How can you create a winning corporate culture? What values do you want to impart in your workforce? How is all this related to competency management?
Values identification is important. You need to make sure that the values fit your organization’s culture. You also need to integrate these values with your workforce’s proficiency. Agreed, this is a complex process, and managers often find it hard to integrate them. But when you are successful, the employees will have a better road map to work for the organization’s vision.
SkillsDB has a comprehensive competency management system with access to an extensive library of hard and soft skills. Our system is designed to make this complex process easy and accessible, just a few simple steps, and you are set.
Figuring out the way to identify competencies and define Culture and Values
Your employees and their way of doing things play a vital role in shaping organizational culture. Employees are however made to believe that Organizational Values are defined at the top and implemented below. However, we often fail to understand that both employees and organizations play an almost equal role in shaping their values.
Whatever decisions you take to create a corporate culture will affect your employees. But employees’ traits and values will also blend in and shape the organizational culture further. Therefore, it is imperative to formulate a competency management system, which ensures that your culture, goals, values, and people are strongly integrated.
A Typical Employee Life Cycle in Competency Management
Here are the five stages of the employee lifecycle and competency management will be integral at each step. This system helps business leaders to keep an eye on integration between individual competencies and corporate values.
Recruitment
The process starts with recruiting, i.e. bringing fresh talent to the organization, getting the documentation, setting up the individual in the system, providing access to the organization, etc.
Onboarding
At this stage, the newly recruited talent is introduced to the organizational resources and information. This phase primarily works towards helping recruits navigate to their job role. Additionally, it helps them to understand the organizational culture and environment better.
Also Read: New Hire Training
Performance Management
The third step is fundamentally an evaluation step. It enables employees to self-evaluate themselves and then be evaluated by their managers. The feedback an employee gets from their manager and vice-versa creates a communication channel. Additionally, this also helps fresh recruits to understand the organizational values and culture in a better way. Similarly, the feedback from the talent helps the organization to identify the weak spots in their processes and improve them.
Also Read: Skills Matrix – Step by Step
Training and Development
This is a stage where the organization utilizes its resources and “invests” them in their employees to develop a culture from scratch. This process is often termed as professional development. Many organizations don’t have a standard coaching method for a specific job role. In such cases, organizations need to create new methods. Especially those which integrate the core competencies of the employees and the organizational values.
Also Read: How to best Implement a Competency-Based Training Program
Career Pathing
The needs and wants of any individual will change with time. Any organization first needs to acknowledge these needs and wants. Next, we need to design a career growth plan as per the employee’s desire and the organization’s goals. In the likelihood of employees leaving, good succession planning goes a long way in providing stability. Whenever an employee leaves, he/she leaves with the creativity and talent they were giving to the organization. But they leave behind the values they helped shape. Great Organizations can create a process where employees when quitting the organization, leave something valuable for the rest.
Also Read: Good people will leave you! How can a good succession plan help?
The company culture cycle is a continuous, never-ending process. The employees are first exposed to the values of the organization and the expectations from them. With time, these employees will give feedback and modify the company values based on their ideas. Just like the life cycle of a herbivore, which eats all the grass that comes out of the soil. Over the course of its life cycle, the herbivore will regularly return nutrients to the soil. Similarly, a strong organizational culture keeps strengthening the organization by adding value continuously. Competency management helps out every step of the way.
Identifying different types of Competencies
What are the different types of competencies and the differences between them?
Job-related competencies are like necessary skills required for a specific job. For instance, having enough skills to work on a computer or having specific industry-related skills are considered job-related skills/competencies.
Core competencies, on the other hand, are more like soft skills such as work ethic, teamwork, empathy, relatability, adaptability, etc.
Let’s get a more detailed view of core competency with a practical example- customer service.
Customer service requires a lot of empathy and relatability. Organizations often work hard to turn customer service into a value and then teach it as a core competency to their staff. You can give your employees training but sometimes it is still not enough. One great motivator is rewarding your staff, making them a stakeholder in providing excellent Customer Service.
Conclusion
Creating organizational values and then integrating them with these core competencies is not as easy as it might look. The management has to work side by side with that talent. There isn’t any shortcut for success, at least not in this case. The theory is simple; organizations need to integrate these two factors at all levels. Management who pay heed to this and evolve will achieve success.
To ensure this, identify what your values are and how you can align them with the competencies you want in your staff. It will transform your business in a much better way and that too for the long run. Once you have zeroed in on that, SkillsDB with its competency management solutions will do all the heavy lifting. Our solutions can create systems that will enable organizations to design, implement, reshape and re-implement. Leaders will be able to communicate what they are planning, what values do they want to promote, and where their organization is heading. On the other hand, the fresh recruits will have a better idea of what they are signing up for and what is expected from them.
Also Read: Best Practices in Skills Management Techniques
Also Read: The 4 pillars of writing competency definitions
Further Read: Skills & Competencies, Similar but Different