TLP19: People and Culture Diligence with Annisa Deshpande
Why is it critical to look at HR in your due diligence activities before investing? Investors focus more on the compliance aspects of HR that they fail to look at the talent side and understand what’s happening from a cultural perspective. Before you invest, look at the rate of turnover in the company and find out what the root cause is. Include people and culture in your due diligence because people are the service of the business.
Our guest, Annissa Deshpende, started her career in IT and then moved to administration and HR. She started to love taking the most common people practices and aligning them with business results. Seven years ago, she decided to launch her people advisory services firm to have a more significant impact and help various companies.
Key Points from This Episode:
- The people are the service of the business.
- Many companies are not so intentional about people culture.
- During the pandemic, company management realized that they didn’t have the cultural foundation to support a remote work environment.
- Annissa shares pointers on what investors looking at a company and deciding if it’s an investment they want to make should look at.
- There’s no reason that turnover is a cost to doing business. You need to get to the root of what’s causing it.
- It’s critical to look at HR in your due diligence activities.
- Investors worry more about the compliance aspects of HR. But that is just one side of the picture. It’s also important to look at the talent side and understand what’s happening from a cultural perspective.
- Annisa talks about her book, Modern HR.
- Employers put together sales and marketing strategies to attract the right customer, but they don’t take that skill and apply it to the employee market.
- Annisa sees a lot of turnover in service jobs where people have no certainty and no ability to manage their life.
- There is a lot of pushback to how companies assumed work to get done, and now is the best opportunity for leaders and HR folks to redefine how work gets done.
- People have to figure out how to be smarter with all the current technology.
- There is such a lack of talent across the board.
Tweetables:
“There is always a people component to everything we do.” [00:05:28]
“Turnover is profit walking out the door.” [00:05:28]
“You have to be as thoughtful and intentional about acquiring talent as you are about acquiring customers.” [00:12:23]
Links Mentioned
The Comeback: A Modern HR Novel by Annissa Deshpande
About Annissa Deshpande
After overseeing the successful hiring of over 20k people in 150 countries annually and leading internal talent initiatives as a former HR executive of a Fortune 500, Annissa combines her experience in finance, IT, and strategy to modernize HR for investor-backed and middle-market companies to achieve business outcomes and create a place where people love to work.
While many HR programs are heavily focused on compliance, Annissa helps teams think bigger, align to business goals, and create great experiences for employees.
Over the last 25 years, she has helped her clients achieve measurable business results, including growing revenue, improving profitability, evaluating the workforce implications of different business models, retaining key talent, avoiding layoffs, and making difficult workforce decisions with compassion and respect.
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