Looking to help your employees shape their role toward their strengths, interests, and values, but not sure where to start? Look over this job crafting plan tip sheet. 

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The HCI Business Priority Puzzle Activity can be used if you have not already identified your business priorities and success metrics.

This 25-minute Business Priority Puzzle Activity and accompanying Business Priority Puzzle Worksheet will help participants collaboratively uncover and articulate their organization’s critical priorities and measurements through group discussion and brainstorming.

This activity is meant to be conducted in small groups. HR professionals will define how success should be measured, enabling them to better align HR initiatives with organizational goals.

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This activity can be followed by the HCI Business Alignment Map Activity, which will help your team visually align HR initiatives with business priorities and success metrics.

This 7-step framework outlines how HR Business Partners (HRBPs) and Centers of Excellence (COEs) can work together to address workforce challenges.

This relationship serves as the foundation for aligning HR strategies with organizational objectives, leveraging expertise, and driving impactful solutions.

Practical guidance includes:

• The clarification of roles and responsbilities for each team
• How teams can work together to ensure collaboration, ongoing communication, and alignment of objectives
• Sample KPIs and success metrics

(Click the image to download the tool)

Last year, employee engagement in the US fell to its lowest level, with only 31% of employees reporting being engaged at work. As engagement directly affects employee satisfaction, productivity, and overall company success, it’s essential that leaders learn how to best support their workers.

Karen Guziciki, HCI faculty member, reminds leaders that it’s okay to fumble, so long as you are dedicated to cultivating an open, communicative workplace. In this week’s HR Query, Karen Guzicki, shares her perspective on the employee experience and her journey in HR.

What sparks your passion for HR?

There’s a lot of things that contribute to my passion, but I think the biggest thing is I love to see and get highly energized when I can walk alongside HR professionals and help them solve a problem. And it’s typically a problem that has a pretty meaningful impact. I like equipping them with the tools, the insights, and the strategies. I’m just a naturally curious person, and my work at HCI revolves around talent strategy and consulting and research. I love being able to take my natural curiosity in those areas and then really see those tangible differences that we are able to give to our members and our clients.

How has your lived experience inspired your leadership? Obviously, your drive for curiosity is a huge factor, but what else has influenced you?

I think I’ve had an experience that a lot of people can relate to. Throughout my career, I’ve seen firsthand how leadership looks both when it’s done well and when it’s done really poorly and how that impacts workplace culture and even the success of individuals.

Early in my career, I experienced environments where leadership felt really transactional, and it wasn’t transformative. It led me to seek out and later develop different approaches that emphasize being authentic, being curious, and of course, continuous learning. That’s really driven me to be the kind of leader who is asking the right questions, who’s fostering consultation and collaboration. And I think more importantly, making space for growth.

What other passions do you have, and how does that inform your approach to the employee experience?

One of my other passions is really about helping organizations bridge the gap between intention and action when it comes to the employee experience. Because I think a lot of times companies have their values—they might be on paper; they might be on a big plaque on the wall—but sometimes they struggle to really live those in the way they work. It doesn’t end up inspiring or helping support their people. And so, I like to really focus on things that are practical, things like helping leaders understand what your employees actually need and how to embed those insights into your everyday interactions. Maybe it’s leadership development, maybe it’s knowledge transfer, or maybe it’s just being a lot more conscious about building and taking care of the kind of culture that’s going to help your organization thrive.

I really do believe that a good employee experience, in fact, I’d say a great employee experience, absolutely starts with leaders. And it has to be leaders who are willing to listen, leaders who are willing to adapt, and leaders who are willing to invest in their people.

Do you have any advice for leaders trying to build trust and communication in order to learn what’s needed to enhance the employee experience?

I think there’s a number of things leaders can do, and it’s a combination of behaviors they demonstrate as well as other things they practice. I think to begin to build the trust, leaders have to demonstrate degrees of vulnerability. They have to make it safe for people to speak up.

I had a great leader once at an organization who was very intentional about sharing with us: where she was successful, where she had failed, what she had learned from that. She made it really safe to approach her with questions and conversations. When that trust was built, she did an excellent job doing what I call “going on a listening tour.” She didn’t interact with people to try to problem solve or push an agenda. She was authentically curious. She wanted to seek to understand, and when people felt like she was genuine, that opened the gateway for her to begin cultivating the culture in a way that was healthy for everyone. And I’ll add, because I think it’s important, a culture that also positioned the business to be successful, because it has to be both. It can’t be a culture that everybody loves, but it doesn’t allow the business to achieve its objectives. It’s a culture designed to propel that business forward. And I think that’s the advice I would offer leaders to start thinking about.

I’ve loved learning about how you’ve been so positively influenced by leaders in your life. In that regard, what can other people learn from your story and experiences that you’ve lived from? How do you think others can relate to your story?

I think my story resonates with a lot of different people, both in HR and even other areas of business, because much like them, I’ve had to navigate a lot of uncertainty and change in my roles. I’ve had to be a steward of the business, but at the same time, make sure we’re meeting the needs of our workforce.

You know, the interesting thing is I never set out to be an expert in leadership development or talent strategy. I just organically moved into this space in part because I started asking a lot of questions. I was seeking different perspectives, and I stayed committed to learning. I think my journey through leadership really highlights that you don’t have to have everything figured out to make a difference. If you focus on trying to understand people, understanding that evolving is a normal part of these interactions, and you stay open to new ideas, you can drive a lot of real change in organizations. It’s okay that leaders don’t have all the right answers. It’s more important for us to learn how to ask the right questions and allow other people to bring information into the discussion.

