Tag: Employee Growth

FIVE STEPS TO IMPLEMENT COMMUNITY™ SKILLS

Written by Kai Donesa on . Posted in Resources.

In our previous articles, we have shared the powerful and versatile capabilities of the newest solution from our Community™ integrated approach and platform, Community™ Skills. In this article, we will go over the five steps needed to implement Community™ Skills in your organization. This innovative tool allows organizations to manage and build their capacity by measuring the skills of their workforce, tailor learning and development plans around explicit measures at every grade level and skill stage and be able to objectively recognize skills growth through pay movement, prepare for their staff’s promotion, and so much more.

So, perhaps you’re thinking, “Sounds great! But how exactly do I implement this? Where do I even begin?” “Does it really only take five steps to implement Community™ Skills in my organization?” Because there are several HR functions that will need to be aligned to the Community™ Skills approach, this undertaking will take a bit of effort. But we, at Birches Group, have gone through this process ourselves, and here are some of the steps that we have taken to get everyone on board:

  • Align your organization’s job evaluation and pay structure to Community™ – To implement any Community™ solution in your organization, we must start with your jobs. Through Community™ Jobs, we will evaluate and align your job structure to our fourteen Birches Group job levels which will be the same levels used once you carry out your Community™ Skills assessments. Once your job levels have been aligned, our five Skills stages can then be arrayed against the pay range at each grade and the corresponding pay increments can be tailored to follow your organization’s policy on pay movement and frequency of skills assessment rounds.
  • Community™ Skills training with managers – Now that you’ve aligned your jobs and pay structure to the fourteen Birches Group job levels and five Skills stages, managers will need to be trained on the concepts behind the Community™ Skills approach and a briefing for them to use the tool. Birches Group is on hand to organize this for any organization to ensure that there is a shared understanding of the principles of each skill stage and the six indicators among all supervisors.
  • Conducting your first Community™ Skills assessment round – Once all managers have been trained on the methodology and platform, HR is now ready to conduct the first skills assessment round. Managers will assess each of their staff according to their evaluated job level and all results will be collated and stored in our Community™ system. Birches Group can assist in generating individual and overall reports. HR can then calibrate the results to ensure alignment in the assessments before presenting recommendations to management.
  • Tailoring learning and development plans – Simultaneously, managers can also begin tailoring individual learning and development plans for each of their staff. Each development plan should focus its activities to help the employee advance to the next skill stage or grade level, their assignments and metrics should align with each of the six indicators, and the timeframe in between assessments should also be determined.
  • Communicating assessment results to staff – once assessment recommendations have been approved and respective movements in pay have been taken into consideration, it is time for managers to communicate the results to their staff. At this stage, it is crucial for managers to be clear about how each employee was assessed, the impact on their salaries, and their follow-up development plans. At the same time, employees can also take equal ownership and provide suggestions to supplement or refine their development plans further. This way, assignments and metrics can be more attainable for staff in between assessment rounds.

The first round of skills assessments for any organization will, indeed, be a period of adjustment. HR has a role to play in making sure that the process that went into the assessments, creating the development plans, identifying promotion readiness, and pay movement are all being communicated clearly to staff. But with the structure and transparency our Community™ Skills tool provides, staff discussions around these critical talent management activities can now be done with ease. We hope that enumerating these five steps to implement Community™ Skills gives a clear pathway on how to get started. Contact us to see a demo of our Community™ Skills tool and how your organization can get started.

Want to know if your existing compensation practices have the elements of a good compensation program or if there are areas that could use some improvement? Take our quick Compensation Program Assessment Quiz to know your score!

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.

Follow us on our LinkedIn for more content on pay management and HR solutions.

COMMUNITY™ SKILLS – THE HR SWISS ARMY KNIFE

Written by Kai Donesa on . Posted in Resources.

Birches Group’s Community™ Skills is a groundbreaking solution that radically changes the way organizations manage human resources. Like the well-known Swiss Army knife, Community™ Skills is so versatile that it can support different human resources activities using one simple and integrated approach.

In a previous overview of our Community™ Skills solution, we described how our methodology, with its five Skills stages and six indicators, can easily be adapted to an organization’s pay ranges and facilitate pay movement based on actual skills growth of staff, measure the capacity of its entire workforce, and help managers tailor learning and development assignments to enable movement of staff deeper into their grade or to the next skills stage.

