You have been hired as VP of People Operations at a midsize organization (750 employees) that has hired you through a headhunter as they knew that their current talent pool, mired in inertia, needed a disrupter to bring a new and aggressive perceptive to reimagining the people operations function. You report directly to the CPO at corporate, in another state. At first, you wondered about the value of working for an organization in a dying form of advertising (direct mail marketing). Then, you thought, the money was too good to pass up, you could set them up for success, and move on. After all, you the job took you to a state you wanted to live in and had for as long as you could remember. You are a first-quarter career professional, with roughly 7-10 years of experience, and are rising quickly within your profession.

The CEO (who is also the COO, which you did think was kind of sus, but whatever, you roll with it) greets you and discusses the following challenges:

Problems:

Employees are chronically absent (late and or sick)

management turnaround (both senior and mid-level) is wildly high. They both average around 18 months to two years and have for the last five years.

The HR Director and Generalist spend most of their time either reigning in production managers and employees, trying to keep the place from seemingly doing one of two things: 1.) going up in smoke, 2.) or getting sued out of existence. They are well-intentioned people and know their stuff, but you wonder if they have been set up to either fail or remain marginally effectual no matter what they do.

Curiously, people in line positions seem to outlast their managers. The average employee career at the organization is 7-10 years. However, there is a performance management system in name only, and a cursory look at the labor force says: "I can pretty much chill and not get fired here."

Using the principles and theories of Positive Psychology as explored in your text, whiteboard a game plan as to what you want to bring to them. You are human and have a career to think about, too. You have exactlyzerointerest in staying with the organization past 3 years yourself. You also want to a great job because you pride yourself on your career's growing body of work, and your reputation is important to you. You will be a CPO, just not at this place. Your blueprint will thus, be a factor in your planning. Your budget is ample, and the CPO has a adopted a "go nuts" approach to your ideation, if nothing else. Using the design thinking principles of empathizing, identifying, ideating, prototyping, and testing, start to design your vision for this place.