Karen is one of many experts that will speak at HRDA’s and HCI’s SPARK HR 2025 conference. From April 30 to May 2, join your peers and HR leaders to discuss what’s driving real engagement and loyalty right now. Discover how new technologies can simplify your life and create customized employee experiences. Learn the different combinations of rewards, benefits, and recognition that work for your organization, and most importantly get the proven strategies you can use immediately to elevate your managers into better team leaders.
 

This article is presented in partnership with HR Daily Advisor. HR Query is a Q&A series by HR Daily Advisor that focuses on HR professionals' insights on current HR trends and dives into their personal stories, helping HR peers connect with challenges and opportunities.

Joan Peterson is passionate about three things: the work she does, her family, and soccer. How do those three things interconnect? Peterson explains it all when I sat down to talk with her about her passions and how they inform her approach to leadership development.

Joan Peterson is the Vice President, Master Facilitator and Leadership Coach for Bluepoint and a speaker at the HCI SPARK HR Conference April 30–May 2. She has been a skilled facilitator and coach for 30 years and has worked with leaders at all levels. She’s also a thought leader and respected authority, and she really digs soccer. She told me that sports has been a passion her “whole life,” and she played competitive soccer growing up. Now her daughter plays college soccer.

Read on to understand Peterson’s perspective of how her passions, including soccer, play into leadership development and coaching.

Q: What are you passionate about? And how does that inform your approach to leadership and employee experience?

Joan Peterson: I’m passionate, really passionate about three things: the work I do, my family—I have two daughters—and I’m passionate about sports and youth sports and, specifically soccer, and what we can do to help the youth around us through sports. I think [all three passions are] interconnected.

I show up as a leader, not just at work, I show up as a leader with my family, with my community. And so the three things I’m passionate about [informs leadership development this way]: the work we do helps build humans inside organizations who then bring that humanity to their families and they bring that humanity to their communities, whether it’s through sporting events or coaching. Those are the three things that light me up every day.

I have spent my career in the leadership development field. And I get to work with leaders who make a difference, who every day get up and say, ‘I’m gonna make this workplace a better experience for the people who come every day and spend most of their living and breathing hours inside this organization.’

Q:  What sparked those passions?

Peterson: So, sports has been a passion of mine my whole life. I grew up playing competitive soccer. And I always loved children. I always loved kids even as a child. The leadership piece I fell into. I have a master’s degree in organizational psychology. The more I dug [into org psych], the more I liked it because I thought it was interesting. And I’ve stayed in the field for three decades because I’ve seen it make a difference. I’ve seen it make a difference inside organizations, inside teams, [and] I’ve seen it make a difference outside of work. A lot of what [I] hear [from] clients later is, ‘What we talked about today is something that can help improve the communication I have on my team, [and] can help improve the communication I have with family members or engaging in difficult conversations.’

Q: What can people learn from your passions ? How can they relate?

Peterson: There’s nothing’s perfect, right? There’s beauty in the mess of life. My experience is that we’re constantly learning and growing, and we never quite get there. We always say leadership is a journey. Every day you wake up and some days we choose to be the best leader, and we choose the behaviors associated with great leadership. Sometimes we choose what we say to our families and sometimes we choose well and sometimes we don’t. The great thing about leadership is I get to get up and try again tomorrow. My hope is that when we all look at ourselves, we have compassion for our own growth and development, that we’re open-minded, that we have a growth mindset.

Q: The important thing is to keep growing and challenging ourselves. So, Joan, at the Spark conference this spring, give us a preview of what you’ll present.

Peterson: I think, big picture, it’s how can we have conversations that matter? How can we as leaders, as HR professionals, not only engage in these conversations that matter to ourselves, but how can we help those around us engage in difficult conversations, engage in performance conversations, engage in coaching conversations? How can we raise the level of the conversations we’re engaging in, and how can we help those around us have better conversations?

One of the questions I oftentimes ask a group is, if someone inside the organization had information about something you were doing that was getting in the way of your success, how many of you would want to know about it? And everyone raises their hand.

Yet we sometimes withhold having difficult conversations, giving performance feedback when it’s negative, when it’s constructive, because we don’t want to hurt feelings, but we’re doing them a disservice.

When we have these performance-changing conversations, we need to put ourselves in their shoes. I’m doing this to be of service to them and taking myself out of the equation. How can I present it in a way that engages them in the conversation? How can I present it in a way that they can hear? How can I present it in a way that’s meaningful for them? Even before the conversation, how have I built trust that I’ve earned the right to engage in a conversation that may not be easy for either of us?

If this Q&A with Joan Peterson got you thinking, just wait until SPARK HR 2025 in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, April 30-May 2. We’ll be diving even deeper into engagement leadership and workplace culture with speakers from LinkedIn, NASCAR, Chobani, Microsoft, and more. It’s not just another conference. It’s going to be hands-on, interactive, and a chance to connect with people who really get it. Plus, we’re adding some Disney magic, so you’re going to have a great experience. See you there!

This article is presented in partnership with HR Daily Advisor. HR Query is a Q&A series by HR Daily Advisor that focuses on HR professionals' insights on current HR trends and dives into their personal stories, helping HR peers connect with challenges and opportunities.