Skills assessement Archives - Birches Group LLC

Tag: Skills assessement

BIRCHES GROUP’S COMMUNITY™ SKILLS MODEL

Written by Kai Donesa on February 24, 2022. 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 Expert 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.

PAY FOR PERFORMANCE – HR’S BIGGEST EPIC FAIL

Written by Bianca Valencia on March 11, 2021. Posted in Resources.

Recognizing and rewarding employees for their contributions is required to motivate and retain staff. But “Pay for Performance” as we know it just doesn’t work!

For the longest time, companies have used performance ratings to decide merit pay increases and sometimes, annual incentives. Typically, merit increases are determined according to a combination of performance ratings and position in range (compa-ratio) – those with a combination of higher performance ratings and lower compa-ratios are eligible for higher increases, while those with lower ratings and higher compa-ratios get less. The idea is that such an approach provides a differentiated reward to those with better performance, while ensuring that, on average, the company is paying at the market rate (compa-ratio of 100).

The level of differentiation between strong performers and good ones isn’t much with annual salary budgets of 3% or less in many countries. Employees don’t get excited about getting an increase of 3.2% instead of 2.9%. It’s not really motivating, and does little for retention, which are the two primary goals. Not to mention employees and managers probably hate your performance management system and do not trust the results are fair.

What’s Wrong with Pay for Performance?

Putting aside that last thought, and assuming your performance management approach is working well and is perceived by management and staff to be fair and effective, the problem with pay for performance is one of alignment. Pay for performance rewards a one-time achievement (as measured by the annual performance rating) with a salary increase forever. That’s a huge misalignment!

Merit increases are essentially “baked in” and will remain a part of salary until the employee leaves the organization. On the other hand, performance is variable, and usually changes from year to year. If an employee is a high performer one year, and gets a “high” merit increase, and then in the next year, their performance is lower, how much do they give back? Yeah, right. The penalty for lower performance is a smaller increase going forward.

Using annual performance assessment to determine salary increases is crazy.

Alignment is Key

To align your pay for performance strategy, the first thing you need to change is the role performance management plays in determining rewards. Birches Group believes performance management, which measures periodic, time-bound achievements, should be used to grant one-time recognition such as bonuses. When performance is higher, bonuses go up. If performance drops, bonuses go down, sometimes to zero. You should do something else for salary movement. But what?

Using Skills to Recognize Growth

In Birches Group, we believe that pay movement should reflect one’s experience. As an employee gains more experience in their job over time, they develop a deeper understanding of their role and accumulate the necessary skills that enable them to be more efficient and produce results of increasing quality. Linking an employee’s growth in skills and knowledge to the determination of their salary movement makes sense, and it’s totally aligned. The accumulation of skills and knowledge stays with your employees and can be applied continuously in the future. Skills are like an annuity that keeps paying over and over – like salary! The challenge with such an approach has always been how to measure skills and knowledge. Until now.

Birches Group Community™ Skills provides a framework for measuring experience. Skills uses five skill levels – Basic, Proficient, Skilled, Advanced, Expert – anchored to our job levels. For each job level, explicit measures or milestones are defined, enabling managers to evaluate employees’ accumulated skills and knowledge. Companies can link their compensation administration to the progression of Skills in any number of ways, and provide increases based on employee growth in their jobs rather than performance.

The New Pay for Performance

Employee’s should be recognized for both the growth they demonstrate in their job and their achievement during a performance period. By structuring your pay for performance philosophy using two concepts instead of just one, you can solve the alignment issue and create a pay for performance program that works.

If an organization’s goal is to motivate and engage their staff, the approach must be clear and fair. By linking salary movement to growth in skills and knowledge, you will be paying for increased capacity, while also recognizing achievement. Contact us to learn more about our Community™ approach to recognition and reward.