Louder than words

My last couple of blog posts have argued in favour of extracting value out of organisational capabilities. Due to the nature of my role I have posited these arguments in terms of employee development.

However, I further advocate the use of organisational capabilities across all parts of the employee lifecycle.

Using the 4+4 Part Employee Lifecycle as my guide, I will share my thoughts on some of the ways in which your capability framework can add value to your organisation’s activities in terms of recruitment, onboarding, performance, and offboarding.

Recruitment

Everyone knows that change management is hard. Culture eats strategy for breakfast; an organisation’s culture doesn’t change over night; something about herding cats; the change curve; etc. etc.

We’ve heard it all before, and yes it’s probably true.

But there’s a big elephant in the room: the power of recruitment to accelerate cultural change. That is to say, bring in from the outside the people whose capabilities you desperately need on the inside.

Which begs the question… what capabilities? Well, organisations that focus like an eagle know precisely the capabilities to assess each candidate against, because they are the ones that align to their strategic imperatives.

If your organisation needs to become more collaborative, recruit collaborative people. If it needs to become more innovative, recruit innovative people. And if it needs to become more digitally literate, recruit digitally literate people.

This approach may seem too obvious to mention, yet I dare you to examine your organisation’s current recruitment practices.

Onboarding

Onboarding is one of those pies that everyone wants to stick their fingers into, but nobody wants to own. Yet it is crucial for setting up the new recruit for success.

From an organisational capability perspective, a gold-plated opportunity arises during this phase in the employee’s lifecycle to draw their attention to the capability framework and the riches therein. The new recruit is motivated, keen to prove themselves, and hungry to learn.

Highlight the resources that are available to them to develop their capabilities now. This is important because the first few weeks of their experience in the organisation colours their remaining tenure.

Ensure they start their journey the way you’d like them to continue it: productively.

Performance

Capability powers performance, so the capability framework is a tool you can use to improve all four subparts of Performance in the 4+4 Part Employee Lifecycle.

Performance Management

Effective performance management complements development planning to provide the employee with guidance on improving said performance.

When seen through the lens of the capability framework, an employee’s performance appraisal can identify meaningful development opportunities. Performance weak spots may be (at least partly) attributable to gaps in specific capabilities; while a strengths-based approach might also be adopted, whereby an already strong capability is enhanced to drive higher performance.

To inform these decisions with data, I’d be keen to correlate capability assessments against individual performances and observe the relationship between the variables over time.

Development

It’s all very well to have a poetic capability framework, but if learning opportunities aren’t mapped to it, then its value is inherently limited.

If the framework’s capabilities align to leadership stages, I suggest the following question be put to the user: Do you want to excel in your current role or prepare for your next role?

Not only does this question focus the user’s development goal, it also identifies the relevant leadership stage so the capabilities can be presented in the right context.

A follow-up question may then be posed: Would you like to browse all the capabilities – useful for those who want to explore, or already know which capability to develop – focus on our strategic imperatives – useful for those who are time poor – or assess your capabilities – useful for those who seek a personal diagnosis.

The answers to these questions lead to a selection of capabilities which, beyond the provision of clear descriptions, outline the opportunities for development.

Resist the urge to dump masses of resources into their respective buckets. Instead, curate them. I suggest the following approaches:

• Apply my framework for content curation to scaffold the learning process.
• Look through the 70:20:10 lens to leverage the gamut of experience, exposure and education.
• Cross-reference the KASAB framework to close the knowing-doing gap.

KASAB is an esoteric extension of the KSA heuristic in teaching circles, and I like it because it includes “B” for “Behaviour”.

For example, help your colleagues move beyond the consumption of teamwork videos, design thinking workshops, and moocs on digital business; by encouraging them to contribute to communities of practice, submit ideas to the enterprise idea management system, and participate in the company’s social media campaign.

Health & Wellbeing

I see organisational capabilities applying to health & wellbeing in two ways.

The first way concerns the impact of employee development on mental health. Given the satisfaction and pride of building mastery drives engagement, the capability framework presents opportunities to improve mental health across the enterprise.

The second way concerns the composition of the capability framework. Given a healthy employee is a productive employee, why isn’t Wellness itself an organisational capability?

Retention

I’ve seen with my own eyes the impact of employee development (or lack thereof) on retention.

Given the sense of support and growth that the investment in people’s learning brings, the capability framework presents opportunities to retain talent across the enterprise.

Offboarding

Capabilities that align to leadership stages are useful for succession planning. Not only do they identify the capabilities that someone needs to succeed in their current role, but also the capabilities they need to succeed in their next role. Assessment of the latter informs the readiness of the employee for promotion.

Conversely, when the employee leaves the team (or exits the organisation) the capability framework can be used to assess the skills gap that remains.

