Elements of Organisational Design to Promote a Learning Culture

In this age of digital revolution, businesses have been going through a constant change. Since business strategies take a hit from its usual perspectives, people strategies also need a re-think.

Two significant stats

Here are two significant stats that will make you realize that HR function can’t be a support function anymore; the whole organizational strategy is dependent upon it.

As per the global CEO survey was done by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), we find that 73% of CEOs believe that the availability of the right talent with notable skills is one of their most pressing issues. In the year 2014, 63% of CEOs said the same. In the year 2015, the numbers got higher – 73%.

The second stat is more astonishing. In the survey done by PwC, it was found that the CEOs of almost every business are looking for a broader range of skills and adaptable human capital. It was found that 81% of CEOs are looking for much broader skill-sets than the past and around 77% of CEOs have or want to create diversity & inclusion strategy.

From the above stats, it’s clear that as a business owner you need to take charge of the people strategies and make sure that your business and people strategies are in alignment.

So, what can you do to re-think your people strategies?

You need to pay heed to the following, get your basics right so that you are on track.

Why do you need to be on track?

Have a look at what Victor Kislyi, the Executive Chairman and CEO of Wargaming Public Company Limited, Cyprus said –

There’s no way you can predict all the changes that will happen 12 months from now or three years from now. Your organization has to be ready to react to any change.

Here are the top three things you need to pay heed to, to improve your people strategies. If you can work on these three simple & insignificant looking acts, you would be able to align your people strategies with organizational success.

Key No. 1: The Importance of Job Analysis

Most of the business owners may think of job analysis as old school, but the fact is that without job analysis, it’s impossible to hire talents with the right skills.

And since hiring the right talent is the most pressing issue of organizations, it’s mandatory that you pay greater attention to the job analysis.

So, how would you do job analysis?

Here’s a checklist that you need to follow while analysing a job –

  • Duties & Tasks: The first thing you need to know about a job is about the performance of certain tasks and duties. You need to look at the parameters – frequency, the effort required, skill-sets needed, complexity, equipment etc.
  • Relationships: An important part of job analysis is relationships. Who will report to whom? Who will supervise whom? Mostly these two questions sum up relationships under job analysis.
  • Environment: It’s said that environment of a job always wins over the attitude of people within the environment. Every job needs a specific environment under which the performer and the job-performance reach a peak. In an ideal condition, we would expect to create such environment; but the job analyst should always tend toward that ideal environment for the particular job.
  • Requirements: To perform a job, performer of that job should be equipped with the required knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics (KSAO). And the job analyst needs to understand both extremes – the minimum range of KSAO and the maximum range of KSAO within which the performers should lie in.

The above four are the most significant aspects every job analyst (if you’re a business owner, you can analyse the job all by yourself) should pay attention to.

But, the question still remains, how to follow a full-proof method of job analysis that helps the business owner understand the whereabouts of the job.

Here’s an infographic prepared by The Ohio State University’s Centre on Education and Training for Employment – a step-by-step process.

Gathering information, working with SMEs (Subject Matter Experts), and getting inputs from the SMEs are not easy, but they’re quite do-able.

The hardest thing where most businesses suffer is while verifying the job analysis information.

It may so happen that the inputs given by the SMEs can be completely different than the information collected via online surveys.

In that case, KSAO (Knowledge, Skills, Abilities, and Other Characteristics) Linkage would be necessary. An expert panel of SMEs will be sitting there with you and you would try to find out the linkages between the job functions and the KSAO.

Key No. 2: Why you need a job description?

Your duty as a business owner/HR doesn’t end by analysing the job at hand. You need to prepare a specific job description that will articulate the exact skills, the role, and how the role is aligned with your long-term business objectives.

What is a job description?

You already know what a job description is – it’s an internal document that covers the whole gamut of skills, qualifications, duties, tasks required to perform at a particular job function.

But a detailed job description doesn’t end there.

It talks about the couple of things that are as important as the list of skills, duties, tasks, and responsibilities –

  • How success will be measured at that particular job: Let’s say that you hire the best candidate for that particular job function. And he has done a terrific job. The question is how do you know that the candidate has done a terrific job? How would you measure up the benchmark that a candidate needs to reach? What aspects do they need to keep in mind while performing their function? As a business owner, you need to specify that.
  • Measures to improve the job performance: Once the benchmark is set for a particular job, it’s important to use the feedback loop to improve the job performance of that particular function. And as per the job function, you need to include measures to improve job performance.

How to write a job description?

Here’s a simple step-by-step process you need to follow. They’re easy and you can replicate them if you’re clear about the job function –

  • First, write down the job title for which you’re writing the job description.
  • Mention the person to whom the performer of the job would report to.
  • Write down in 3-5 sentences about the role, what success would be like in that position, and how this job role gets aligned with the overall organizational strategy.
  • Next, talk about the duties and responsibilities of the job.
  • Then, discuss the qualifications required (or expected/preferred).
  • Finally, you can write about how one can improve the performance of the job. This part is optional and only used in the detailed job description. If you’re writing a quick job description, you may skip this.

