I came across research commissioned by Middlesex University for Work Based Learningthat found from a sample of 4,300 workers, that 74% felt they weren’t achieving their full potential at work due to lack of development opportunities. While this research included workers form a variety of industries, my own conversations with customers and industry leaders indicate a similar failing where project-focused businesses are concerned. Development really should be at the very center of any human capital management strategy – instead we see investment in recruiting without an equal investment in the initiatives that will keep those key leaders and star project players at the top of their game and driving successful outcomes.
Think about it. By acting on a development plan you can impact everything from productivity to the billing rates of your employees. For example, if one of your growth plays includes diversifying your revenue streams by pursuing different types of projects, your development plans should be preparing your employees to meet the new and unique needs of those different contracts.
Want to have a serious impact on your organization? Development plans, when leveraged consistently, can help you to:
Facilitate alignment between your business goals and employee performance and growth
Prevent stagnation in your workforce, which results in increased employee engagement AND improved client satisfaction
Identify the key strengths (and weaknesses) of your employees and course-correct to utilize those strengths or address the gaps
Gain the competitive edge that you need to win the next contract or project by keeping your workforce on the cutting edge of your industry
Attract even more great talent by cultivating a development culture that helps establish your employer brand in the talent marketplace
Let’s assume for a second that you’re convinced, how and when do you start creating and implementing development plans? In short, the day your employees walk through the door for their first interview. After all, you learn key information that can help inform the earliest version of a new hire development plan during the interview process, so why wait?
It’s not as difficult as you might think to get started and the pay-off will be significant. Here are 5 tips to help you kick off the process:
#1 Define (and understand) your business strategy
Whether your business is in a growth phase or is staying relatively stable in size, there are always firm-wide strategies that require employees to stay at the top of their game. Understanding those plays is an important piece of implementing a development planning process for your employees. Aligning strategy with employee development offers a much higher return on your investment and prepares the workforce for the known challenges coming their way.
#2 Get to know your employees
You took the time to define what the business needs from its workforce, now it’s time to talk to your employees. Learn what your employees want from their careers. Take the time to objectively assess (and understand) you employees’ skill level and career aspirations. No assumptions. A star project player may seem like a logical project manager, but maybe they would rather stay an individual contributor. Gaining a basic understanding of who wants what on your team can go a long way toward building development plans that make sense for the employee AND for your business.
#3 Identify potential (and readiness)
Once you understand what types of roles your employees want to move into, it’s time to assess whether they are ready for their next step. Readiness is about more than general skills and experience. Every seasoned manager had to start somewhere, but I think most of us would admit that those first couple of years as a manager were some of the most difficult. A dose of humility and a growth mindset are also important indicators of readiness when it comes to moving an employee into a leadership position for the first time in their career, for example.
#4 Development is about more than certifications
Many of the industries we serve have very credentialed workforces, so tracking and maintaining the certifications, licenses, and even security clearances needed can be a handful. Regardless of tenure, career path, or level within your business, your employees need so much more than certification tracking. Start your development plans during onboarding, and leverage them throughout the employee life cycle to address gaps, and to prepare employees for stretch projects and growth.
#5 Create plan, measure success, adjust and repeat
A development plan is not a static thing. It is absolutely NOT something that you create once and leave on a shelf for the remainder of the employee’s tenure with the company. Development plans should be fluid and reflective of the changing needs of your employees. If you are executing your development plans, than your employees are constantly growing out of them. That is as it should be. As an employee progresses, their aspirations may change and the skills and competencies required for advancement may change, too. Be prepared to keep that dialogue open and continuous; then adjust and repeat the process.
KEY TAKEAWAY
Development plans aren’t just about creating leaders; they are about supporting your employees in their own aspirations and providing a framework that makes them successful. The success of your employees is your success. As your employees mature in their roles and feel your support, they’ll take on those stretch projects and become even more skilled. You’ll end up with a culture of development; a workforce full of people with a growth mindset. You will have cultivated the leaders, the innovators, and the integral contributors your company needs to build a long-lasting legacy of growth.
Our Client Spotlight series features casual, interview style conversations with current Brilliant HR clients to share best practices learned firsthand through their experience with Brilliant HR software. This Spotlight features Corey Gilchrist, Director of Compensation and HRMS at Shamrock Foods Group.
Key Takeaways
Effectively introducing Brilliant HR’s Compensation tool and best practices
Building relationships to cultivate employee loyalty
Personal experiences showing the value of having a thorough compensation practice at your organization
Research conducted by AIHR in 2018, showed that HR metrics & analytics is the least effective area of human capital management. This trend has remained largely unchanged over the past five years. The lack of progress in this area is certainly not reflective of need or desire. Most HR professionals we talk to are hungry for data and metrics that help them measure the success of their recruiting and employee engagement efforts. Why the struggle? In short, outdated or non-existent technology is a major factor. The vast majority of firms surveyed as part of Deltek’s Clarity research pointed to the fact that HR solutions have not seen significant investment in the last 5-10 years. If you are evaluating solutions to help you win, manage, and deliver successful projects, human capital management absolutely should be part of the equation and investment. It’s the people behind the project delivery that truly drive growth and success.
Are you asking yourself how to become more data-driven in your human capital initiatives? Maybe you’ve started to invest in learning and development for your employees or to renew your focus on your employer brand to attract fantastic project leaders. Wouldn’t you like a way to measure the success of those initiatives? With access to the right data, analytics, and reports HR leaders can champion strategic goals that align with the big-picture direction of the firm and have a real impact on both employees and firm-wide growth. Your ability to answer some of these key questions has a direct impact on your company’s profitability and overall success.
