Questions

headcount approval process / how to approve new headcount

Turn a business capacity or capability need into an explicit workforce decision before a role or requisition is opened. Choose and authorize the most suitable response to the work—redesign, automation, development, redeployment, external capacity, or employee hiring—using common evidence and clear decision rights.

compensation review process steps

Create a complete, current, and reviewable analysis of an employee’s compensation in relation to approved work, pay structures, legitimate factors, contribution evidence, market context, and organizational effects. Identify whether compensation warrants no change, correction, adjustment, structural action, or further qualified review without letting a manager request, market number, or performance conclusion decide pay by itself.

offer approval process

Convert an authorized selection into one complete, affordable, approved, and version-controlled employment offer. Preserve the integrity of the role, selection, compensation, and employment decisions while giving the candidate a clear and timely offer experience.

manager check-in template / 1:1 cadence for managers

Run a recurring operating conversation that connects current outcomes, evidence, obstacles, feedback, support, decisions, and learning. Help manager and role holder steer the work while action is still useful, instead of reconstructing performance at a distant review.

onboarding process for a manufacturing company

Convert an accepted offer into role readiness, working relationships, safe system access, early contribution, and an owned transition to normal operation. Deliver the conditions a new hire and their manager need to begin useful work without reducing onboarding to forms, orientation, or information overload.

how to build job architecture

Maintain a coherent structure of job families, career tracks, levels, reference roles, and movement paths grounded in actual work. Give role design, hiring, pay, development, progression, and workforce decisions a shared operating language without forcing every job into titles or generic corporate ladders.

pay equity controls process

Keep job mappings, pay ranges, compensation data, decision patterns, exceptions, and equity controls coherent as work, markets, and the company change. Provide the operating mechanism that detects structural drift, distinguishes individual from systemic issues, routes qualified investigation, and changes pay structures through evidence and authority.

performance review process for a small company

Reach a fair, evidence-based view of contribution across the actual expectations, context, support, and changes that governed the review period. Create an explainable performance conclusion and useful forward decisions without letting recency, personality, one metric, or an undocumented standard substitute for the whole record.

candidate assessment and selection process

Collect comparable, job-related evidence and make one traceable hiring decision against criteria defined before candidates entered the process. Select the candidate best supported by the approved evidence while controlling bias, inconsistency, candidate treatment, exceptions, and decision authority.

how to open and source a role

Launch an authorized role and generate a viable, informed candidate pool through deliberate audiences, channels, messages, and pipeline control. Attract enough relevant candidates for a fair selection process without allowing urgency, title conventions, or channel habits to rewrite the approved role.

how to build and operate a development plan

Build capability through relevant work, deliberate practice, feedback, support, and evidence—not a catalog of courses. Connect an important capability need or aspiration to an operating outcome and run a supported learning cycle until evidence justifies adaptation, transfer, continuation, or closure.

how to manage team capacity and priorities

Match authorized demand to real team capacity through explicit priorities, work-in-process limits, tradeoffs, commitments, and escalation. Protect the most important work and the people and systems performing it by making demand, capacity, constraints, and consequences visible before commitments are made.

hiring process metrics

Hiring System processes define 24 measures. These include Decision cycle time, Decision completeness, Connected handoffs, Unauthorized starts. Each measure tracks a specific operational question and is calibrated to client context — no default targets are set.

how to measure onboarding effectiveness

Hiring System processes define 6 measures. These include Time to agreed role readiness, Readiness evidence completeness, Critical-resource readiness time, Role-readiness plan use. Each measure tracks a specific operational question and is calibrated to client context — no default targets are set.

compensation review metrics

Compensation System processes define 6 measures. These include Compensation review decision usefulness, Compensation review evidence completeness, Compensation review cycle time, Controlled compensation-review method use. Each measure tracks a specific operational question and is calibrated to client context — no default targets are set.

manager effectiveness metrics

Performance and Development System processes define 6 measures. These include Check-in steering value, Decision and commitment closure, Obstacle response time, Useful cadence adoption. Each measure tracks a specific operational question and is calibrated to client context — no default targets are set.

HR process map

Inspect the connected, measurable management processes Lock designs for growing technical and industrial companies.

how do hiring and compensation processes connect

Inspect the connected, measurable management processes Lock designs for growing technical and industrial companies.

people management system for a growing company

The Lock method: understand the company, fit a connected mechanism, establish it, measure it, improve it, and hand it off.

what happens after headcount is approved

Inspect the connected, measurable management processes Lock designs for growing technical and industrial companies.

fractional CHRO vs HR consultant

A fractional CHRO sells judgment and part-time attention. Lock designs the connected, measurable mechanism the CHRO would otherwise have to build ad hoc, and the design is transferable to whoever operates it next.

HR process consultant for a manufacturing company

A general HR consultancy typically sells a project or a policy deliverable for one function at a time. Lock designs across the whole operating system so the interfaces between processes do not break.

alternative to a fractional HR leader

A fractional CHRO sells judgment and part-time attention. Lock designs the connected, measurable mechanism the CHRO would otherwise have to build ad hoc, and the design is transferable to whoever operates it next.

what does an operating mechanism review cost

Accepted starting prices and scope drivers for Lock process architecture, implementation leadership, and improvement partnership.

Lock relyonlock

Lock designs connected, measurable management processes and systems for growing science, technology, engineering, and manufacturing companies.

Lock management process design

Lock designs connected, measurable management processes and systems for growing industrial and technology companies.