An HR Offsite That Ended in Charters, Not Flipcharts

We started before the room. With the head of HR, 5 themes were set: performance, talent, careers, diversity and inclusion, and how the team itself works. Each theme owner prepared a short introduction on where their process stood. On diversity and inclusion, every participant sent 1 or 2 ideas they could realistically deliver within a year, so the room started from proposals, not from a blank page.

Then a retrospective before any roadmap. Each process theme was reviewed against the goal it had set 18 months earlier, in the same timed sequence: what went well, what did not, ideas, prioritisation, action. One grid framed every review, customers, HR, processes and policies, systems and tools, so each theme covered the same ground. Careers got a longer sequence of its own, from vision and value to pain points, because it had the least already in place.

Then the choices. Ideas went onto an impact-effort matrix in the room, and only the few with the most impact for the effort went into the plan: 16 actions across 5 themes, from quick wins in the first months to longer moves to mid-2024. What belonged to the bank, not the unit, was handed up: careers went to the bank-wide employee value proposition. And the team turned the lens on itself: its own poll put decision-making and accountability first, so it gave itself a communication charter, clear decision rights and fortnightly updates before asking managers to change.

A plan written on flipcharts fades by the next team meeting. Every action left the room with an issue, a solution, an owner, a timeline and next steps. Read across themes rather than added up, the plan showed performance and talent converging on the same answer, manager training, so it was planned once. Each owner then got a project charter template, with our offer to write it with them one to one, and the charters were merged into one timeline to check priorities, milestones and dependencies, with success measures set in each.