In 7 tips for custodians of capability frameworks I declared a capability framework that remains unused is merely a bunch of words. But it’s worse than that. It is unrealised value across the employee lifecycle.

So use your capability framework to improve the organisation’s recruitment, onboarding, performance, and offboarding.

Actions speak louder than words.

The good life

In a previous role I had cause to draw up an employee lifecycle. Despite my years in HR up until that point, it wasn’t something that had ever occurred to me to do.

The driving force was an idea to support managers through the various people-related matters to which they needed to attend. The employee lifecycle would provide the structure for a platform containing information and resources that our managers could draw upon on demand.

After a bit of googlising, it struck me that there is no one standard model of the employee lifecycle. I found this surprising as the basics of the employee experience – and the HR functions that correspond to them – are arguably similar across jobs, organisations and industries.

Moreover, some of the models I found were either overly complicated (in my opinion) or they were presented in an illogical manner. In any case they didn’t quite suit my needs, so I decided to draw up my own.

After much thinking and reflection, I realised the employee lifecycle can be distilled into just four main parts: (1) Recruitment; (2) Onboarding; (3) Performance; and (4) Offboarding. Of course the employee experience is more complex than that, but it is within these four parts that the complexities reside.

I call this model the 4 Part Employee Lifecycle.

While some other models of the employee lifecycle start with “Attraction”, I consider this a subset of recruitment, along with other activities such as interviewing and selection. Diversity may also reside in this part.

Onboarding concerns the bringing up to speed of the new recruit, and it may include a combination of pre-boarding, orientation and/or induction.

Performance is the raison d’etre of recruitment and onboarding. It is the productivity of the employee. In other words, are they doing what they are paid to do, and how well are they doing it?

Offboarding is probably the most under-leveraged of all the employee experiences. While exiting resides here – voluntary or otherwise – so too does succession planning and promotion. An organisation that neglects this part of the lifecycle shoots itself in the proverbial foot.

While the 4 Part Employee Lifecycle is purposefully simple, for many it may be a little too simple in terms of “Performance”. So I propose the subdivision of this part into its own four subparts: (1) Performance Management; (2) Development; (3) Health & Wellbeing; and (4) Retention.

Hence I call this model the 4+4 Part Employee Lifecycle.

Performance management would include probation, along with goal setting – KPI’s and behavioural markers – and the dreaded performance appraisal. While performance management has attracted a lot of heat in recent years, my view is that rather than dispensing with it altogether (to the organisation’s detriment), change its nature. For example, I suggest performance appraisals be frequent, short, and feedback rich. There should be no nasty surprises at the end of the year!

Development is complex in its own right; indeed this blog is almost entirely devoted to it. Suffice it to say that in this context, it’s probably best to think of an employee’s development as the totality of their formal development – including training, development planning, leadership programs, career development and talent management – and their informal development – comprising learning (as opposed to training) and performance support.

Health & wellbeing enjoys ever-increasing interest among HR folks, and rightly so as beyond the ethical imperative, an employee who is healthy in body and mind is also productive. I see the usual suspects – inclusion, bullying & harassment, WH&S – in this space, along with personal health initiatives such as pedometer challenges and flu jabs.

And finally, retention concerns the obvious – remuneration and benefits – and the less obvious such as opportunities for growth and career prospects. Engagement may also reside here.

A smart man once declared all models are wrong, but some are useful; and I find the 4+4 Part Employee Lifecycle useful because it identifies key parts of the employee experience which we HR folks need to support.

If we look at the model through the lens of L&D, for example, it prompts us to ask questions that are critical to the success of the business:

• Recruitment – What capabilities do we need to buy into the organisation? Which attitudes do we need to inject to shift our culture? Who can we develop into a future leader or SME?
• Onboarding – What do we need our new recruits to know and do as soon as possible? How do we support this process?
• Performance Management – Where are the performance gaps? Why do these gaps exist? Are they due to deficiencies in capability?
• Development – Which capabilities do our people need to develop? What training should we push? How do we enable our people to drive their own learning? How do we support their performance on the job?
• Health & Wellbeing – Are our people in tune with their physical and mental health? Are our managers capable of supporting them in this space? How do we shift our culture from one of rules and regulation to one of care and collaboration?
• Retention – Are our people aware of the wonderful benefits that are available to them? What kinds of work experiences do they seek? Do they have a career development plan?
• Offboarding – What capabilities do our people need to equip them for the future?

In a similar manner we can look at the model through other lenses, such as technology, process improvement, innovation, or analytics, to ensure they add value across the gamut of HR functions.

Eye health

Anyone who works on a computer all day can become susceptible to eye strain, and maybe more serious eye problems.

It’s important that we all take care of our eyes and keep them healthy.

This article from Ergonomics Now talks about the causes of computer related eye strain, and provides some practical tips on what we can do to prevent it.

What are your tips for taking care of your eyes in the workplace?