Are you able to determine the most effective recruiting channels for different positions?
Can you assess the quality of your new hires?
How good is your organization at identifying and assessing top performing employees?
Do you really know how your employer brand is perceived by employees and candidates?
DASHBOARD WIDGETS
The main dashboard gives users access to key pieces of information important to their role. Depending on a user’s role within the solution, they will see information relevant to the recruiting process, managing direct reports, or administering the solution.
For example, our recruiting user will see information that will help them manage the recruiting cycle. Alerts for actions pending, such as approvals, onboarding sessions, or requisition creation, are presented. This is followed by dashboard widgets specific to recruiting. Here, we can see how many candidates are in each cycle, with the option to drill down and easily access all new resumes. We can track where our requisitions are, and again, drill down to see which requisitions are still in the approval process. We can also track current onboarding sessions and drill down to view details of existing sessions, or initiate onboarding for new hires.
Users can configure the information they’d like to see here. If a user wants to change the layout of this screen, they can drag and drop widgets to a new location. They can remove widgets that they don’t use and add widgets to take their place. There are several widgets to select from, such as a resume search or new resume listing.
If a different user logs in, who primarily uses the solution to track information related to their direct reports, information relevant to that user’s role will be presented. The manager will see alerts related to certifications, appraisals, and other items related to their employees. This user can easily view and create continuous feedback sessions, view team competency fit, track employee goals, and view performance appraisals.
STANDARD REPORTS
There are many standard reports included in the solution that can be consumed in two different ways. First, users with permission can access built-in reports through the solution’s navigation. The second way is through the reporting tool designed , to provide custom report writing capabilities, but that also includes additional standard reports. This time we’ll focus on the built-in standard reports.
BUILT-IN STANDARD REPORTS
Users with the appropriate access will see the built-in standard reports on their navigation pane. The categories of reports available will vary based on the Deltek Talent Management modules that you have implemented, so this example may look different if you aren’t yet live with the complete Talent Management solution.
In each module, you’ll receive a listing of standard built-in reports, further broken down into related categories. You can hover on a report title to see what the report is designed for. For example, the Quality of Hire report lists hired individuals within a specified time frame and includes their referral source, original type, requisition hired against, assigned recruiter & hiring manager, date of hire, latest performance score (pulled from Performance) and overall potential (pulled from Career Development).
When you run the Quality of Hire report, your first step is to select filters, then you can see the results of the report. Many of these items come from Talent Acquisition, but in addition to just seeing where hires are coming from, you can also see which channels produced top performers and high potential hires. This information will then help you to determine which source produced the most applicants in addition to the greatest number of hires who are performing well.
Standard built-in reports can be exported to CSV, PDF, and Excel formats.
Why Your Firm Needs to Implement Continuous Feedback Now
Continuous feedback and goal-based performance management strategies can help to more quickly and easily drive consistency in employee development and engagement in your organization. This modern approach is a key strategy for businesses that have employees constantly rotating on and off projects. Continuous feedback discussions can drive productive performance management conversations between employees and managers that in turn, can help to drive employee engagement, productivity, and even profitability.
We like to talk about continuous feedback at Deltek, the performance management method our teams use. If you’re new to the continuous feedback method, it includes ongoing feedback between two or more parties. These active discussions provide opportunities to check-in, build relationships between employees and managers, foster innovation and creativity, and address action items or issues. Sessions can focus on various aspects of performance; such as initial feedback when a new hire joins the company, general check-ins throughout the year, project-based feedback around an employee’s involvement in a project, growth opportunities for the employee, progress tracking toward goals, salary discussions, and performance review discussions.
One of the top challenges facing firms cited in Deltek’s Clarity surveys year after year is “Employee Retention.” Poor retention results in the constant need for firms to recruit new employees, especially in fast-growing organizations. When organizations are stuck in recruitment mode, it can be nearly impossible to advance strategic initiatives that would actually have a positive impact on employee engagement and retention. It can be a vicious cycle if you get caught in it.
Consider this:
According to Gallup, only 30% of employees strongly agree that in the last six months, someone at work has talked to them about their progress
Additional research shows that people aren’t motivated by outdated annual performance reviews. Only 21% of employees strongly agree their performance is managed in a way that motivates them to do outstanding work
Only 19% of millennials say they receive routine feedback. An even smaller percentage of millennials (17%) say the feedback they do receive is meaningful
As managers and leaders, one of our top priorities is to maximize the output, productivity, and efficiency of our people. We know the key to achieving this is retaining, engaged employees who know what to do and how to do it. So why are we not talking to our employees more regularly? Often times, even when feedback is being provided, there are issues with the quality of that feedback. Managers may be biased, causing their feedback to come across as being tinted with favoritism or inconsistent in terms of timing and delivery. Feedback can be perceived as untimely, irrelevant, or lacking in specificity if it isn’t given at the right point in time (such as at the end of an employee’s engagement in a project).
Many managers and employees experience fear and discomfort around feedback discussions. Often there is uncertainty around how to broach topics that need to be covered or what type of reaction it will trigger when you do. Some managers fear the effect of the discussion on their popularity and may feel uncomfortable with being direct and/or critical. These types of discussions are MUCH easier and more comfortable when the exchange is relevant, timely, and objective. This also helps to alleviate concerns around being too critical. Regular and consistent interactions can go a long way to help employees and managers develop a good rapport for making even difficult conversations less scary and intense.
My colleagues and I have benefited immensely from the continuous feedback model that we use. I know your employees will, too.
