2025 Strategic Planning

A View into 2025

For the third year running, the LAHRA volunteer leader board spent its January meeting setting the stage for another year of fantastic events and building connections during their strategic planning meeting. This year, hosted and facilitated by incoming President Jessica Kerr, the team got together after working hours at Express Employment in their Brighton office ready to reflect, plan, and set key areas to focus on this year as they align with the chapter’s vision.

Taking a step away from reality for just a moment, Jessica asked us to think of the Aspirational Goals of LAHRA, generating a list from everyone that reflected their area of responsibility but that ended up serving the chapter as a whole. Some of those goals included being a source of HR-related information; having a reputation and presence like other organizations like the Howell Chamber of Commerce; intentionality in building a relationship-focused network of professionals; and extending the partnerships we have to generate new members, sponsors, and relationships through social events, leadership engagement, and overall excellence in what we do.

But before the team could determine the three themes for 2025, we collectively reflected on what was working in 2024. When compiling the list on large sticky notes, one thing that stood out was how well we were able to work together. In any volunteer role, the work should be fun, and even when, at times, we weren’t always able to make an event or fulfill all of our duties, someone on the Board was very willing to step in; that’s great teamwork and collaboration, and trust by all.

We also discovered that we had a lot to be proud of, from driving more traffic to our social media sites on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook; to supporting the partnership with the Livingston Educational Service Agency in their Challenge Z grant and classroom presentations to DECA students; to securing new sponsorships, getting new bylaws approved, and being honored with the Platinum-level Excel award for the third year in a row. Attendees of our events probably noticed the change in venue for 2024 along with hiring Whisk and Ivy, a local women-owned catering business focused on community involvement.

In any good reflection process, we teetered over to what was not working as well as we anticipated for 2024; and we’re happy to say the list was pretty short. We have always realized the importance of communication (within ourselves and with our members) and we continue to realize gaps we miss along the way. With events on the same day each month, it presented challenges for us (and attendees) in offering flexibility to meet the needs of others. And finally, attending to the numbers in our budget, although very healthy indeed, we will be focusing on financial analysis and year-over-year budgeting in order to continue enhancing our membership benefits.

At this point, we started to get really excited, seeing the accomplishment list overflow, to show all the hard work our team had done in twelve months. Jessica kept us on track by breaking down our lists further with a Start and Stop activity; what do we want to start doing more of, and what do we feel we need to stop doing because it doesn’t fit with our Aspirational Goals. We further broke that down into the three driving themes we plan to focus on for 2025:

Operational Excellence: Being fiscally healthy and refining our processes for registration, volunteer interest, payments, and our internal communications will help us serve our membership in a more streamlined way. The volunteer Board already works well to support each other, and making sure we continue to partner with each other to hold our credibility as a chapter made sense for all stakeholders involved.
Social Engagement: With so many possibilities to be engaged with each other, current members, partners and presenters, and future members, this theme connected with the things we already do well, but with a few tweaks. With plans to be more intentional with existing and prospective members, we’re planning additional engagement opportunities at various times of the month in addition to our well-attended Lunch ‘n Learns. We also want to engage more intentionally with attendees at our events; sometimes it’s hard to meet everyone in such a short amount of time, but when each attendee knows at least one person at the event, it makes it more inviting and a reason to come back again.
Unlocking Potential, Driving Growth: The biggest, overarching theme from the strategic planning meeting was the continued aspiration for growth through enhancing the resources LAHRA provides to our members. Fostering growth as a chapter representing Livingston County, the growth of each individual on our leadership board, and the growth potential with the partnerships and members we currently serve.

The strategic planning meeting continues to serve the best interests of our members and future partners. Keeping our mission in mind, as a community-based peer networking group providing knowledge to the HR profession, and our vision in focus, to be the premier HR organization leading growth and development of local area professionals, we will continue to strive for excellence in working together and making great things happen for HR professionals and our community!

Written by Julia Keider

Julia Keider has been with LAHRA since 2018 and has served in a variety of leadership roles within the chapter, currently at the College Relations Director . She is the Executive Director of Keider Consulting Group and a lifelong resident of Livingston County.