Journal ·
The order of a board briefing pack
Cover note, figure list, establishment, leavers by tenure, replacement cost, scenarios, then the company-wide rate in an appendix. The chair’s three likely questions sit on page two.
A board pack is not a gallery of charts. It is a sequence that matches how a sceptical chair actually reads.
Page one is a cover note in sentences: what was asked, what the files could support, and what we refused to print. If we declined a single lead rate, it is said here, not buried.
Page two is three questions we expect: where the leavers actually sit, what replacement costs in this employer, and which scenario still works if overtime on the adjacent shift is higher than hoped.
Then establishment versus occupied posts, because every later page is unintelligible if the room does not agree how many posts exist.
Then leavers by tenure, site and grade. Charts are sized for print. A line that cannot be read from the far side of a table is redrawn as a table.
Then replacement cost, using the organisation’s own recruitment fees, agency fill and induction time. A borrowed “cost of turnover” from a conference slide is how you lose the finance director.
Then two or three scenarios, each with assumptions in full sentences. We do not present a preferred option as if it were a finding. The finding is what each option costs and whom it touches.
Appendix: the company-wide rate, definitions, and the file caveats (missing hours, free-text leave reasons, sites on a delayed payroll).
The briefing day is for marking the pages, not for discovering that finance uses a different grade list. That discovery belongs in working session one. If it still happens on the day, we write it into the revised page rather than arguing from memory.
If you only want the sequencing, not the underlying study, that is a board briefing pack commission — and it only works if the source tables already exist.