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Best-in-Class Workforce Planning

In January, the Aberdeen Group published a report on Strategic Workforce Planning. Their conclusions sound like responses to Baldrige Criteria questions.

The group surveyed 240 organizations and differentiated best-in-class (BIC) performers from those in the middle and the laggards. They found that:

• The BIC performers saw a 13% decrease in key talent turnover in the past 12 months compared to a 13% increase for the laggards.
• The BIC performers have at least one “ready and willing” successor for 53% of their key positions compared to just 15% for the laggards.
• The BIC performers have workforce plans in place in 90% of their divisions compared to 13% for the laggards.

The group concluded that BIC performers share common characteristics:

• Involvement of senior leaders with workforce planning initiatives
• Ability to define and screen against competencies required for future business success
• Tools to integrate employee data with financial, customer, and other data to create a comprehensive view of the workforce.

If you integrate the Baldrige model, you will improve your performance in each of these areas by improving your performance on these related Baldrige Criteria questions:

• How do senior leaders participate in organizational learning, succession planning, and in the development of future organizational leaders?

• How do you assess your workforce capability and capacity needs, including skills, competencies, and staffing levels?

• How do you relate your workforce engagement assessment findings to key business results to identify opportunities for improvement in both workforce engagement and business results?

You…

(4 votes, average: 4.75 out of 5)

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Walk in Your Customer’s Body Armor

USAA insures military members and their families. It does this really well: Its customer retention rate is 97.8%.

The company’s call centers are critical to serving customers located around the world. Its call center reps spend six months in training before answering customers’ calls. They eat MREs (meals ready to eat), find out what it feels like to wear Kevlar vests and flak helmets, and receive deployment letters to get them thinking about what such letters mean to the families they affect.

USAA understands its customers’ needs. It was founded by 25 Army officers in 1922; almost a quarter of its management and new hires have served in the military. It has ranked number 1 or 2 every year for the four years of the BusinessWeek and J.D. Powers Customer Service Champions list. No other company has come close to matching its performance. (“USAA’s Battle Plan,” Jena McGregor, BusinessWeek, February 18, 2010)

Mobile customers require mobile banking and insurance solutions. With USAA, a service member can use his iPhone to send a photo of his check to the USAA bank and it is deposited in his account. He can find out his balance with a text message. Later this year, he should be able to email or text-message money to family and friends for immediate deposit. He can use his phone to initiate a claim from the scene of an accident. If he’s looking at new…

(5 votes, average: 4.40 out of 5)

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Organizing Your Baldrige Research

Before you can write a Baldrige application, you must gather and organize the information and data you need to respond to the Baldrige Criteria questions. Your research will produce interview notes from internal subject matter experts; documentation of processes, procedures, presentations, meeting minutes, reports, and other material; and data you will use to create the graphs for the Results category. You will want to organize all of this stuff to help you with two tasks: (1) determine if you have all you need to answer every Criteria question; and, (2) respond to the questions by making it easy to find all relevant information.

The Baldrige Criteria disassemble a management system into seven categories and a profile, 20 items, 41 areas to address, and 150 or so questions. One way to organize Baldrige research is to disassemble it along the same lines. This is easier to do with interviews, during which you have likely asked specific questions about specific areas to address, and for data than it is for supporting documentation.

I’ve done research for dozens of Baldrige and state award applications and my approach is to assign pieces of each interview to the appropriate Baldrige areas to address and then to cut and paste them in the order laid out in the Criteria. If parts of an interview apply to more than one area to address, I copy and paste them more…

(8 votes, average: 4.25 out of 5)

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An Ongoing Commitment to Quality

In December of 1980, Roger Milliken assembled 267 of his managers (Milliken and Company has been in his family since 1865) to hear Philip Crosby speak. Crosby, a popular management expert and the author of Quality Is Free, echoed the position of Deming and Juran that “management is the problem,” but the statement that really riled people up was “the cost of quality at your company, if it’s like most, is 18 to 22% of your revenues.”

One senior manager rose and shook his finger at Crosby as he asserted that there was no way his division’s COQ was that high. (Cost of quality is the total cost of ensuring good quality and rectifying poor quality and includes prevention costs, appraisal costs, internal failure costs, and external failure costs.)

After the meeting, Milliken formed a task force to determine the company’s actual cost of quality and sure enough, Crosby was wrong. It wasn’t 18 to 22%; it was 26%.

Do you know what your cost of quality is? You can estimate by applying Milliken’s rate to your organization. How much is one-fourth of your annual revenue?

You can find a quick guide to calculating your cost of quality at bexcellence.org. Don’t be thrown off by references to business and manufacturing; you can adapt the categories and examples of costs to any organization.

Milliken was one of the first companies to receive the Baldrige Award in…

(7 votes, average: 4.29 out of 5)

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