Evaluate Roles and Responsibilities

When did you last evaluate the roles and responsibilities (job descriptions) of employees? For many organizations – the answer is often “not since the employee was hired!”

Employees’ responsibilities change after they have been in the job. They have likely taken on new responsibilities as they have become competent in their role and it is seen that they are capable of doing more. They may be assisting other employees in other roles. Particularly over the last few years when many organizations downsized, employees took on multiple roles and additional responsibilities. Many employees take on new tasks with no formal training provided; effectively learning on the fly.

As a best practice, around the time of annual performance reviews, review with employees their current responsibilities in comparison to what is written on the job description.

What are they doing above and beyond their regular job description?What projects have they undertaken?What new roles do they serve within the organization?

And…

What do they need to help them succeed?

In collaboration with the employees, determine what skills and knowledge are needed for them to be successful with the new responsibilities they have undertaken. How well do their current skills and knowledge match to what is required? Is training needed? Do they need time to concentrate on a particular project to meet a deadline? Do they need more management support to be successful?

I have learned that in most cases employees do not mind taking on additional and new responsibilities. What they do mind is having projects or new tasks dumped on their lap with no consideration for what they already have to do and with no training in order to be successful.

Provide the employee with an updated job description to capture what they do and, frankly, to reflect reality. It is difficult to evaluate workforce needs when you don’t have a true understanding of the work the employees are doing within the organization. You can’t figure out where the needs are when you are unsure of who is doing what within the organization.

Understanding exactly what new roles and responsibilities the employees are doing enables for more effective performance review sessions overall.

When possible and it makes sense, consider updating job titles and adjusting salaries to accommodate permanent changes in employees’ job responsibilities. Even when salaries cannot be adjusted, possibly a bonus can be given to the employee for going above and beyond or public recognition of their extra efforts and their new role/responsibilities.

If the organization has significant changes occurring, consider evaluating job descriptions on an annual basis. If not, at least every 2 – 3 years makes sense.

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Early in 2014: Conduct a Business Process Review

As a best practice, consider evaluating your business processes at least once a year. As your business changes – grows or contracts, launches new products and services, hires new employees and gains new customers – your business processes will need to change or be updated for the business to continue to succeed. Too often organizations do not set aside time to evaluate their business processes with an eye toward improvement in how the work is getting done and the customer’s needs are being met. Let’s face it – businesses are changing every day! There is no way the same processes that enabled for past success will enable for future success. I’m not suggesting a complete haul-over of your busienss processes are necessary on an annual basis, sometimes even the smallest tweaks make such a difference!

As a leadership team, take these best practice steps to develop a plan to evaluate current business processes with a goal of refinement to ensure the organization can continue to succeed in a competitive, global marketplace. 

Begin by selecting those critical business processes that have not been evaluated in at least a one to two year period (choose no more than 2 – 3 initially)Pull together small project teams that include managers and individual contributors from those areas where business processes need to be reviewed (e.g., if you are evaluating your sales processes, including sales managers and individual sales team members as well as individuals from marketing and operations and other areas that impact/work with sales.)For each project team, select a team leader and provide them the following high level agenda to get started: Document current process (if already documented – ensure accurate and reflects what is actually being done!)Look for where the process can be improved for efficiencies and increased effectiveness.Design a new/updated process to enable for those efficiencies and increased effectiveness.Test it out!Make any adjustments and finalize the new process.

Ensure someone from the leadership team checks in frequently on progress, answering questions and providing support. Once the company goes through the process once, it is easier the next time around!

Make reviews of business processes an annual process within your organization!

Best practices for success while enabling employees to work remotely

 

Recently we have heard about the debate whether work at home/work remotely makes sense and some of these organizations have appealed all the possibilities of remote work. I find it surprising when companies do not want to learn about work at home options. And this is to be managed (we'll discuss this shortly), the great advantage is the ability to expand the pool of potential talent for your organization. Why limit your search to local or worry about moving expenses (and prospective employees, or even want to move), and instead allow the ability of employees to work remotely?

