All Posts Tagged With: "career development"
Climbing the Corporate Lattice
The Baldrige Criteria ask how you engage your workforce to achieve organizational and personal success. Among the key factors that engage most employees are opportunities for learning and growing, tackling challenges, and advancing their careers.
In “Growing within the corporate lattice” (Star Tribune, November 2, 2009), Pam Moret describes a new career path that doesn’t always mean moving up: You may move diagonally or even down to gain knowledge about a different part of the organization. As a result, you become more valuable to your company while making yourself more employable. You increase your options. You learn and grow, tackle challenges, and advance your career. You become a more engaged employee.
Moret encourages you to take responsibility for your personal growth and development including identifying what is really important in your life and career, examining the need for work/life balance, and evaluating your strengths and weaknesses and how best you can serve your company. “The lattice model encourages taking on different roles to learn more about the company and expand your skills and expertise,” she writes. It also offers multiple paths to success rather than the one at the top of the corporate ladder.
One process that can help you take personal responsibility for your career is the Personal Performance Excellence Framework developed by Oriel and described in “Making Performance Excellence Personal.” As Moret concludes, “It is up to each of us to grow, manage and shape our own careers and organizations.”
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10 Steps to a Successful Workplace
This list of 10 steps to building a successful workplace comes from the Business and Professional Women’s Foundation:
- Flexibility: Offer telecommuting, shift exchanges, and compressed work weeks.
- Diversity: Diversify by race, age, gender, orientation, disability, religion.
- Equity: Promote equity in pay and access to positions and promotions.
- Sustainability: Reduce carbon footprint by working “greener.”
- Care giving: Allow for flexibility and compassion.
- Wellness: Provide sick days to allow the sick to be sick.
- Multigenerational. Promote a diversity of generations.
- Social spaces: Engage consumers through social media and revenues grow 18%; don’t, and revenues drop 6%. Read the study.
- Retention: Provide mentoring, professional development, career advancement planning, and continuing education.
- Practice: Everyone, top to bottom, follows policies.
The article in which this list appeared (“The Work-Life Tip Sheet: 10 Steps to a Successful Workplace,” by Deborah Frett, Huffington Post, October 22, 2009) quotes a Harvard Business Review article that cites a study from the University of New Mexico (patience, we’ll get there) that measures the stock market’s response when a Fortune 500 company announces a work-life program: The stock goes up 4.8%. Just on the announcement. And then, when you actually implement the program, employee satisfaction typically improves, which bumps up customer satisfaction, which increases revenues, which can also boost the stock price.
That’s a pretty good business case for creating an organizational culture that values employees—a core value of the Baldrige model.
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10 Critical Questions: Your Workforce
Several articles on Baldrige.com have emphasized the value of employee engagement and satisfaction. “Valuing workforce members” is a Baldrige core value, as the Criteria state: “An organization’s success depends increasingly on an engaged workforce that benefits from meaningful work, clear organizational direction, and performance accountability and that has a safe, trusting, and cooperative environment.”
The best way to evaluate how well you are creating an engaged and satisfied workforce is through a Baldrige assessment using the Baldrige Criteria. You can find out how to do that here.
The Criteria consist of powerful questions, rarely asked, about how an organization functions. If you cannot do a full assessment but want insight into how to improve your workforce focus, here are 10 critical questions to ask and answer:
- How do you determine the key factors that affect workforce engagement and satisfaction and assess performance on them?
- How does your culture promote open communication, high-performance work, and an engaged workforce?
- How does your organization benefit from the diverse ideas, cultures, and thinking of your workforce?
- How does your workforce performance management system engage employees and support high-performance work?
- How does your learning and development system address your organization’s core competencies and strategic challenges, action plans, performance improvement, innovation, ethics, employees’ needs, knowledge transfer, and reinforcing new knowledge and skills on the job?
- How do you manage career progression and succession planning?
- How do you assess your workforce capability and capacity needs including skills, competencies, and staffing levels, and prepare your workforce for changing needs?
- How do you recruit, hire, place, and retain new employees?
- How…
