Your team is struggling with HR initiatives overload. How can you address their feedback effectively?

To effectively address the feedback from our team about HR initiatives overload, active listening is key. We'll begin by scheduling focused listening sessions with each team member to understand their specific challenges and concerns. This will allow us to prioritize initiatives based on their impact and relevance, potentially deferring or scaling back less critical efforts. Clear communication about the rationale behind each initiative and its expected benefits will also be crucial to ensure alignment and understanding. Finally, establishing regular check-ins to gather ongoing feedback will help us adapt and refine our approach, ensuring that our HR initiatives support rather than overwhelm our team's capacity and goals.

Not only listening actively but engaging them in the solutions. Team members usually already "have the answer" so ask them for it! It may not be 100% actionable, but if you ask them for ideas on how to resolve it, and build a plan from there together then you accomplish all the steps suggested in this article while positively engaging your team and working together as one.

Beginning with "small talk" and finding common ground, as well as looking for things to laugh about, are easy "ice breakers". Mentally embracing a genuine concern for the well-being of the person I am listening to and sharing my similar personal experiences, also opens doors for good communication. Asking the 5 W's, who, what, where, when, and why to get to the root cause. Sincerely acknowledging their accomplishments builds trust. Being a good "sounding board" is often all the support a person needs to solve their own problems.

To prioritize many tasks, and or projects, the Impact and Effort Matrix - a Lean tool, is very effective and easy to find on internet. In person meeting, draw the 4-quadrant matrix on a dry erase board, and have participants identify their tasks and projects on sticky notes. Work as a team to place these on the matrix. Those that are high impact, and low effort are "do it now". Those that are high impact, high effort, are longer term projects to plan. Those that are low impact, high effort, decide if they should be done at all. Those that are low impact, low effort, if very low effort, do it now, given the impact is sufficient. List all items on a spreadsheet with categories, sort, plan and execute.

Analyzing existing processes can be intimidating; you can feel you are drowning in detail. However, finding a tool(s) to organize that detail makes it easier to analyze, understand the process at the micro and macro levels, and identify concentrations of waste, create lists of opportunities, prioritize your efforts, and create short- and longer-term plans/maps. Getting traction with easy wins can really inspire and energize the team.