Of course you will need to establish processes and procedures for employees, work at home, in order to ensure that it has the consistency and working. Processes in place also soothes managers, who may not be used for at-home workers and I wonder if people are really working or goofing off.

Considered necessary to ensure success for employees working at home

Technology plus support for creating and solving problems with technology (computer, phone, software, including virtual meetings, etc.)Access to the sites or other internal Web site for sharing information, downloads and transfer dataClearly referred to the responsibilities of employeeRegularly scheduled in check (individual meetings) of the employee's immediate managerEnsuring time in the Office on a regular basis (even if only a few times a month) allow you to build relationships and staying connected to the mentor help othersA employee (preferably in peer or external to the Department) to support, answer any questions and concerns

For new recruits, as well as best practices, bring them to the Office for at least the first one or two weeks of employment. Putting them into other (always nice to learn about working with face to face), allow them time to build rapport and get a feel for the organization.  It also allows you to "feel" people skills and may need more support when working remotely.

Initially assign employee projects that allow them to work with other than getting things done on their own. This allows them To be better acclimated to the Organization, and their associates.

What are Your Goals for Mentoring

Prior to beginning to develop the plan for your in-house mentoring program, spend a bit of time developing the strategy for the program. The goal is to develop a program that makes sense for your organization and the people you are trying to support with mentoring. Often organizations roll out a mentoring program without consideration of what they are trying to accomplish by having a mentoring program. When I asked one client why they were interested in launching a mentoring program, the response was “Because our competitor has one and we should too.” I’m not saying the client shouldn’t have a mentoring program, but they need a good business case for one and not simply because they competitor has one.

Consider the answers to these questions listed below in order to develop your strategy for a mentoring program and thereby ensure you develop a program that works to meet organizational goals.

What challenges or issues are being faced within the organization that mentoring may be able to address?Which individuals would be suited to participate in a mentoring program – either as a mentor or the mentee? What is the ideal profile of a mentor? What is the ideal profile of a mentee?What is the experience with mentoring within the organization?What is the expected outcome or changes from a mentoring program? What is it expected that mentees will do better as a result of being mentored?How would a mentoring program link to the organization’s strategic long-term goals?

As a best practice, get the leaders of the organization together for a strategy session to respond to these questions. For a few clients, I do well when I send the questions out beforehand and then we discuss as a group –it gives them time to process and think. For yet others, I do better when we meet and talk through the questions as the connversation is lively and everyone participates and shares freely.

Developing a Project Strategy

This is the year one of my clients, a senior project director within his organization, decided the company will have a strategy for the projects they complete! A review of projects completed over the last 5 years indicated to them that, while many projects have been successful, many still have not been successful. In further review of the projects that have not been successful, the client noted the following:

A number of them never should have been launched as they did not have the resources, budget nor interest to support them and enable for successOthers appeared to be planned poorly and failure was attributed to that poor planningOne was a pet project that had significant investment money from leadership, but no clear understanding of what it was supposed to accomplish

During a meeting, we discussed the need to prioritize projects. Especially since in the upcoming year the organization had a number of strategic objectives to expand the business into new geographic areas and to launch a number of new products. Previously, projects selected were not “officially” mapped to organizational strategic objectives. In the past, some projects were able to be linked back to strategic long-term goals certainly, others could be “squeezed” to fit, and yet others had no link at all to a strategic long-term goal.

The client decided that in order to reduce the number of projects being done to a manageable amount but to ensure that those projects that were selected enabled for achieving goals, the following should be reviewed for each project before it was launched and resources assigned to it:

The project must help to achieve one of the organization’s strategic goals, either in full or in part (in part means it must at least move the goal forward.)Expected project benefits must outweigh the project costs (positive ROI.)The budget exists to complete the project.The proposed scope is achievable.Resources are available to complete the project (with the majority of resources coming from internally.)Technology is available to launch and complete the project.

