Workforce Performance
A high-performance business starts with a high-performance workforce. iSource is helping organisations substantially increase productivity, market share and shareholder value by ensuring that they have the right people, with the right skills in the right roles.
We deliver workforce performance strategies that go beyond mere cost reduction to have a greater positive impact on the company’s overall business and financial performance.
iSource’s innovative, holistic approach to increasing workforce productivity and transforming the performance of your workforce begins with a focus on the necessary competencies and capabilities to meet strategic goals. This focus is achieved at three levels:
- Individual performance , because companies with well-trained, knowledgeable and flexible employees operate more efficiently, seize market opportunities more readily and weather economic downturns more effectively.
- Workforce performance , because a company must focus on providing their workforces, especially their most strategic ones, with the resources and tools they need to perform effectively.
- Enterprise performance , because organizations must more effectively align their people with their business strategy.
With this holistic approach to workforce transformation, geared to the unique needs of your organisation and its people, iSource delivers breakthrough improvements in workforce performance.
Background
The "supply chain" of learning, content creation, storage, distribution, administration, maintenance and so on becomes so cumbersome that a company cannot alter that supply chain quickly enough to meet business needs that are always evolving.
The answer is an approach to managing the learning supply chain that is inherently nimble...that puts in place the structures, planning and methodologies that keep the learning function "interlocked" with a company’s strategic goals.
Analysis
Properly conceived, learning investments are some of the most critical drivers within a company’s overall value creation plan. When iSource works with our client companies, we begin with an initial benchmarking analysis within an overall value planning process, helping them to articulate their strategic objectives and value creation opportunities in terms of concrete and measurable value levers.
Recommendations
A learning diagnostic is often an important first step to the overall analysis. The learning diagnostic permits an organisation to:
- Document the scope, operating model and costs of their learning organisation.
- Identify their learning organisation’s goals, issues and priorities.
- Benchmark the major components of the current costs and service levels.
- Confirm the major areas of value creating opportunities.
- Articulate a business case for moving forward.
- Develop the initial guidelines for the potential learning design and development project.
Why iSource
Our industry experience and expertise in Learning, Workspace Solutions, Collaboration & Knowledge Management, Performance Management & Motivation, Leadership, Organizational Change and Culture Change allows us to collaborate with your organization to quickly deliver solutions that are both understanding and rigorous.
Specific Services
- Aligning the workforce to business strategy
- Enabling the workforce to deliver measurable value
- Increasing innovation
- Increasing the workforce productivity
- Managing skills development
Learning Investments
Typically, companies are pushing titles and content out to their people based on what they think the employees need. Then they measure how many people take the courses or how many hours are spent on training. What’s missing from this picture? Any measurements on the back end as to what the workforce has gained in terms of productivity and capability, and then how those new workforce characteristics show up on the financial statements.
Recommendations
There are five ways to measure how the effectiveness of the learning function translates into upside opportunities and increased business value:
- Speed to Market
- Speed to Competency
- “Reskilling” to Support New Strategic Objectives
- Responding to Technology, Market or Regulatory Change
- Shareholder Value
Linking Strategic Educational Development to Business Goals to Optimize Workforce Performance
The most inviting targets for the cost-cutter's axe are often employees and the budgets set aside to hone the skills of those who remain. Yet a finely tuned workforce is arguably the most important asset in helping a company not only weather down times but also outperform the competition when things turn around. Unfortunately, many financial services firms are learning this lesson the hard way.
As cost reductions, layoffs and attrition in financial services have boiled workforces down to the barest essentials, a major disconnect has formed between learning and performance. To close these gaps, executives need to refocus on the quality of their people as a critical competitive differentiator no less important than their product or their brand. By tailoring, scaling and synchronizing their learning strategies to their overall business strategies, they can ensure there is a direct correlation between money spent and the results produced and optimize the value between working capital and human capital.
Value of Your Training Function
By deploying the right learning strategies and technologies to efficiently deliver the learning that's needed to the people who need it, companies can transform their learning function into an engine driving greater business performance.
Brain Drain
Knowledge loss, often an unintended consequence of downsizing, can be one of the costliest problems confronting organizations today. It is also one of the most widely ignored. Better workforce planning and targeted knowledge-retention initiatives can help you avoid losing this key source of competitive advantage.
Practices for retaining knowledge may be applied broadly or narrowly, depending on how the organisation views the problem. Broad formal procedures are in place for retaining critical knowledge. Managers are responsible for identifying departing employees whose knowledge is both crucial and unique, and for making extensive efforts to retain that knowledge.
Whether it’s in chemicals, aerospace or government, knowledge loss is a systemic problem involving the entire employment lifecycle from recruiting, employee retention and retirement. One-off solutions, such as creating a database, introducing a mentoring program or using retirees as contractors, are merely quick fixes. Comprehensive problems need comprehensive solutions. Several factors address knowledge retention.
1. Identifying knowledge at risk
Understanding where an organisation is most at risk requires processes to identify which employees have the most critical knowledge.
2. Career development and succession planning
A career development program builds knowledge that professionals need to prepare for future roles.
3. Knowledge transfer practices
At the heart of any knowledge-retention strategy are the actual practices used to transfer knowledge. Among the many practices that contribute to knowledge retention are after-action reviews, communities of practice, mentoring programs, storytelling, expert referral services, interviews and training.
Building a High Performance Sales Force
Even in the toughest of markets at the worst of times, sales can exceed expectations but only with a strategy based on deep customer intelligence and implemented by a competent, confident salesforce equipped with the tools and processes it needs.
