

Do you need them? Are your existing position descriptions clear and help you and your people understand their responsibilities, authorities and what success looks like? Are you able to easily and accurately match your jobs and data to those in compensation surveys? If this is an issue for you, we can help get you aligned.

Short & Long-Term Incentive Programs

Are you confident you are incenting people appropriately? Are you aware of the different techniques and their pros/cons? We have significant private and public company experience in this area and can help you determine what might be most effective for your business.

Employee Benefit Program Design

As a start up, do you know how to determine what benefit programs are right for you? Do you know how your current offering and costs compare to market benchmarks?

We can facilitate the process of determining what benefits, funding arrangements and providers make sense for you while carefully managing costs. We can also support the employee communication process.

Talent Development

Employee Engagement

Do you know how engaged your people are in helping you succeed? Do you know how you can assess this? This has become a top business priority with research showing that a highly engaged workforce can increase innovation, productivity, and bottom-line performance while reducing costs related to hiring and retention. We can help you establish metrics and practices to effectively quantify and improve the impact of engagement initiatives on your overall business performance.

Leadership & Coaching

All of us can recall a manager we didn’t enjoy working for or with. Do you ever wonder if they could have improved if someone helped them? Would that have helped the company and your team? We have considerable experience and training in leadership development and can help you assess your condition. We can also help you develop practical, proven approaches to define what leadership means to you and develop and improve leadership competency and effectiveness. We have built proven, practical programs.

Performance Assessment & Feedback

We can help you determine what makes most sense for your company, culture and people. This involves analysis of the measures that drive performance, how you want to differentiate and what you want to reward. It also covers how you can set clear expectations / objectives and provide feedback and development planning for your people.

Employee Development & Coaching

Career opportunity and growth are recognized as top motivators. Without them you risk losing talent. We can help you develop a tailored approach to address this; one that supports your company objectives, culture and cost structure. We can also help coach your people managers become effective developers of talent.

Team Building & Conflict Resolution

Do your teams have a clear and common understanding of their purpose? Are they aligned on who is responsible for what? Is participation high and do they assess how they are functioning? Is there conflict brewing? How you deal with this influences the outcome. Often managers struggle with this aspect of leadership. We can help you as an unbiased 3rd party to assess and determine appropriate approaches to gain resolution.

HR Operations

Building HR Capability

As companies evolve they often reach the cross-road of whether they should build in-house HR services, add to existing resources or modify them. We can help you define your requirements, attract new talent and mentor them. We can also provide outsourced HR resource services.

HR Policies, Compliance & Procedures

We can assist you in creating appropriate guidelines and processes designed to ensure clear and consistent communication of your workplace practices including understanding of compliance requirements (i.e. Employment Standards, Workplace Safety, Workplace Discrimination and Harassment, etc.).  We can help you with understanding the same in the USA and other jurisdictions.

HR KPI’s and Metrics

Do you know how efficient and effective your HR initiatives are? Are they adding value? We can help you define what measures are important for your business, assess what the data is saying and assist with improvement plans.

HR Information & Applicant Tracking Systems

Are you getting to the size where spreadsheets just don’t cut it anymore? Is data accuracy and redundancy getting to be an issue? We have considerable experience with defining requirements, sourcing, evaluating and implementing right sized solutions that reduce transactional workload, so you can focus on value add activities.

Compliance Audits

We have the experience to conduct an audit to assess your level of compliance with Human Resources related laws and regulations, which change as your company grows. This includes the USA and other jurisdictions.

Off-Boarding

Some level of turn-over is healthy as it allows others to grow and shine and it renews capabilities. Some is regrettable, while for others it might be beneficial to help them be successful else where. We can assist you assess, plan and implement off-boarding situations and ensure you are in compliance and manage each situation in a respectful way.

Business Transformation

M&A Due Diligence

We have been involved in over twenty (20+) M&A due diligence initiatives and experienced what works and what erodes value. We have also led eight (8) HR integration planning and execution projects. The reported rate of M&A failures globally is staggering and often linked to the lack of attention to cultural fit and integration. We can help you assess and plan for this.

Integration Planning & Execution

You’ve closed the deal to either acquire, merge or sell and now you have to bring people together. Our experience tells us that it’s fatal to let this just happen. We can help you improve your chances of success by sharing our experience and helping you plan an orderly, thorough and participatory integration.

Cross Boarder / International Expansion

We have extensive experience operating in the Canadian and US jurisdictions as well as Europe, Australia, Asia, Middle East and South Africa. If you are considering ventures into unknown territory, we can help you gain clarity on the regulations and customary employment practices.

SOX, C-SOX & COSO Compliance

As a new public company, your external auditors have likely introduced you to the internal control requirements for your business. Part of this will apply to your HR policies and practices. With experience in this area, we can help you audit your situation and determine what changes, if any, might be required to help reduce risk.