Because Community™ Skills links the pay movement of staff with their growth in skills and experience, this approach can also be readily incorporated into other areas of HR from recruitment to succession planning. Here are other ways where Community™ Skills can support your HR program:

  • Establishing Fair and Equitable Hiring Practices

During recruitment, Community™ Skills makes it possible for managers to target the right candidate they need by allowing them to define the appropriate skill level required for a role. From the five Skills stages, managers can select from the first three skill levels, Basic, Proficient, or Skilled, depending on the level of skill they need. And because assessments are purely based on the candidate’s skill level, setting starting salaries during the recruitment process becomes simpler, more objective, and easily justifiable.

  • Aligning Skills to Pay

With the five stages of knowledge mapped across the different points in the salary range, Community™ Skills makes it possible for organizations to fully utilize their salary ranges and manage pay clearly and objectively. As staff build skills, they move across the stages driving movement in pay within their salary grade. Personal biases such as gender, race, etc. will have no impact on the increase that an employee receives.

Community Skills- The HR Swiss Army Knife

The illustration above can be applied to most grade levels.

Staff development can be tailored at every job level to be able to push out more of the work that is essential to the organization’s success.

  • Tailoring Learning and Development Assignments for Employee Growth

Through Community™ Skills, tailoring learning and development plans become a collaborative effort between the manager and staff. Because each skill stage is explicitly defined, employees can equally take ownership of their progress by providing feedback or suggestions that will tailor their initiatives to advance their skills growth.

  • Prepare for Career Pathing

Skills ratings inform managers about promotion readiness, providing objective criteria for succession and promotion decisions.

Never has there been any other solution that can address so many HR needs with just one approach. Community™ Skills not only seamlessly connects what used to be separate HR functions, but also links each of them in a way that any organization can adapt and design their respective strategies around. Contact us to learn how Community™ Skills can work for your organization.

Want to know if your existing compensation practices have the elements of a good compensation program or if there are areas that could use some improvement? Take our quick Compensation Program Assessment Quiz

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.

Follow us on our LinkedIn for more content on pay management and HR solutions.

BIRCHES GROUP’S COMMUNITY™ SKILLS MODEL

Written by Kai Donesa on . Posted in Resources.

Through our Community™ Skills model, organizations can finally recognize and explicitly measure an employees’ growth in skills, knowledge, and experience – their abilities to perform their job.

In Birches Group, we believe that when organizations are able to explicitly measure their employee’s accumulation of knowledge and experience, this can serve as the foundation to ensure transparency and equity for other critical talent management functions such as managing pay movement, recruitment, learning and development, succession planning, and more.

The problem is, many organizations have always applied separate approaches and tools in managing each of these critical HR activities. This is an issue because none of these approaches align with each other or even share the same standards…but not anymore.

In Birches Group, we’ve developed a better approach, and it’s simpler than you think!

Community™ Skills

The Birches Group solution for measuring knowledge and experience is Community™ Skills. Community™ Skills measures the stages of skills and knowledge linked to the Birches Group Community™ job levels.  We have developed explicit measures for each job level using the same factors and indicators that form the basis for our job evaluation methodology.

The Same Three Community™ Factors

Community™ Skills is part of our larger integrated HR management approach and platform, Community™, wherein the same three factors – Purpose, Engagement, and Delivery – are also used to assess each employee across the same fourteen Birches Group levels. A description of each of the three factors can be found in our previous Community™ article, “Just Three Things: How Purpose, Engagement, & Delivery Can be Used to Understand Your Organization and Support Your HR Programs” and how these three factors serve as the common standard of measure across all our Community™ solutions.

The Six Indicators

Each Community™ factor is then divided into two indicators. The factors and indicators are job-based and can be applied to any kind of role in any occupation in a generic manner.

For Purpose:

  • Conceptual Knowledge – What is the conceptual focus and complexity in the design of solutions? For rules-based transactions, what is the complexity of the data or information handled?

  • Applied Knowledge  – What is the breadth of managerial or project/program oversight? What is the extent of supervisory or process management as part of a larger functional service?

On Engagement:

  • Internal – What is the collaborative role within the functional team? What is the depth and breadth of information provided to the team?

  • External – What is the advisory role with other functional teams or external clients? What is the depth and breadth of information provided to other functional teams or external clients?

And for Delivery:

  • Timeliness – Efficiency: How are resources deployed against project/program needs and cycles? How are process schedules maintained to strengthen service responsiveness?

  • Quality – Effectiveness: What is the measurable impact of interventions or the functional unit? How are quality metrics maintained throughout service execution.

