Your People strategy

Lost? You just need a map.

Your People Strategy shouldn't live in an HR folder.

If your business has a growth plan, it already needs a People Strategy. You might just not have written it down yet.

Updated September 2026

Let's start with something that probably won't win us any awards for groundbreaking insight.

Businesses need people.

Good people, ideally.

People who know what they're doing. People who know what they're responsible for. People who have decent managers, sensible priorities and some idea where the business is going.

And yet, when businesses start talking about strategy, the people bit can sometimes become strangely separate.

There's the Business Strategy.

The Commercial Strategy.

The Growth Strategy.

And then, somewhere in HR, there's a document called the People Strategy.

We're not terribly interested in that kind of People Strategy.

Because a good People Strategy isn't an HR document.

It's the answer to a much more useful question:

What do we need from our people, organisation and leadership for this business to succeed?

That's where it gets interesting.

Growth changes things

When a business is small, quite a lot can run on instinct. Everyone vaguely knows what everyone else does. The founder knows most people personally. Decisions happen quickly. Problems get sorted out in conversations.

Someone asks: "Who's dealing with this?" And somebody usually is. Then the business grows; Twenty people becomes forty, forty becomes eighty.

Suddenly the founder can't be involved in everything. Managers appear. Teams become departments. Communication gets harder. Roles overlap. Decisions take longer. And things that used to happen naturally need a bit more thought.

This is often the point where businesses conclude that they need more HR.

Sometimes they do.

But quite often, what they actually need is more organisational clarity.

So what should a People Strategy actually do?

Forget the beautifully designed 47-page presentation for a moment.

A useful People Strategy should help answer some fairly straightforward questions.

·      Where is the business going?

·      What organisation do we need to get there?

·      What skills and capabilities will we need?

·      What kind of leaders and managers will make that work?

·      What behaviours do we want to encourage?

·      What might stop us getting there?

And then:

What are we actually going to do about it?

That's essentially your People Strategy. It doesn't need twelve pillars. It doesn't need a complicated diagram. And it definitely doesn't need a photograph of six suspiciously enthusiastic people pointing at Post-it notes.

It needs to be useful.

Start with the business. Not HR.

This sounds obvious. It isn't always what happens. A People Strategy shouldn't begin with: "What HR initiatives should we introduce this year?"

Start instead with the business plan.

Perhaps you're planning to double revenue, enter a new market, launch a new product, acquire another company or move from founder-led to a proper leadership structure. Each of those creates different people questions.

If you're doubling in size, you might need to think about recruitment capacity, onboarding, management capability and whether your current structure will survive another fifty people.

If profitability is the priority, adding more people might be exactly the wrong answer. You may need clearer accountabilities, better capability or simpler ways of working instead.

The business objective comes first. The People Strategy works backwards from there.

Organisation before recruitment

One of the easiest responses to growth is: "We need another person."

Maybe.

But before opening the job advert, it's worth asking why.

·      What work actually needs doing?

·      Where should that work sit?

·      Who should be accountable for it?

·      Do we already have the capability somewhere else?

·      Is the problem really capacity — or is it unclear priorities, poor processes or nobody quite knowing who's responsible?

Recruiting someone into a badly designed organisation rarely fixes the organisation.

It just gives the problem another employee.

Hire deliberately

Of course, sometimes you really do need more people.

When you do, recruitment shouldn't simply be about filling vacancies quickly.

Think about what the business will need next, not just what it needs today. That means being clear about the role, the outcomes expected and the capability required. It also means having a recruitment process that actually helps you make a good decision.

We're fans of structured interviews.

We're fans of clear criteria.

We're fans of making recruitment accessible and fair.

We're slightly less enthusiastic about seven interview stages, personality tests, presentations, coffee with the founder and asking candidates what kind of biscuit they'd be.

Recruitment should give both sides enough information to decide whether this is likely to work. That's really the point.

