Watt about the employee lifecycle? Your January 2026 strategic review starts here

Claire Watt
60m
4 min read

January brings a natural reset moment

and, for HRDs like you, it's the perfect time to evaluate whether your employee lifecycle is delivering strategic value or just creating operational headaches.

Let's look at where you may be experiencing bottlenecks across the employee lifecycle and how we can add value.

Your Employee Value Proposition: Are you winning the January talent war?

We all know that the New Year is when people take stock of their employment options. Your best performers are scrolling LinkedIn right now.

So, are you attracting the top talent that your business deserves or are you losing them to competitors with sharper propositions?

Let us:

Benchmark your reward packages to ensure that you are winning in your market (not just relying on published surveys)
Re-write your job descriptions to ensure that they are creative and not stuffy
Train your managers to ensure that, once attracted, your selection processes are well managed and timely

The board wants to see you winning critical hires. Don't let outdated EVPs undermine your credibility.

Is your onboarding something to celebrate or a bottleneck to productivity?

Once you have attracted and selected the top talent, you want them to be engaged, productive and returning on investment as soon as possible...NOT working their way through form filling and boring compulsory training. Yet most onboarding takes months to show ROI and that's a board-level concern.

Let us:

Refine your onboarding processes to maximise automation and reduce administration
Create onboarding training using repeatable and scalable eLearning
Work with departments to create key milestones and training plans

Get this right and you're proving value from day one, not month three.

Development: Building tomorrow's leaders before they leave

Are you looking after the talent in your business and creating your next generation of leaders?

Because, if not, you may well lose them to your competition. High performers don't wait

around and replacing them costs more than developing them.

Let us:

Develop skills assessments for your roles to ease the burden on your management team knowing what they should do next
Create coaching and mentoring programmes, including reverse mentoring, to ensure that your people can pass on skills and develop from one another
Define salary scales with clear career paths that support non-linear development paths

This isn't just about retention metrics; it's about building organisational capability that the board can see and trust.

Performance: From box-ticking to business impact

Does your team have clarity of what is expected of them and accountability to deliver?

Are your metrics in place to ensure that you have good management information to demonstrate the return on investment of your team or are you scrambling when the board asks for evidence?

Let us:

Support you in developing a 1-2-1 system that drives your people and not one that simply ticks boxes
Compile metrics and reporting that align to your organisational strategy and management information that is compelling not boring
Arrange staff surveys and employee feedback loops to understand where your strengths and weaknesses are

The right performance approach connects individual contribution to strategic goals and gives you the data to prove it.

Retention: Keeping your best people in a competitive market

To ensure that you are retaining your talent, you'll need to ensure that your rewards are competitive, that your culture is a positive one and that they are well looked after.

But most HRDs don't know there's a retention problem until the resignation lands and by then it's too late.

Let us:

Benchmark your benefits to ensure that you are staying ahead of the market
Undertake culture audits, staff surveys and exit interviews to know where your blind spots are
Support and deliver wellbeing to ensure that your team are healthy and well both physically and mentally

Offboarding: Your last impression matters as much as your first

Do your Glassdoor reviews make you shudder or are you finding yourself blindsided by resignations? How people leave shapes what they say about you: to future candidates, to clients, to everyone.

Let us:

Support you with downsizing and redundancy exercises so that you can ensure that even bad news is delivered well
Develop alumni relations programmes to ensure that you can stay in touch with those who are friends of the firm, boomerang hires can save recruitment costs and add value to your business
Handle support for leavers, like CV writing clinics and career advice, or even phased reductions for retirees

Strategic offboarding turns potential critics into advocates, especially important during restructures.

Make your resolution count

Our HR experts can create flexible and bespoke plans to support your business through whatever the next year has in store for you and your people. We bring fresh eyes, proven frameworks and the capacity to actually implement change while you

manage the day-to-day business.

Make it your New Year's resolution to ensure that the employee experience is one that is proven,

scalable, repeatable and something you can feel truly proud of. Because the organisations winning

the talent war aren't necessarily spending more, they're designing better systems that work foreveryone.