Every operations leader I know learned KISS early. In HR we say Keep It Super Simple. The Operations version swaps out the last word, and it is less polite.

Both versions give the same advice. Most companies forget it the minute they get a budget.

I see the same story play out again and again. A company has no real process for something. Maybe it's performance reviews. Maybe it's how a job gets approved and posted. Somebody decides to fix it, which is the right call. Then they go shopping for best in class and come home with the Ritz-Carlton.

From nothing to the Ritz overnight

The system they pick is excellent, and that's what makes it hard to argue against. It comes with competency models, calibration sessions, weighted goals and a dashboard for every level of the org chart. On paper it's what a mature company runs.

But last month the managers weren't holding regular one-on-ones. Now they owe HR ratings on eleven competencies by Friday.

You can predict the rest. Managers click through the form at 4:45 on the due date. Employees get a rating with no conversation behind it. Six months later someone asks why the expensive new system “isn't working,” and the system takes the blame.

The system did what it was built to do. The company skipped every step that would have made it usable.

Crawl, walk, jog, marathon

I run ultramarathons. Nobody gets to the start line of one by running the full distance on day one. You build a base first. Those early miles are slow and a little boring, and they are the reason the later miles are possible.

A business works the same way. People crawl before they walk, walk before they jog, and jog before they run a marathon.

Each early step does two jobs. The obvious one is skill: people learn how to do the thing. The one that gets missed is culture. A manager who has held a simple monthly conversation with every employee for a year has built a habit, and the team has learned to expect it. A bigger system needs that expectation underneath it.

Skip the crawl and you skip the habit. The new tool then lands on people who never bought into why the work matters, and it becomes one more thing HR makes them do.

What this looked like for us

I'm the VP of HR for a private equity owned company that has acquired more than 20 businesses. Many of them were 10 to 20 employee shops when they joined us.

Those shops never had HR, and performance reviews never happened. You knew how you were doing by whether you got invited to the group party that weekend. I'm kidding. I made that part up, but you get the point.

In other parts of our company, performance reviews are old hat.

A mature review process would have worked fine for about half the company. It would have overwhelmed the other half.

So this year we started with a short and standardized form for everyone's performance review. We're treating it as a foundational year. The goal is to build the baseline habits and the culture around them. With that base in place, we can improve the process a little more each year.

What super simple looks like

Simple is a starting point. Version one should fit the company you have today. Version two can wait until people have outgrown version one.

Four questions to ask before you roll anything out:

• Can a manager explain it to an employee in two minutes without a slide deck?
• Does it fit on one page?
• Will a busy supervisor in the field do it without being chased?
• Do you know what the next step up looks like once this one sticks?

Operations already works this way. A new technician doesn't get the most complex job on the schedule in week one. They ride along first. HR and every other support function should hold their own rollouts to the same standard.

Start where you are

Best in class is a fine place to end up. It's a rough place to start.

The next time someone pitches the Ritz-Carlton version of a process your company has never run, ask what the crawl looks like. Build that first.

Keep it super simple. Your Operations team will tell you the same thing, with one word changed.