Projects that meet the requirements above will be further prioritized as follows:

5 (most impact) to 1 (least impact)

Increases revenueImproves profitabilityReduces expensesSupport customer needs/increases customer satisfactionHas a benefit to more than one division/business unit

It was decided among the leadership team that for 2014 this process for selecting and prioritizing projects will be used, with the expectation that it will need to be fine-tuned. However, it is believed this is a good starting point to ensure the right projects are selected. Certainly considering that the organization has not had a way to select and prioritize projects previously, this was a step in the right direction.

Align Training Plans to Organizational Goals

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
 By Gina Abudi, on January 15th, 2014

I was speaking with a client at the end of 2013 who was working on finalizing training plans for 2014. He stated that there appeared to be so many training needs and desires based on a recent employee engagement survey that he just didn’t know where to start! He had a limited budget but wanted to satisfy as many people as possible. He asked my advice on what would be most important to cover in training based on my knowledge of the organization. I asked him what the organization’s goals were for 2014 and beyond. He listed a number of goals that were discussed at a mid-year strategy session. And there was our starting point I told him!

As a best practice, align training needs to what is required to meet organizational goals. This provides a number of benefits, including:

Making a better business case for training investmentEnsuring employees are equipped to help the organization meet goalsProviding employees skills they will need for the futureEnabling the organization to better meet long term goals by ensuring employees have the skills and knowledge to do what needs to be doneEngaging executives and leaders in training (since by investing in training of employees, they will be able to meet their goals)

In order to align training needs to organizational goals, you will need an understanding of the long-term goals of the organization and will need to understand what is required to reach those goals. For example, in my client’s case, the organization is a pharmaceutical organization that has expanded significantly in the last year and half; more than doubling their employees and they expected to grow over the next few years. Additionally, they were moving from research to product development, an area in which they had not worked prior. Two needs were identified as essential:

The ability for individuals to take on management roles within the organizationThe ability for individuals to manage projects with tight deadlines

This prompted my client to look at the following skills and levels of competency:

Supervisory skills (many of those who would be moving to management roles were scientists and researchers.)Project management skills (a disciplined approach to managing product development projects would be essential in the future.)

Based on this research, he would be able to develop comprehensive training programs to help the organization meet their goals.

To summarize, as a best practice human resources and other training professionals should be meeting with executives and other leaders to understand strategic goals – at the organizational level but also strategy for each division or business unit. Use this information to develop a listing of necessary skills and knowledge that will be needed within the workforce to help achieve those goals. Determine whether those skills and that knowledge curently exists within the workforce and if it does, at what level (beginner, intermediate, advanced). Build your training plans based on getting employees the skills and knowledge needed to be successful. Certainly you may need to recruit new hires with special skills for some roles, but build up the skills of your current employees when possible. These individuals already have the institutional knowledge and understanding of the culture and bring much to the organization.

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What is the impact of being able to manage your time?

have a number of tasks to be performed on a given day! Is just too much to do to achieve the goals and objectives, what we need to do. It seems easy to say only limit what you do. but it's rare when we can do.

Here are a few common mistakes that we all make that distract us from the focus and implementation of our goals:

Not keeping ' to-do ' list of priorities, not to be doneNot management and interruptionsProcrastinating on tasksTaking on more than we can do in the time they accepted periodNot breaks planning tasks effectively workNot/projects to be completed (with sufficient time to do) trying to multitask

I have found that when we know that these errors and stop their conscious, we can more easily go past them! Here is one of best practices in order to try that effectively worked for me – I hold a priority "to do" list that have to be met. Priorities in the following two ways:

The greatest impact (customer focused vs. personal) effort that is required to complete a task

Priorities in any way that works for you. Each and every day to create a "to do" list to be completed that day. I set aside time to work through this list; lock time on my calendar. At this time to send my phone, voicemail and keep my e-mail off, so I'm not distracted.

Since I am a morning person "," fill my more complex "to do" items in the morning.