It’s that time of the year once more. Business planning, budgeting, forecasting, setting objectives. Our financial year begins in September, so we’re now well into our 4th quarter and the management team are queuing up with capex requests and headcount plans to appeal to the CFO. It’s a slick, well-practised routine and one which I’ve followed for several years in several different companies, irrespective of when the financial year actually begins.
I quite like the fact that our FY runs from September to August. Our final quarter covers June, July and August and, despite the need to plan around holidays, it’s a quieter period for finding time for all those strategic planning activities. This is one of the reasons why we chose to do our annual appraisals during Q4 although, of course, the main reason is that it fits with the business planning cycle.
In other companies, I’ve worked with both March and December Financial Year-ends. To me, both have some major disadvantages. In December, everyone’s thinking about Christmas and in March, both Finance and HR have other deadlines around the tax year-end to contend with. In August, however, it’s quite refreshing to have a new (business) year to look forward to just as the summer holidays are coming to an end and everyone’s feeling a bit jaded.
For us, this coming year will be a challenging one. Our auto-enrolment staging date is in October and, with a large cohort of casual workers, we’ll be rolling out a new pension scheme. We’ve also taken the opportunity to harmonise and refresh several of our benefits which, over time and as a result of some significant acquisition activity, have become fragmented and cumbersome. At the start of this financial year we had three pension schemes and four PMI policies. We also had no less than seven different payrolls – an administrative nightmare! Almost one year on, those numbers are reducing fast with some significant overhead cost savings (I hope our CFO is reading this..!)
Despite an improvement in levels of optimism throughout the UK economy, there’s still a need to control costs. In our own case we also need to manage expectations. We’re on target for a successful financial year, but that doesn’t mean I’ve got limitless funds to support an expansion of our employee benefits programme. My team and I have had to be creative in order to find cost savings to fund each improvement to the benefits we currently offer.
Throughout my HR career, I’ve found that each new business year brings some great opportunities to improve things and I always feel a sense of optimism and excitement about what the future year will bring. Even in organisations where I’ve worked for a number of years, there’s still been something new to look forward to each time. I certainly don’t subscribe to the view that my fifteen years’ HR experience is one year’s experience repeated 15 times, as some cynics would have it.
So, even if it isn’t your time yet to start the business planning cycle, I wish you a very happy and successful New Year!
Has this inspired you to discuss HR? Leave your comment here telling us about your new business year experiences. I bet you’ve got some good tales!
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