What a six-hour HR diagnostic actually uncovers

We ask for five things in advance: the handbook, a sample employment contract, the org chart, the last two payroll registers, and whatever performance documentation exists. Nothing is judged in isolation, but patterns appear quickly.

A handbook that has not been reviewed in four years, a contract template with a clause that no longer matches practice, an org chart where three people report to the founder and everyone else reports to nobody — these are more diagnostic than any interview.

The session is structured in three passes. The first is a business review: revenue model, growth plan, margin pressure and the people decisions attached to each. HR problems that are not connected to the business are usually symptoms of something else.

The second pass is people and process: how work is allocated, how performance is judged, how conflicts get resolved, where decisions stall. The third is technical — systems, data, compliance and the flow between them.

Throughout, our AI analysis runs against what we are hearing and seeing, flagging inconsistencies between the documented process and the described one. That gap is where most real risk lives.

You receive a roadmap, not a report. It contains a risk register scored by exposure and effort, a 90-day sequence with named owners, an itemised cost for each workstream, and a one-page summary written for a board or an investor rather than for an HR audience.

The document is deliberately short. If it needs an appendix to justify itself, it is not finished.

The decision-maker must be present — usually the founder, CEO or COO. A diagnostic run with someone who has to relay everything upward produces a roadmap with no authority behind it.

Bring whoever owns the operational reality: the office manager, the HR generalist, the finance lead. They will correct the story in ways a leadership team cannot, and they are the people who will have to execute the plan afterwards.

About half of our diagnostic clients implement the roadmap themselves. The other half ask us to staff it — a fractional leader to own it, specialists for the pieces that need depth, or a technology specialist to fix the stack.