During my corporate HR career, I found the amount of information we prepared and pushed out to the organization to be overwhelming and, often, ridiculous. We published HR newsletters, HR updates, and reports on all nature of things that were sent out regularly.
Every time I joined a new organization, I’d ask about these publications and who was using them. Too often, the answer was either “I think that so and so uses it for something or the other” or “I’m not sure.” Since I hate creating work product for no apparent reason, I developed a way of dealing with this dilemma. We’ll call it rule #2 of HR transformation.
When you are regularly sending out information to a group of people and you aren’t certain if they are using it, stop sending it to see if anyone notices it is gone.
Sadly, about 75% of the time (or more), no one even noticed that we had stopped sending the information. In the other 25% of the cases, there was at least one person who noticed the information was missing or not sent. When they reached out about it, we asked questions of them to clarify what information they were missing. Generally, this helped us zero in on the information that mattered to our constituents so we could deliver it more effectively and efficiently.
This approach saves a ton of time. Plus, it generally is a big internal win for your HR teams because they know deep down that they are spending a bunch of time producing information no one is using. That’s incredibly demotivating. We have more important and valuable things to do.