In HR, there’s no shortage of things that you could tackle. Prioritizing amongst those can be quite difficult.

In this guide, my goal is to introduce some of the essential* people programs that you should have in your company. My goal is to keep things high level, especially since there are a lot of great resources already - ex. how to run a performance review).

Programs are things that you can ‘put on a calendar.’ This means you can plan your year around it and the timing is somewhat discretionary.

(Quick tip: people programs are different than employee lifecycle events, which you can read about here).

<aside> 👉 * Essential is subjective. And so is my prioritization. What may be important to your organization can (and will) differ. I encourage you to work with your stakeholders to identify what will have the most impact. (Ex. if the company is growing slowly, investing in Orientation is less important. But Career Progression likely is).

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You’ll see that some things are a Priority One because they enable other things within a specific functional area. (Ie. a prerequisite).

Ex. a good orientation program will reduce friction for a new hire, enabling them to get up to speed faster and to reinforce organizational values.

Ex. ongoing feedback & 1:1s form a baseline for performance management. Building a full ‘cycle review’ program is a massive lift, and could take until six months into your tenure. If you start building a 1:1 organizational muscle, you will have better foundations going into a cycle review.

What this doesn’t cover:

• Recruiting process / candidate lifecycle.
• Lifecycle Events (ex. manager changes) which are things that (typically) happen to one employee (or a small group) as a result of something else happening.

People Programs

Why are programs important?

Programs are important for a few reasons:

• It ensures the rest of the organization knows ‘what’s coming’ from HR over the course of the year so that they can plan with that in mind.
• It creates modularization within your People team so that people can pick up defined areas of responsibility as stakeholders change.
• It enables you to run processes ‘at scale’ in repeatable and equitable ways.
• It creates discrete measurements of your people-team outcomes.

Program Management in People Teams

In HR, we may not always think of ourselves as program managers. But I strongly encourage it, even if you’re a lean team.

This mindset makes it easier for you to keep yourself accountable, create visibility and transparency, and to hand off responsibilities when new team members join.