The Five Skills Stages

Community™ Skills uses the job levels established within an organization as the basis for defining progressive Skills Stages, which can be used to measure the continuous growth of an employee within their job. In short, it provides an explicit measure of “experience” rather than relying on time as a proxy. In our Skills tool, we have identified five Skills Stages at each grade level:

  • The Basic stage reflects the minimal acceptable understanding of the job.  Employees in this stage are capable of addressing simple issues in standard operational settings.
  • The Proficient stage reflects the level of understanding of work where more complex issues can be addressed and the employee can adapt to most operational settings, including more complex ones.
  • The Skilled stage is achieved with a complete conceptual understanding of the job and the ability to be effective in all types of operational settings.
  • The Advanced stage shows the level of knowledge that enables a high degree of independence in the job and reflects a broad understanding of concepts which overlap with the next higher grade level.
  • The Master stage indicates the highest level of understanding of the job and overlaps significantly with the next higher grade level. The level of understanding found at the master stage also allows for advising on process and systems improvements and the mentoring of others, which in turn results in better outputs and stronger capacity.

These Skills Stages were developed using the Birches Group Community™ Jobs approach as the underlying foundation.

With six Indicators and five Skills Stages, there are a total of thirty (30) milestones to measure skills and knowledge per grade.

Using these thirty milestones, a Skills assessment can be recorded over time. Staff may progress through the stages at different rates across the different indicators as this reflects the natural competencies of people relative to areas where they have skill, and how quickly or slowly their Skills grow.

As managers and supervisors observe the Skills growth of their staff, critical HR functions such as pay adjustments and determining the readiness of staff for the next grade or assignment becomes clear, transparent, and objective.

Community™ Skills makes it possible for managers to measure skills, knowledge, and experience through explicit stages and indicators making this one of the most innovative HR tools yet. Contact us to learn how Community™ Skills can work for you.

Want to know if your existing compensation practices have the elements of a good compensation program or if there are areas that could use some improvement? Take our quick Compensation Program Assessment Quiz to know your score!

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.

Follow us on our LinkedIn for more content on pay management and HR solutions.

WHY YOU NEED TO ASSESS THE SKILLS OF YOUR EMPLOYEES

Written by Kai Donesa on . Posted in Resources.

Organizations typically provide a range of pay for each job. And what these pay ranges represent is the value an organization places on experience within a grade level. Traditionally, pay ranges are divided into steps or increments awarded on a fixed calendar schedule. When an employee moves up a step, this usually indicates satisfactory performance was achieved. But what often happens is that organizations move staff through the steps simply because another year has passed.

While the general belief is that over time, with experience, the value of work carried out by an employee should increase, we know this isn’t always the case. Organizations can have staff who have been in their roles for ten years but only show minimal progression or improvement in their quality of work. Other times, an employee can be in a job for less than two years, but they learn fast and deliver timely and quality outputs proving an increase in tenure does not always equal an increase in the value of work.

The question managers and supervisors should ask is, “How can we measure experience without relying on time or tenure as a proxy?” “And if we continue to award pay increases each year to staff, how can we determine that the knowledge of our staff also grows at the same pace?”

The lack of an approach to move staff through the pay range continues to be a challenge for many organizations. And while the alternative approach to steps applied by many organizations is to use merit increases as a basis to manage pay movement, we know that this approach is just as flawed.

In our article, Pay for Performance is HR’s Biggest Epic Fail, the problem with using performance as the basis for pay movement is that it rewards an employee’s one-time achievement through a salary increase even if we know that their performance may not be the same the following year. Further, the rubric designed to determine increase differentials among staff is often so minimal that it has no impact and does little for employee retention.

We all know performance management can be tedious and difficult. But we all also know that they are important. So, what’s the alternative? In Birches Group, we have a different approach, and it is simpler than you think!

WHY SHOULD YOU ASSESS YOUR EMPLOYEES’ SKILLS?

We believe that pay movement should be linked to skills growth and knowledge. It is known that as one learns and develops further into their roles, they acquire more experience and skills that allow them to deliver faster, better-quality work. And because skills are accumulated and cannot be unlearned, there is a sustained value to the organization making it a more reliable basis for salary increases.

But beyond pay management, assessing the skills of your staff will also greatly support your organization’s strategies around capacity building and career development. Knowing the skill level of your entire workforce enables managers to identify and create the necessary initiatives that will help close existing skills gaps and facilitate the movement of staff, either deeper into their grade or promotion to the next higher level.

In our next articles, we will go deeper into our approach to measuring skills and how it can support many of your talent management programs from pay movement, learning and development, and recruitment and career planning. Contact us to learn more.

Want to know if your existing compensation practices have the elements of a good compensation program or if there are areas that could use some improvement? Take our quick Compensation Program Assessment Quiz to know your score!

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.

Follow us on our LinkedIn for more content on pay management and HR solutions.

Pay Management using Skills-based Approach

USING SKILLS-BASED APPROACH FOR PAY MANAGEMENT

Written by Kai Donesa on . Posted in Resources.

