The Royal Wedding: an example of effective recruitment, onboarding and succession planning?

We don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s a wedding in the UK on Friday. Kate Middleton, a young woman with no royal blood, is marrying Prince William Mountbatten-Windsor, second in the line to the throne of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Barbados, the Bahamas, Grenada, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Antigua and Barbuda, Belize and Saint Kitts and Nevis.

In the recent film The King’s Speech, the actor Colin Firth, playing Prince William’s great grandfather George VI – before becoming king – says ‘We’re not a family. We’re a firm.’ So Miss Middleton, in marrying into the Mountbatten-Windsors, is not just joining a family: she is being inducted into a powerful, well-resourced and long-lasting organisation, a brand.

So perhaps this can be a reminder to look at your organisation’s policies describing the recruitment of family members of existing employees, and describing the onboarding and induction of new recruits?

We can see Miss Middleton joining the Mountbatten-Windsors as an example of long-term strategic succession planning. If current plans come to fruition, she will be the Queen Consort – wife of the King – in some years’ time. This is a position of considerable power and influence. So the extended courting period between Miss Middleton and Prince William has been an extensive assessment centre and onboarding process, to ensure that she is right not just in her relationship with her future husband but also in her future job.

Oakwood wish the happy couple, and indeed their entire organisation, a fruitful and productive future. And we wish all our students an equally effective set of policies and practices.

Create your own competencies or use the research of others?

There are good arguments for every organisation creating its own competency framework, as explained in the best practice journal paper referenced in this blog a couple of posts ago. The main benefit is that such organisation-specific competencies can reflect the unique culture, values, mission, vision and strategic objectives of a mature and successful organisation. But what if your organisation is not mature enough to have developed it’s own unique culture etc.? Or what if your organisation has been created in the image of another organisation (and doesn’t want to just use the competencies that the ‘parent’ organisation uses)?

Then it makes sense to use good quality work done by others. Take a look at:

Bartram, D. (2005). The Great Eight Competencies: A criterion-centric approach to validation. Journal of Applied Psychology, 90, 1185-1203.

Professor Bartram describes an extensive research programme to identify a set of robust general management competencies that should apply in most organisations. The research was undertaken by the occupational psychology company SHL, and is often used by that organisation to promote the sale and use of its products and services. Here at the Oakwood Club and Alumni Network blog, we’re not in the business of recommending (or criticising) other organisations, but we like the ‘Great Eight’ competencies described in the paper, even if they are used by organisations as no more than a starting point in making their own competency framework.

Take a look at the paper. I could help you get your competency framework started.

Staff surveys: lessons from Market Research

Staff surveys are used a lot but they are not always useful. Running the same annual survey gives us year-on-year comparison data, but the questions can lose meaning or focus as the organisation changes. After all the work of designing, administering and analysing a new survey, we often end up with information that either doesn’t help (‘That’s not we really wanted’) or seems trivial (‘We already know that’). Part of the problem is that we don’t know the difference between what Market Researchers call Qualitative and Quantitative research.

Quantitative research (‘quant’) collects data that can be simply coded numerically: typically, ‘Yes’, ‘No’ and multiple choice responses to straightforward questions. Quant needs large samples of respondents (hundreds) because large samples enable statistical analysis that yields reliable and valid results. The trouble is, quant can be time-consuming and resource-heavy, and if the wrong questions are asked then all that is wasted. And since quant is often all we do, the process of surveying staff gets a bad reputation.

Qualitative research (‘qual’) collects data that is not easily quantifiable or numerically coded. It usually concerns people’s ideas and feelings, which can be complex and not easily summarised. It’s often collected in in-depth interviews or focus groups: the answers to open questions such as ‘Why?’ and ‘How?’ Qual is done to ‘scope’ or explore a range of opinions. An objective, experienced and emotionally intelligent qual researcher can get a vast amount and variety of information out of a few meetings. They can put questions in their organisational context. They can also ensure that respondents reflect upon questions before answering: they don’t get ‘gut feel’ or ‘knee jerk’ responses. But the number of people (staff and key stakeholders) involved is nearly always too small for their answers to yield statistically meaningful results: we can’t measure the relative popularity or importance of the ideas and opinions collected.

So what’s the answer? Do both!

Begin with qual. Use an experienced and objective outsider to scope the area you want to survey. Gather the full range and variety of issues. Produce an interim report. Then – if your sample is large enough to enable meaningful statistical analysis – write your quant questions, distribute your quant questionnaire (email, paper and online), collect and the interpret responses and write your final report. This way you’ll focus your staff survey on what’s really important, and the expensive part – the quant – will not be money wasted.

Quant AND qual. That’s how professional Market Researchers do it.

How old is your competency framework?

Competency frameworks are funny things. If they are well-designed, fit the organisational culture and work well they have a way of taking over HR processes. Pretty soon they form the basis of every recruitment campaign, every learning needs analysis, every development plan, career plan and succession plan, every performance management review meeting...

But it’s almost as if they work TOO well. When organisations use ‘joined-up thinking’ to link all these processes with competencies, then the levels of competency (skills, knowledge, abilities) of employees tend to improve. Two to five years after being introduced, the levels, and even the competencies themselves, start to look out of touch with the increasingly high levels of behaviour and performance demonstrated by employees. They need revision and updating.

Of course, if your organisation’s competency framework (you have got one, haven’t you?) ISN’T being used to improve recruitment, development, performance management and reward, then the levels of competence of employees could well have NOT changed since the framework was introduced. And if it’s not being used in any structured or integrated way, then it’s probably not being evaluated either.

So there’s the dilemma: really good competency frameworks need (expensive) regular reviews and revisions, while mediocre or under-used competency frameworks can be left alone for years.

What’s yours like?