All Posts Tagged With: "employee development"
Baldrige Model: How do you engage your workforce to achieve organizational and personal success?
Item 5.2 in the Baldrige Criteria asks key questions about how you engage, compensate, and reward employees to achieve high performance. The following processes, best practices, and problem areas look at critical issues in this part of the Baldrige model.
Your organization needs processes for:
- Determining the key factors that affect employee engagement
- Creating a culture and a performance management system that promotes open communication, high-performance work, and an engaged workforce
- Assessing employee engagement and correlating the findings of these assessments with business results to identify opportunities for improvement
- Developing a learning and development system that serves the needs of the organization and the development needs of all employees
- Managing effective career progression and succession planning
Best practices to consider:
- The organization uses employee data from a number of sources including employee surveys, turnover rates, and exit interviews to determine and prioritize employee requirements and then validates those requirements with employees.
- An effective performance management system supports both individual and organizational performance, aligns individual goals/objectives with the organization’s mission and vision, and addresses individual development.
- Employee satisfaction/engagement surveys are done more frequently than the typical annual survey, often with a statistically-valid sample of employees.
- Every employee has a development plan that supports both personal and organizational improvement.
Common problems areas:
- Organizations tend to…
3 Things Employees Care About Most
“In my experience with managing people all over the world, I have found that most ineffective managers are considered ineffective not because they don’t know how to motivate people, but because they don’t know what motivates their people.”
The observation comes from Rajeev Pershawaria in “The Three Things That Employees Really Care About” (FastCompany, May 12, 2011). He describes an exercise he has facilitated in seminars with hundreds of executives around the world. In the exercise, he poses an imaginary dilemma:
“Imagine you are about to change jobs and have two competing offers. Both jobs pay roughly the same amount of money and are in the same industry. Both are at reputable companies. How will you choose between the two jobs? What factors will you consider while making your decision?”
Think about that for a minute.
What factors topped your list? The nature of your new job? The work culture? Coworkers? Future opportunities?
Pershawaria captures the executives’ responses on three blank flip charts that represent the three things people care about most. He then reveals the hidden titles:
Role
Environment
Development
He observes that “most managers think they know what motivates their direct reports, but when you ask them, they actually list things that motivate them.” To be effective at engaging people,…
15May2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedEvaluating Training Effectiveness
In its award application summary, Studer Group, a 2010 Baldrige Award winner, describes a tiered approach to evaluating training effectiveness. This is typically a weak area for most organizations, whether or not they integrate Baldrige. Most rely on participant surveys at the end of classes or courses to tell them whether the training was effective. At Studer Group, that is just one tool in the first of three tiers it uses to determine effectiveness.
Tier One methods include evaluations by everyone involved in the training. Tier Two measures effectiveness by how well the new knowledge and skills were applied. Linkage grids identify specific actions that participants should take, and online surveys capture the extent to which participants applied the learning. Tier Three assesses the degree to which new knowledge and skills affected results. For example, Studer Group has two employee segments: coaches and admin employees. Each coach is formally evaluated on the degree to which his/her partner’s (client’s) results improved on individual LEM (a Web-based performance management system) scores.
Tier Three addresses the true value of any training, that it make an impact on the success of the organization. Participant surveys tell you what people thought of the training but they cannot…
7Apr2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedHow to Be the Best
Baldrige.com focuses on information that can help you build the organization you want. As a result, nearly all of the articles address elements that contribute to an excellent management system. This one is different: It looks at how you can become excellent at your heart’s desire.
In “Six Keys to Being Excellent at Anything” (HBR, August 24, 2010), Tony Schwartz quickly dismisses the myth that greatness is determined by our genetic inheritance. He analyzes current thinking about building personal capacity as well as his company’s experience working with executives to state that how hard we are willing to work determines our level of excellence. The minimum level of practice required to be expert in something, according to people who have studied this, seems to be 10,000 hours. That’s about seven years of practice at 4.5 hours per day, six days a week (this will make more sense when you read Tony’s list).
Schwartz offers six keys to achieving excellence:
- Pursue what you love. Passion “fuels focus, resilience, and perseverance.”
- Do the hardest work first. Great performers delay gratification and do the most difficult first.
- Practice intensely – for 90 minutes without interruption. Then take a break. And great performers practice no more than 4.5 hours a…
Measuring Training Effectiveness
One of the most vexing challenges in completing a Baldrige assessment is showing meaningful results for workforce and leader development. Most organizations can show the percent of employees who received a certain type of training. Many can summarize data from surveys of people who completed specific training. A few can provide hours of training per employee.
Very few can identify results that show how effective their training is.
The Baldrige Criteria ask how you “evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of your learning and development systems.” Examiners expect to find measures of effectiveness and efficiency, the results of which should appear in Item 7.4. Not many organizations have a good answer for the question or relevant data to put in the Results section.
In “Putting a value on training” (McKinsey Quarterly, July 2010), Jenny Cermak and Monica McGurk explain why this data is so important, noting that “90% of respondents to a McKinsey Quarterly survey said that building capabilities was a top-ten priority for their organizations. Only a quarter, though, said that their programs are effective at improving performance measurably, and only 8% track the program’s return on investment.”
At a time when building capabilities in existing employees is critical but the resources to do that…
10Aug2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedEmployee Development and 10,000 Hours of Practice
I’ve been reading Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell and one of the first notions he tackles is the idea that peak performers in any field are born and not made. According to Gladwell:
“The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.”
He references studies to support this claim and points to well-known individuals who most of us consider geniuses but who became geniuses by putting in their 10,000 hours: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and the Beatles, to name a few.
Of course, not everyone would jump at the chance to spend 10,000 hours becoming an expert—it also takes desire and determination—but the point Gladwell is making is that anyone born at the right time and raised to believe in himself or herself and alive at a time when circumstances presented 10,000 hours of practice has a chance to become a genius.
Anyone.
This relates directly to employee development. Every employee has the potential to contribute to your organization’s success. With the right training and support, every employee can become an expert in…
28Aug2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
