At the end of the year, most businesses aren’t sitting around thoughtfully reflecting on their people experience. They’re trying to get to Christmas.
There are deadlines to hit, work to wrap up and end-of-year celebrations to organise. If you’re in a seasonal business like retail or hospitality, you may be doing the opposite of winding down, hiring and rostering as many people as you can just to get through the summer rush. Either way, the end of the year has a way of becoming about getting through what’s immediately in front of us.
Then the calendar ticks over and, psychologically at least, we get a fresh start. New targets, new plans and new priorities. This will be the year we finally sort out those things we didn’t quite get to last year.
Except your business didn’t reset at midnight on 31st December.
The tension in the team is still there, the performance conversation someone has been avoiding still needs to happen, and the process everyone complained about last year is probably still painful. That person who was questioning whether they wanted to stay may still be questioning it too.
So before you launch into 2027 with a fresh set of initiatives, it’s worth asking a different question: What was 2026 trying to tell us, and are we actually set up to deliver what comes next?
Your turnover, absenteeism, engagement results and performance data can tell you part of the story. But the number itself isn’t the insight. It’s what’s sitting underneath it, and what’s driving the result, that matters.
Here are five questions I’d want every business owner and leadership team to be able to answer heading into 2027.
1. Do you have the people and capability to deliver where you’re going?
Start with what the business is trying to achieve. Perhaps you’re planning to grow, enter a new market, introduce new technology, improve productivity or change the way you serve customers. What will need to be true of your organisation and your people to make that happen?
You may need different skills, additional capacity, clearer roles, new ways of working or leaders capable of operating at a different level. It’s easy to build an ambitious business plan and assume the organisation will somehow stretch to accommodate it. Sometimes it can. Sometimes you’re building next year’s strategy on top of a workforce already operating at its limits.
Look at the gap between what your strategy requires and what your organisation can realistically deliver today. Are you set up for success, or are you relying on people to keep compensating for the gaps?
2. What is turnover really costing you, and what’s driving it?
Most businesses know roughly how many people they’ve lost. Far fewer understand what those departures are costing them.
Recruitment costs and salaries are the obvious ones, but there’s also lost productivity while a role is vacant, time spent recruiting and onboarding, pressure on the people absorbing additional work, knowledge walking out the door and the time it takes someone new to become fully effective.
The more useful question, however, isn’t simply how many people are leaving. Look at who is leaving, where they’re leaving from, when they’re leaving and why.
Ten per cent turnover spread naturally across a business tells you something very different from losing three of your strongest people from the same team.
If you’ve recruited the same role three times in two years, don’t automatically assume you have a recruitment problem. It could be job fit, unclear expectations, workload, leadership, culture, the way the role is designed or a mismatch between what was promised and what people experience once they arrive.
The pattern is the signal. Your job is to understand what’s driving it before you recruit person number four.
3. Why would the right people choose you, and why would they stay?
For a small or growing business, competing with larger organisations on salary alone isn’t always possible. Fortunately, salary isn’t the only reason people choose where they work.
Think about what is genuinely distinctive about working for you, not simply what your careers page says. It might be flexibility, access to leaders, development, meaningful work, autonomy, career opportunities or being part of a team where people genuinely enjoy working together.
One of the simplest places to start is with the people you would least like to lose. Ask them why they joined and, more importantly, why they stay. Their answers might not be what you expect.
Then consider whether the experience you’re promising candidates is the one employees actually have once they arrive. Attraction gets someone through the door. Their experience afterwards has a lot to do with whether they choose to stay.
4. Where are your critical talent and capability risks?
An organisational chart won’t necessarily show you where your biggest people risks sit.
Who holds knowledge nobody else has? Which roles have no obvious successor? Where does work grind to a halt when one particular person goes on leave?
There are less obvious risks too. You may have promoted someone technically brilliant into leadership without equipping them to lead. Your growth plans might require capability you don’t currently have. Or perhaps one high performer is quietly holding together something that should be an organisational process rather than an individual capability.
The important thing is to understand where you have depth, where capability needs to be developed and where the business is overly reliant on particular individuals. That doesn’t mean having a ready-made successor for every role. It means knowing where your critical risks sit and having a plan for the ones that could materially affect your ability to deliver.
If your business depends heavily on one person knowing, doing or holding something together, that’s not simply a people issue. It’s a business risk.
5. Are your leaders creating the conditions for people to perform?
As businesses grow, what made someone successful at one level doesn’t automatically equip them for the next. Leaders need to deliver today while also building the capability to deliver tomorrow, which means being able to work both in the business and on it.
Consider whether your leaders understand where the business is going and their role in getting it there. Can they translate strategy into clear priorities, make decisions, lead through uncertainty, develop their people and have difficult performance conversations when they’re needed?
Leadership capability also isn’t just about the individual leader. How they lead creates the environment everyone else is trying to perform within, influencing everything from clarity and accountability to trust, decision-making and whether people feel able to raise an issue.
If you want to understand how effective your leaders really are, look beyond the leaders themselves and consider the experience of the people working around them.
Your people experience connects all five
People Experience isn’t a separate initiative sitting somewhere alongside your business strategy. It’s happening every day as your people try to deliver it.
It’s the experience of joining your organisation, getting work done, dealing with a manager, navigating processes, making decisions, being recognised, raising concerns, developing and, ultimately, deciding whether to stay.
Sometimes the answers you need are already sitting in your turnover, engagement, performance or exit data. Other times, you’ll need to dig deeper and hear directly from your people.
The goal isn’t to collect more data for the sake of it, but to turn what you know into genuine insight about where you are now, what’s driving that experience and what needs to change to get you where you want to be.
Don’t start 2027 with a longer to-do list
Once you start asking these questions, you’ll probably find more than one thing you could improve. That doesn’t mean you should try to fix everything.
Instead, look across what you’ve learned and decide where you’re most exposed, what’s getting in the way of delivering your strategy, and what’s having the greatest impact on your people and performance. Then identify the two or three things that, if genuinely shifted, would make the biggest difference.
You might need to build leadership capability, strengthen your talent pipeline, address turnover in a particular area, fix a process that’s creating unnecessary friction, get clearer about accountability or spend more time understanding an experience your data has highlighted but can’t fully explain.
The answer will be different for every organisation because the context, the people and what’s driving the results will be different too.
That’s why understanding comes before action.
A new year gives you a useful point to reset and refocus, but changing the date doesn’t change the business. Understanding where you are, getting clear on where you need to go and focusing your effort on what will genuinely move you between the two is what changes the result.