Don't forget the people you've already got

Growing businesses can become obsessed with hiring. New roles, new skills, new people. Meanwhile, some of the people who helped build the business in the first place are wondering where they fit into it now.

Development doesn't need to mean sending everybody on a course. It might mean giving someone a bigger project. coaching a new manager, creating opportunities to move between teams, sharing expertise, giving someone proper feedback. Or simply having an honest conversation about where somebody wants to go next.

Before automatically recruiting externally, ask:

Could somebody here do this with the right opportunity and support?

Sometimes the answer will be no.

That's fine.

But it's worth asking.

Managers matter. Quite a lot.

You can have excellent policies, lovely values and an super sexy employee engagement platform.

A poor manager can undo an impressive amount of that before lunchtime. As businesses grow, people who are technically excellent often become managers.

And then we seem surprised when they don't automatically know how to manage people.

Management is a skill. It can be learned.

So if your growth depends on managers leading bigger teams, managing performance, having difficult conversations, giving feedback and making good people decisions, management capability belongs in your People Strategy. Not as a nice-to-have. As business infrastructure.

Performance management doesn't have to be horrible

Mention performance management and people tend to imagine annual appraisal forms nobody enjoys completing. It doesn't have to be that. Good performance management is mostly about people knowing:

• What am I here to achieve?

• How am I doing?

• What do I need to do differently?

• What support do I need?

• What happens next?

Those conversations should be happening throughout the year.

If somebody reaches their annual review and discovers for the first time that their manager thinks they've been underperforming for nine months, something has gone rather wrong.

Culture is what happens when nobody from HR is watching

Most businesses have values.

Innovation.

Integrity.

Collaboration.

Customer First.

Occasionally something involving the word brave.

There's nothing wrong with values. But culture isn't the words written on the office wall. It's what gets rewarded, what gets challenged. It's how those values translate into behaviours. How decisions are made, how managers behave, what happens when somebody makes a mistake. Who gets promoted, what people discover they can actually get away with.

If your stated values and those things don't match, employees will believe those things.

Every time.

Measure something useful

People data matters.

But collecting numbers isn't the same as understanding what's happening. Turnover, Absence, Engagement scores, Time-to-hire might all be useful. But none of them mean very much without context.

If turnover has increased, ask where.

·      Which teams?

·      Which managers?

·      Which roles?

·      How long had people been there?

·      Why did they leave?

·      What changed?

The interesting bit usually isn't the number, it's the conversation the number starts.

Your People Strategy should change

A People Strategy isn't something you write in January, present to the Board and rediscover eleven months later while looking for something else.

Businesses change. Markets, technology, people and plans all change.

Your People Strategy should be reviewed alongside the business strategy and adjusted when reality inevitably refuses to follow the PowerPoint. That doesn't mean constantly launching new initiatives.

Quite the opposite.

Sometimes the most useful thing HR can do is stop doing something that no longer serves a purpose.

Digital People HR says…

We think People Strategies have become unnecessarily complicated.

You don't need an HR initiative for everything. You don't need to copy whatever Google is doing and you don't need fifteen different People priorities because somebody saw an interesting presentation at an HR conference.

You need to understand where the business is going, then work out what that means for your organisation, your leaders and your people.

Next, decide what matters most.

Maybe that's recruitment, developing managers, making sense of your organisation structure now things have changed. Maybe you've grown quickly and your culture is starting to wobble or your best people are leaving. Maybe everyone is run off their feet but nobody is quite sure what they're supposed to be doing.

That's your People Strategy. Not the document. The decisions.

Need some help working yours out?

That's exactly the sort of thing we love to do.

Digital People HR works with growing businesses to turn business plans into practical People Strategies — without creating unnecessary HR machinery along the way.

We can help you look at where you're going, what your organisation needs next, what's already working and what might need to change.

And if you already have a People Strategy sitting in a folder somewhere, we're quite happy to look at that too.

Get in touch

We'll bring the People expertise.

You can keep the 47-page PowerPoint.