Businesses change and evolve – it’s a fact of life.
It can be stressful for employees and managers alike, especially when there isn’t a clear plan for getting from where you are today, to where you need to be tomorrow.
Successful organizations need employees who can adapt to changing markets, new technologies and new ways of doing business, and most importantly, be equipped to participate in the change process.
But how do you equip your employees to do this? Competencies are a powerful tool to communicate a change in performance expectations, and here are some recommendations on how to do this.
As with any change initiative, it is important to start by figuring out where you are going. Once defined, you can use this vision to answer some key questions that will help paint the picture of what your “ideal” employee group looks like, and what competencies they need to have in order to be successful.
Using this information, you can build future-oriented competency profiles that will provide a roadmap to success for each job in your organization. These job profiles form the basis for your planning and HR management activities.
The hard part comes next: determining how your employees measure up. To be successful, this should be done in a systematic way.
The required skills, competencies, knowledge and educational requirements need to be clearly defined, and your current group of employees will need to be evaluated against these requirements.
We recommend using a competency assessment or building personal employee inventories of competencies that can then be matched to the new job requirements.
The results of the employee assessment can be used to create individual action plans for addressing any gaps in competencies identified. Options include:
>> Netflix, for example, takes a very strong stance on this. In a business environment where technology changes at an incredible pace, making sure all employees have the right skills and competencies to do their job is imperative to building a high performance workforce. Netflix chooses to offer generous severance packages to employees who no longer meet job requirements.
Throughout the entire process, it is important that employees be kept up to date about the change underway, and be treated with respect and dignity.
Always remember to present the change in a positive light and point out the benefits for both employees and the organization.
The aim is to come out of the process a better organization, prepared to meet the challenges of the future and to achieve the organization’s vision and goals.
Want to learn more about using competencies? Get started with our Competency Toolkit:
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Post last updated: June 26, 2019.