INTRODUCING COMMUNITY™ – INTEGRATED HR MANAGEMENT FOR ANY ORGANIZATION
As the human resources function has improved and modernized over the years, a lot of positive changes have resulted. HR in many organizations is now a respected partner to business leaders, and increasingly are being asked to provide strategic insights about the overall people management for the organization. In most HR departments of any size, there is usually a “hard side” – job evaluation, compensation, benefits, etc. – and a “soft side” – recruitment, learning and development, succession planning, and performance management. These two sides of HR are often managed separately and from totally different perspectives.
And that’s a problem!
While some argue this arrangement has worked in their organizations, what they don’t realize is this disconnect between the hard side and the soft side of HR has led to many of the issues organizations face today – poor job alignment, loose enforcement of compensation policies, and how reward and recognition are often confused with each other.
For the longest time, organizations have managed these areas separately, patching together using different tools built on different methodologies. How can we expect HR to provide a clear base of policies if their own approaches are not aligned and don’t even use common standards?
Community™ – HR Management Integrated
Community™ is Birches Group’s methodology and platform that integrates critical areas of human resources: job design and evaluation, compensation management, skills measurement, and performance management. Community™ uses a simple, clear, and consistent approach across all areas of HR, and the key is Jobs.
We provide a robust and powerful job evaluation system, Community™ Jobs. It is designed to focus not only on the nature of work and its value, but also connect the purpose of each job to the fundamental skills required for the role and the corresponding metrics that define its success. The job levels defined using Community™ Jobs extend the job levels into all other areas of HR – compensation and benefits, individual skills assessment, and performance management.
Organizations using Community™ are able to integrate the key areas of their HR program and achieve better workforce engagement. When participating in salary surveys, performing market analysis is easy because all job levels are mapped to Birches Group’s Community™ levels, which serve as the common standard across all comparators. Community™ Skills makes it easy for managers to assess the accumulated skills and knowledge of their staff using explicit criteria outlined across five skills stages, anchored to the Community™ job levels. This enables companies to understand the capacity of their workforce and provide focused learning and development to build capacity for the future.
And finally, performance management becomes a seamless process because using the Community™ job levels to evaluate employee achievement by considering what outputs are expected for the job. A 360-degree approach is used to capture the perspectives of the employee, the manager, and peers with whom the employee interacts, inside and outside the organization.
Community™ Solutions
Birches Group’s Community™ platform offers four solutions – Jobs, Market, Skills, and Performance, all integrated into one intuitive platform. Jobs and Market define the structural elements of an organization, while Skills and Performance focus on the organization’s people and capacity.
Organizations can enter the Community™ system through any of its solutions depending on their needs. Using Community™, organizations can start by defining jobs and job structures, and use these to ensure a competitive market position. Skills provides a mechanism to measure individual capacity, and can be used for setting individual pay, learning and development and more. Performance is focused on how the achievements of individual staff are measured and rewarded.
Through Community™, our clients have access to an integrated solution that aligns both structure and capacity using one simple approach. It closes the gap that many systems have failed to address, bridging the hard side with the soft side of human resources.
Contact us to learn how Community™ can power the success of your organization.
Bianca manages our Marketing Team in Manila. She crafts messaging around Community™ concepts and develops promotional campaigns answering why Community™ should be each organization’s preferred solution, focusing on its simplicity and integrated approach. She has held various roles within Birches Group since 2009, starting as a Compensation Analyst and worked her way to Compensation Team Lead, and Training Program Services Manager. In addition to her current role in marketing and communications, she represents Birches Group in international HR conferences with private sector audiences.
