How do you know it’s time for senior People and Culture support?
We often get asked what the magic number of employees is that tells you it’s time to bring senior People and Culture capability into your business. In our experience, it’s rarely that simple.
At Nine Yards we work with organisations at very different stages of their journeys. Some have no dedicated People and Culture support at all, with a Founder, CEO or Operations leader picking up people matters alongside everything else. Some have a great junior P&C resource keeping things moving, but nobody providing senior strategic support. Others have established People and Culture teams that simply don’t have the capacity or specialist capability for everything the business needs from them right now.
Across all of these situations, the need for senior P&C support tends to show up at a similar point in their journey - the business is becoming more complex. The people decisions are getting harder, the organisation is changing, or there’s important work everyone knows needs to happen but nobody quite has the capacity to get to it.
That’s often the point to ask: “Does our business currently have access to the level of People & Culture capability it needs?”
Here are some of the signs we see.
1. Too many people decisions are landing with the CEO
In a smaller or scaling business, this is completely normal. Founders and CEOs (or COOs) often make the hiring decisions, work out salaries, navigate performance issues, think about team structures and answer the tricky people questions.
But as the organisation grows, both the volume and complexity of those decisions grow with it.
Suddenly you’re not just deciding who to hire, you’re thinking about what capability the business needs next. You’re not just dealing with an individual performance issue, you’re wondering whether leaders across the organisation know how to manage performance well. You’re not just approving salaries, you’re trying to work out whether remuneration decisions are fair, competitive and sustainable. You’re not just moving boxes around an org chart, you’re trying to work out why decisions feel slow, accountabilities are unclear or teams aren’t working together as effectively as they should.
At some point, these stop being individual HR decisions and start becoming organisational ones. The CEO may still be perfectly capable of making the difficult people decisions, but the question is whether they should still be the person they all ultimately land with.
If every complex people question still finds its way to the CEO’s desk, your People and Culture model may not have grown with your business.
2. You have great HR support but but some challenges need more experience
This is probably the most common example we see in organisations we work with. The business has invested in an HR Coordinator, People and Culture Advisor or similar role, and they’re doing a brilliant job keeping the people foundations running.
Contracts are getting issued. New starters are being onboarded. Recruitment is coordinated. Policies exist. Employee questions have somewhere to go.
The gap tends to emerge when the questions become more complex, particularly as the organisation grows or changes. Often the CEO and/or Executive team need support at this point in the journey with questions that require judgement, experience and the ability to connect people decisions with business strategy:
How should we structure this team?
What capability will we need in the next stage of growth?
Why are we losing good people?
Is our performance approach actually working?
How do we shift the culture?
How do we build stronger leaders?
That doesn’t mean the existing P&C person isn’t capable, or developing quickly, but there’s often a point where asking someone to solve problems significantly beyond their experience stops being a development opportunity and starts becoming an unreasonable expectation. Adding senior support can be one of the best ways to help a junior or mid-level P&C person succeed.
3. The business is changing faster than your people approach
Growth is an obvious trigger for People and Culture support, but it isn’t the only one. In our experience, change creates just as much need for senior P&C capability as growth does.
Maybe you’re entering a new market, restructuring or integrating an acquisition. You might be building a new leadership team, changing strategy, scaling quickly or reducing costs. You might be at the point in your journey when you’re moving from a very founder-led business to an organisation that needs clearer structures, accountabilities and ways of working.
Periods like these create people questions everywhere.
What roles do we need to enable our future success?
Is the way we’re structured helping or hindering how work gets done?
What capability do we already have? And where are the gaps?
What do our leaders need to do differently?
What parts of our culture do we want to protect? And what needs to change?
The people practices that worked brilliantly at one stage of an organisation’s journey won’t necessarily be the ones that take it through the next.
Once decisions about structure, capability, leadership and culture start influencing the organisation’s ability to execute its strategy, they’re no longer just “HR things”, they’re business decisions that require senior P&C capability to tackle.
4. Your P&C team has the capability… but not the capacity
Not every organisation that needs senior P&C support has a capability gap. Sometimes you have exactly the right people internally, but just not enough of them! This is another very common scenario for our clients.
This is particularly common during periods of significant change. The internal People & Culture team still needs to recruit, support leaders, manage employee issues, run core processes and keep the day-to-day people agenda moving.
At the same time, the business might be asking them to redesign the organisation, integrate two cultures, overhaul performance, build a leadership program or lead a major transformation. It’s just not possible to do it all within your current team’s capacity.
We’ve seen how valuable additional senior capacity can be in these moments, not to replace the internal team, but to work alongside them and give important work the attention it deserves. More often than not, bringing in someone on a short term basis who can pick up a piece of work and run with it is far more useful than adding another permanent role.
And ideally, that support comes from people who get to know your team and business well enough that they can seamlessly come in and out as you need them.
5. You’re spending more time reacting than getting ahead
Often our clients first recognise the need for senior People & Culture support because something has gone wrong. We often come in to help solve an immediate challenge and then stay on to help them set up for the future.
Those problems may be:
Turnover is climbing
Leaders are struggling with difficult conversations
Performance issues keep resurfacing
Roles and accountabilities aren’t clear
Remuneration decisions are inconsistent
Engagement results tell you something needs to change, but nobody is quite sure what to do next.
Hiring feels reactive rather than connected to where the business is going
In an ideal world, senior P&C capability arrives before these types of issues arise, but that’s often not how it works. Regardless of timing, one of the biggest benefits of experienced People and Culture support is the ability to not just solve the immediate issue but also to look beyond and ask what it tells you about the organisation more broadly. Not just “how do we solve this problem today?” but “what needs to change so we’re not solving the same problem again tomorrow?”
So what’s the best solution for you?
One of the biggest shifts we’ve seen in the way organisations access People and Culture capability like ours, is that it doesn’t always have to mean adding another permanent full-time role.
For some businesses, the right answer is a permanent senior P&C leader. For others, it might be fractional support from an experienced P&C leader working with the CEO and leadership team on an ongoing basis without being there five days a week.
Sometimes it’s interim support during a period of change, extended leave or leadership transition. Sometimes it’s senior project capability brought in to lead a specific priority while the internal team keeps everything else moving.
The right model depends on the business, the work and the stage you’re at on your journey.
There may not be a magic employee number that tells you when it’s time for senior People and Culture support, but there are usually plenty of signs.
If the people challenges facing your organisation have become more complex — or simply greater in volume — than the resources you currently have to support them, it might be time to rethink your model.
You don’t necessarily need a big People & Culture team. You need the right level of capability, at the right time, for the challenges your business is facing.
If you’re not quite sure what that looks like for your organisation, we’d love to help you work it out.
