Employees said the benefits on offer were inadequate, so the organization expanded them.
The satisfaction was short-lived, however, and new complaints soon emerged.
As more employees left before completing their first year, the organization strengthened its onboarding.
The training took longer and cost more, but employees continued to leave.
To improve productivity, the organization expanded job training.
Employees spent more time in training, yet their performance seemed unchanged.
It is easy to end up with conclusions like these:
“There’s no end to employee benefits. Give people one thing, and they’ll just ask for another.”
“Onboarding? We put so much effort into training people, and they still leave before they’ve even been here a year.”
“Sending people to training doesn’t make any difference.”
But before deciding that these solutions did not work, there are a few things to examine.
- Were inadequate benefits really the cause of the dissatisfaction?
- Was onboarding really the reason for the early departures?
- Was low productivity really caused by employees lacking the necessary skills and knowledge?
If we assume the cause and choose a solution before examining the problem closely enough, even good programs can consume time and money without producing the result we want.
That is why I want to focus on how we identify problems, rather than starting with solutions.
In a practical sense, I have chosen to call this approach Ground HR.
I am not proposing a new theory of HR.
It means starting not with trendy programs or best practices, but with what is actually happening in our organization and the evidence we can verify.
I am particularly interested in how far small organizations can take this approach when they do not have ample dedicated staff, data, or budget.
- What can we learn from the information already available?
- If there is no relevant information, what should we start recording?
- Whom should we ask, and what should we ask them?
- How much can we verify directly, and when is a decision from managers or executives needed?
I will examine practical HR issues one by one, including recruitment, onboarding, time and attendance, job roles, performance evaluation, training, organizational culture, and employee departures.
Where relevant, I will also draw on established approaches to organizational diagnosis and research methods. I plan to create surveys, analysis templates, interview guides, and reports that practitioners can use right away, as part of Ground HR + Toolkit.
I am still working through this subject myself.
Some established and validated methods are difficult to apply directly to the realities of small organizations. I want to explore ways of making them genuinely useful by taking practical contexts and constraints into account.
As these resources build up one by one, I hope they will help us decide what to examine first when we encounter problems involving people and organizations, and that I will be able to share materials that are useful in practice.
※ This article was developed and refined through conversations with generative AI and is published through an automated process.