I dislike Category 5 in the Baldrige Criteria. Workforce Focus. By the time I get to it I’ve already plodded through the Profile, Leadership (my second least favorite Category), Strategic Planning, Customer Focus, and Measurement. If this was a marathon, Category 5 would be “the wall.”

First, it’s long and unwieldy. If you break down the components of every Area to Address in Items 5.1 and 5.2, you conceivably have more than 80 questions to answer. And you’ll have to answer them concisely because you’ll only get six or seven pages to do it in. That’s 12 or 13 questions per page. Stick a graphic in, which a lot of examiners like, and each answer is maybe a paragraph long.

Example: 5.1a(2) How do you foster an organizational culture that is characterized by open communication?

Your response has to fit in a space less than the first two paragraphs of this post. Of course, you can make it longer, but then another response must be shorter. You now have less than seven pages to respond to the other 79 questions.

Second, Category 5 covers too much ground. You start with creating an organizational culture and then move to your performance management system, learning and development system (for leaders and the rest of the workforce), assessing workforce engagement, assessing workforce capability and capacity, getting and keeping employees, diversity, managing and organizing your workforce, improving safety and security, and providing policies, services, and benefits. Whew!

Category 5 used to be three Items. Unfortunately, when it was cut to two, no questions were left behind.

I think you could do each question justice if you had twelve pages to tell your Category 5 story. Anything less and you’re at such a high altitude that meaningful details are lost. That makes it harder for applicants to tell their stories and almost impossible for examiners to evaluate the responses.

I would solve this by prioritizing the questions being asked in Category 5 and lopping off the lowest-scoring 25%. Category 5 has suffered from “feature creep.” It’s time to make it more user friendly.

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