One of the most significant responsibilities of human resources is pay management. Without a clear and objective way to manage salaries, managers are frustrated, employees are disappointed and organizations risk losing employee engagement. Traditional approaches use “merit” increases tied to individual performance don’t really work well, failing to achieve the key objectives of the process – to motivate and retain staff, and to differentiate between staff based on performance.  We think there is a better way.

As we explained in our article about Pay for Performance, pay management consists of two critical parts – recognizing the accumulation of skills and knowledge for the job, and rewarding individual and team achievement.  In this article, we will explore our ideas about how skills and knowledge can drive pay.

Skills, Not Time

If you ask any manager who their best employees are, they will know.  Dig a little deeper, and you will hear things like “Sophia is very experienced” and “Marc really knows the job well.”  In a lot of cases, these star employees have been in their jobs for a while.  Managers often use time as a proxy to measure experience – the longer the time in the job, the better the employee gets at doing it.  Sometimes, though, an employee with a short tenure excels at their job – their level of skill is one typically observed after a longer period.

Birches Group believes pay movement should reflect the value of an employee’s experience in their role.  Over time, employees gain experience through the accumulation of skills and knowledge.  It follows that growth in salary should be a recognition of growth in skills and knowledge.  The challenge is how to measure it, and how to apply the measurement to salary management.  Time is a terrible way to measure experience. 

Responsible pay management should be based on a framework that can clearly measure an employee’s capacity, rather than their achievement. As an employee grows and develops a deeper understanding of their role over time, the required skills and expected outputs naturally become bigger and more complex. Staff need to continuously learn and develop new skills to enable them to engage and deliver work at higher, more intricate levels.  In this model, growth in skills and knowledge drives increases in pay.

The Five Stages of Knowledge

Birches Group has developed Community™ Skills, a tool to measure experience.  In the Skills tool, we have identified five Skills Stages at each grade level:

  • The Basic stage reflects the minimal acceptable understanding of the job and is capable of addressing simple issues in standard operational settings.
  • The Proficient stage reflects the level of understanding of work where more complex issues can be addressed and the employee can adapt to most operational settings.
  • The Skilled stage is achieved with a complete conceptual understanding of the job and the ability to be effective in all types of operational settings.
  • The Advanced stage shows the level of knowledge that enables a high degree of independence in the job and reflects a broad understanding of concepts that also overlaps with the next higher grade level.
  • The Master stage indicates the highest level of understanding of the job and overlaps with the next higher grade level. The level of understanding found at the master stage also allows for advising on process and systems improvements, which in turn results to better outputs and stronger capacity.

These Skills Stages were developed using the Birches Group Community™ Jobs approach as the underlying foundation.  For each Birches Group level, milestones are defined by Skills Stage for each of six Indicators – two Indicators for each job evaluation factor – as shown in the chart below:

Birches Group Community™ Jobs approach

With six Indicators and five Skills Stages, there are a total of thirty (30) milestones to measure skills and knowledge per grade.

Measuring skills and knowledge

Aligning Skills to Pay

In a salary range, there are three important points – the minimum, the midpoint, and the maximum. The midpoint of a pay range represents full capacity for that particular role, while the minimum reflects entry level experience for that grade, and the maximum shows a highly developed level of skill that may overlap with the next higher grade. Using these three points in the pay range, we can easily establish a mapping of the Skill Levels to pay ranges:

Skill Levels for pay management

The illustration above can be applied to most grade levels.

Pay Management Using the Community™ Skills Solution

With the five Skills Stages mapped to the salary range, it is possible for any organization to easily manage pay clearly and objectively. Using Birches Group’s Community™ Skills solution, pay increases are linked to increases in Skills Stage.  Organizations can determine the specific set of rules to govern these increases.

For example, you can grant pay increases when a new Skills Stage is fully achieved.  Another approach is to grant an increase for partial achievement, with a proportionate reduction in the increase amount.  You can also require that growth be broad and encompass milestones from each of the three factors, to ensure well-rounded growth is being rewarded.  Organizations could even pay per milestone.

This innovative approach to pay management eliminates the guesswork for managers and HR and assures that pay increases are explicitly tied to an employee’s growth in their job.  Organizations can objectively measure experience and ensure that higher salaries are paid to those employees who are the most capable in their job.  At the same time, the skills-based approach to pay management is motivating and empowering for staff.  There are clear milestones to strive towards, and managers can conduct meaningful discussions with their staff about how best to grow their skills and grow their career.

Finally, an objective and deliberate framework that can truly allow for an engaged workforce. Contact us to learn more about Community™ Skills.

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.

Follow us on our LinkedIn for more content on pay management and HR solutions.