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…

Evaluating 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…

Seeking Unconscious Competence

The Baldrige Criteria (5.2c) ask how you address the learning and development needs of your leaders, including needs that are both self-identified and identified by their superiors. I’d like to focus on the identification of those needs and suggest a role for the Conscious Competence Ladder.

The ladder is particularly helpful with coaching leaders on what they need to learn. Somebody has probably developed a behavior/skill checklist for slotting leaders into one of the ladder’s four rungs:

Level 1: Unconscious Incompetence. The leader is clueless about the subject, lacking almost any knowledge or skills. Worse yet, the leader is not aware of this weakness and, as a result, exudes confidence where none is warranted. We’ve all had leaders like this.

Level 2: Conscious Incompetence. The leader realizes his/her ability is limited and that others are much more competent in this area. The leader’s confidence plummets until learning takes place.

Level 3: Conscious Competence. The leader puts his/her learning into practice and gains confidence during the process.

Level 4: Unconscious Competence. Repeatedly applying the new knowledge and skills create new habits that allow the leader to perform confidently and without conscious effort.

All of us, including leaders, need someone to help us figure out where we are…

School Districts Saving Money

Public schools are desperate for money. Their funding has been frozen or cut for years, when adjusted for inflation, while the demands on their resources have grown. So what would they do to save this kind of money?

• $4 million saved through energy savings
• $300,000 saved by changing the utilization of preferred healthcare providers
• $366,000 saved my changing how it manages and controls its database
• $2 million saved annually by shifting how it purchased energy
• $4 million saved over a three-year period through a cooperative interagency bidding process for employees’ healthcare services

The three school districts that realized these savings are part of an education reform project, called North Star, developed by the American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC). You can read a white paper on the project here. What the districts did to save this kind of money was to implement a North Star plan with seven components:

1. Learn from existing North Star schools to spread reform faster and more cost-efficiently
2. Identify processes and outcomes, gaps, and best practices in a process and outcome measurement database available at APQC—if you contribute your district’s data
3. Public training on process and performance management (PPM)
4. Finding, learning, sharing, and comparing data and best practices in PPM
5. Virtual networking through communities of practice
6. A process…