The people agenda review checklist: the questions a CHRO and a remuneration committee should be able to answer

People agendas are rarely found to be wrong in one decisive way. They drift. The enterprise strategy moves and the workforce plan stays where it was; the culture report settles into a shape that never carries bad news; the succession list ages until half the names have left; pay decisions come to be explained by benchmarks that nobody in the room chose. Each drift is small and each is discovered late — by the executive committee when a plan cannot be staffed, by the board when a chief executive leaves without warning, by the institution when a case involving a top performer is handled in a way everyone notices.

The eight areas below are where a people agenda is most consistently tested — by the executive committee, by the board through its remuneration and nomination work, and by the events that arrive uninvited. Each is stated as questions a sound agenda can answer with specifics: a cost, a name, a case, the date of a decision. A question that can only be answered in adjectives is the finding.

1. The bet — workforce strategy and enterprise strategy#

• Was the people bet inside the current strategy written down and costed before the strategy was agreed, and can you show the paper and the date?
• Which assumptions does the strategy make about hiring, retention and leadership that the institution has failed to meet before?
• Has the chief human resources officer told the executive committee, in the room, that any part of a plan could not be staffed — and what happened next?
• Are the workforce strategy and the enterprise strategy one document with two authors, or two documents that reference each other?
• Who at the executive committee could explain the people bet without the CHRO present?

2. The executive talent market — buy, build, keep#

• For each top seat, is the institution’s position — buy from the market, build from within, keep who is there — a decision someone took, or the result of not deciding?
• What does each option truly cost, including the cost of the time a seat stays empty and the cost of a hire who does not hold?
• Which executives could leave without the institution being able to say who would act, and for how long?
• When did the institution last lose a leader it intended to keep, and what did it learn?
• Is there a market view of the executive talent the strategy needs, or only a view of the people currently employed?

3. Pay#

• For the last significant pay decision, can the reasoning be stated in terms of what the institution was buying, rather than in terms of a benchmark?
• Would that reasoning survive publication — in the newspaper, and in front of the people the decision affects?
• Did the remuneration committee hear the case against the decision as well as the case for it, and from whom?
• Where pay and conduct have collided, which one won, and does the record show why?
• Can the CHRO describe the process that produced the decision as its owner, and testify to how it was reached as its witness?

4. Culture, measured and reported#

• Does the culture measure put behaviour — cases, investigations, the defining moments — beside sentiment, or is it a survey score alone?
• When did the culture report to the board last contain something the board would rather not have heard?
• Is the report the same shape each time, so that a director can see movement, and does it end with what the CHRO is worried about next?
• Who owns the measurement, who owns the oversight, and has either tried to do the other’s job?
• What was corrected because of the last report, and can you name it?

5. Speak-up, investigations and the top performer#

• For the last speak-up case, was the person who raised it protected, was the investigation independent of those it concerned, and was the outcome visible to the rest of the institution?
• Has the institution applied its stated standards to someone whose results argued for an exception — and what did everyone else conclude from the answer?
• Do investigations reach conclusions, and do the conclusions have consequences that the record shows?
• Which cases did the executive committee decide as a single case that it was in fact deciding as a policy?
• Would the CHRO be comfortable if the handling of the last three cases were described to the board in full?

6. The defining moments#

• In the last restructuring, were people told the truth early and treated as the institution says it treats people — and did those who stayed believe what they saw?
• In the last merger or integration, were two cultures made one deliberately, or left to settle by attrition?
• In the institution’s last bad week, did leaders behave in public the way the culture statement says they will?
• Was the CHRO in the room when those moments were planned, or informed when they were announced?
• What did the workforce conclude from each moment, and how does the institution know?

7. Succession the board can defend#

• Does the chief executive succession plan distinguish emergency cover from planned transition, and is each answer a name rather than a process?
• Is there an honest assessment behind every name on the executive pipeline, produced without politicising the executive floor?
• Could the board defend its choice today, on the evidence it holds, if it had to make one this week?
• When was the plan last refreshed, and how many of the names on it are still in the institution?
• Does the CHRO serve the nomination work as adviser and evidence-holder, or does the board treat succession as its own affair and the CHRO as its clerk?

8. The HR function itself#

• Can the executive committee trust the function’s data, and when did it last find that it could not?
• Is the function’s use of technology judged by what it changed in the institution, or by what was bought?
• Does the service model look like one run by an executive, or administered by a department — and would the executive committee say so?
• What does the function cost, what does it deliver, and can the CHRO argue both in the terms used for every other function?
• Is there a deputy who could hold the seat, and has the CHRO said so to the board?

How to use it#

Run the questions against one area before running them across the agenda. The bet is the most diagnostic area, because it is the one that cannot be improved by improving the paper: either the people bet was put to the executive committee before the strategy was agreed, or it was not. Most of what is wrong with a people agenda will appear in that first area, and it will appear while it is still cheap to fix.

A question that can only be answered in adjectives is the finding.

Then take the areas the board tests — succession and pay — and the areas events test — culture and the defining moments — and prepare answers for both examiners before either arrives. The CHRO Agenda in The Helm works those answers with chief people officers, and the remuneration and nomination committee members who depend on them.