Today's typical sales organisations operate in a much different world than they did only a few years ago. In a battered economy, many have been hobbled by staff reductions and cutbacks in marketing budgets. Their customers are trying to save money by hunting for bargains or deferring purchases altogether. Meanwhile, increased competition has turned last year's product innovations into this year's price-shopped commodities.
But the economy is only part of the problem. Surprisingly few organisations appear to be tackling the real culprits behind lackluster sales performance: misdirected resources, the rising cost of sales, and the poor return on technology investments made during more prosperous periods.
Comprehensive Programs of Change
At the heart of successful IT transformation is the recognition that IT is not just a technology business but also a people business.
It requires an orientation toward workforce enablement that goes well beyond “training.” Training will be effective only as part of a more comprehensive program that addresses people, structure and tools, as well as broader cultural and behavioral issues such as:
- Exercising courageous leadership, as well as the development of leadership capabilities at all levels.
- Setting clear performance goals that determine the behaviors that people will be performing in the new organization.
- Defining the working processes that will support those goals, and adjusting the organizational structure to make processes visible, measurable and manageable.
- Identifying the skills and competencies that will lead to the right behaviors and outcomes.
- Creating performance management and reward systems that are aligned with business and performance goals and that properly motivate.
- Providing access to the right learning resources and expertise, linked to clear business goals.
- Putting in place the right technologies to support collaboration and knowledge sharing.
Leadership
Successful change requires effective leadership at all levels: certainly from the top, but also from strong leaders throughout the workforce who not only challenge people to develop their skills but also inspire them to do so. Developing leadership capability at all levels, as well as setting clearly defined performance objectives and the criteria for advancement, are all part of transforming the IT workforce. But businesses that successfully transform their IT function typically go further. They extend leadership development beyond the “steady state” approach, which focuses primarily on control and management, to transformational leadership, which needs to be visionary and inspired.
Performance Goals
A transformation program should establish clear performance goals for the IT organization that are aligned with the company’s overall business objectives. Then, individual goals can be set and the behaviors necessary to reach the goals can be more clearly defined. If an IT department is perceived as being out of touch with business goals, IT executives must fix the situation by establishing rigorous, tangible performance measures and then work back to the behaviors needed to reach those metrics.
Processes
Executives may have the top people with the best skills, but if those people are doing the wrong things, the IT organization won’t get very far. To attain the new performance goals, people must be supported by the processes most likely to lead to success; for them personally as well as for the business as a whole. High-performance IT organizations across all industries share common process characteristics: Processes are clear; the link between process and performance goals is well understood; and the performance of the process is well measured and properly supported.
Skills and Competencies
When the IT transformation program is on the right course focusing on performance, behaviors and the right processes it then makes sense to look at the competencies and skills that will produce those behaviors. What do executives want from their people now, and how is that different from what they needed before? What behavioral characteristics, knowledge and skills are required? Skills and competencies, as well as process frameworks, need to be understood not only from within the IT organization but also from the perspective of those on the business side of the company. Developing such an understanding requires effective diagnostics, which can include face-to-face interviews with employees and executives, skills assessments, broader surveys of the workforce, a core values measurement tool, process performance diagnostics and assessments of IT leadership.
A comprehensive diagnostic of current skills is vital. That analysis can then lead to a more detailed blueprint for the transformed organisation. It will summarize desired competencies, behaviors and values, by role and responsibility; compare the desired state to the existing situation; and define a program of activity for areas where improvement can have the highest impact.
In addition, the most successful IT organisations are highly efficient at matching the right skills to the right work (and at the right price) and then managing processes across any structural barriers, such as sourcing, geographic distribution and supplier relationships.
Performance Management
Once the performance and behavioral goals are set, the new processes are in place and the competencies are defined, companies engaged in IT workforce transformation must focus on the incentive and reward structures, as well as the learning programs needed to reinforce and sustain the desired new behaviors. Effective performance management clearly defines goals and provides feedback on how well those goals are being achieved, at an individual level as well as at a team level. If the IT organisation is truly to be transformed, team-based performance measures and reward structures must be part of the mix. Ideally, staff at all levels will have a tangible stake in delivering the best possible service to the business.
Learning
Sustainable IT workforce change requires access to the right expertise, linked to clear business goals. Some IT executives favor an IT academy approach that bundles learning content from internal and external sources, and provides a more comprehensive curriculum at all levels through blended e-learning and instructor-led training. An IT academy can also include the delivery of learning to those outside the IT organisation. The success of these learning initiatives depends on clearly linking learning to the right business outcomes.
Technologies that Support Optimal Workforce Performance
An important part of IT transformation is the development of a collaborative, knowledge-sharing environment, enabled by new tools and technologies that pull all the elements of the virtuous performance together for individuals on their desktops. These solutions combine portal technologies, expert searches, e-learning, online collaboration tools and visibility-to-performance metrics with an appropriate content infrastructure. As IT projects increasingly combine teams working across time zones, effective tools for collaboration and project management become increasingly essential. The success of a portal, however, depends on focusing tightly on the right business outcomes, rather than looking at technology for its own sake.
Success: Culture Change as the End, Not the Means
In the end, IT workforce transformation is part of a complex system where all parts must work together to achieve high performance. Changing the culture is one way to describe the change to the overall system. But leaders of high-performance organisations know that culture change is not, in fact, tackled straight on but is the result of the other factors outlined here: courageous and insightful leadership; bold but tangible goals; new processes, tools and structures; sourcing strategies that assign the best skills at the right price to the right work; new behaviors; and the competencies, rewards and enablement programs to sustain a transformation.
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