A template to follow while writing a job description

To make things easy for you, here’s a quick job description template you can use if you want to write a job description for few minutes. You need to ensure that the job is properly analysed before you ever write the job description. Otherwise, there would be no value of writing a job description for a particular job.

Key No. 3: Understanding Competency Framework

All the steps in aligning your people strategies with the organizational goal are interconnected. Conducting a job analysis and then writing the job description isn’t enough.

You need to build something which will set the benchmark for your people and help them become adaptable to the organizational environment.

As we already know that 81% of the CEOs in the global CEO survey conducted by PwC want people with a broader range of skills. Building a competency framework will help you achieve it.

What is a Competency Framework?

competency framework helps define the attributes of working that would enable organizational success.

So, in a competency framework, two things are most important.

The first thing is the attributes.

  • What attributes you would need to develop?
  • How would you develop them?

The second thing is organization success.

  • How would you align the attributes of working with the overall success of the organization?

Types of Competency Framework

There are three types of competency framework you should look at as a business owner.

  • Behavioral: What sort of behaviour is expected from the employees that will ensure organizational success? What people should see and how should they interpret and pursue?
  • Technical: What technical expertise employees will require that ensures the success of their job and how that will translate into overall organizational success?
  • Results: What outcome/s the organization is looking for to call it a success? How would the organization achieve the outcome/s?

How to develop a Competency Framework?

Before we go on understanding how to develop a competency framework, let’s have a look 15 core competencies that you may consider looking at while building a competency framework.

You need to find a sweet spot among these three circles. The sweet spot is too narrow. And it would take a lot of trial and error to understand and continually fix things.

But at the end of the day, if you can pay attention to all of these 15 core competencies and can align your organizational goals around them; the chances of achieving organizational success will drastically increase.

Now, let us see how we can develop a competency framework.

Here’s a simple framework that you can follow as a business owner. This is easy to replicate and you can use the data you gathered while analysing the job to take the first step.

Step 1 – Understanding High Potential Talent: By using the information you gathered while analysing the job/s, you would understand what a high potential talent would look like. Before you ever hire (which you need to deal with under recruitment & selection procedures), you need to know what to look for. And just having enough talents or skills won’t make the cut. You also need to ensure that the personality of the potential talent would match the organizational culture and organizational values.

Step 2 – Recruitment & Selection Procedure: Once you know what a high potential talent looks like, recruitment & selection procedure would become easier. Recruitment is the art of attracting the high potential talent (you have already done the homework) and selection is the process of choosing the right person/s from the pool of candidates. As a business owner, you should stress upon understanding the attributes of a high potential talent. Once you have clarity, the rest would become gravy.

Step 3 – Performance Management: At this stage, you have hired the right talent and you have articulated what the organization would expect from her in the long run. However, you need to know how the expected behaviour (and performance) is matching up with the actual behaviour (and performance). And if there’s any gap between these two, you should do a gap analysis and find out why the right candidate isn’t able to perform at the expected level. Only at this stage, you would realize the value of exposing your resources to continuous learning. If you can teach and educate your resources continually about how to perform certain necessary tasks (if one sub-part is a technical skill, you need to train your resources in that skill as well), what is expected of them, and how to hit the benchmark during contingencies.

Step 4 – Succession Planning: If you can find a right talent who can be promoted to a higher rung, wouldn’t be that a wonderful thing? You already know about the cost of recruitment and selection and the time and effort required looking at a vast pool of candidates. If you can continuously help your resources to learn, offer simultaneous feedback, provide positive reinforcements, and help them bridge the gap between the expected and actual performance, succession planning would become much easier for you.

Step 5 – Rewards & Recognition: If you know that a pool of your resources are doing exceeding well and another pool needs a nudge of education/training, would you treat each pool in the same way? Of course not! You will reward the first pool of resources that have done great and will also recognize their efforts so that another pool can be encouraged to adhere to the similar feats and a set of benchmarks for the organization can be set henceforth.

Step 6 – Leadership Development: Finally, you reach this stage. At this stage, you would see a group of people who would do great if they receive leadership/career development learning/education. Leadership/career modules may not be for everyone, but if you can expose them to these modules, chances are they would catch up with your amazing performers and do exceeding well.

If you follow this simple approach while building a competency framework for your organization, you don’t need to worry about alignment – because this step-by-step approach will ensure that your people strategies and organizational goals are in unison.

These are few Basic yet very essential & powerful elements that lays the foundation of your People strategy.

We help #SMBs in designing the required Organization & People strategies. Reach us at info@skillhubconsulting.com for more details.

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