The theme of developing a competent and capable workforce runs throughout all of our services.

We take a holistic view of managing the development of the workforce and we specialise in organisational processes that can get the best from an organisations employees.

We strongly believe that individuals are naturally motivated to do their best at work, and that an organisation’s processes should primarily be focused on unlocking and making the most of this natural motivation.

We believe holistic appraisal and competence development should encompass:

• Knowledge and Skills – in the NHS we work closely with the Knowledge and Skills Framework (KSF) and how it can help organisations define the requirements for workforce competences, and the best approach to engaging employees and measuring their application of these competences. We also understand how knowledge and skills relate to Occupational Standards and Qualifications in the Qualifications Credit Framework, (QCF), and can help you to make the most of the QCF approach to motivate your staff to undertake structured development, and critically evaluate your competency development activities.

• Values and Behaviours - as the organisational cultures and personal attributes that “unlock” competence and create an environment in which employees can give their best to the organisation. We can help teams to make sense of espoused organisational and cultural values, by translating them into positive and negative behaviour statements that make sense day to day, for all staff. We can also help teams to agree ways of constructively challenging negative behaviours, and rewarding and reinforcing positive behaviours.

• Personal, team and organisational targets and performance management – including cascading and balanced scorecard objectives to deal with both short-term and underlying performance challenges. We can help to implement a practical performance management process that integrates with competency management to create an appraisal approach which makes sense, and is useful, to all employees.

• Managing  an individual’s knowledge and knowledge networks – in an increasingly knowledge-driven world, the knowledge that an individual can apply to their job (whether that’s knowledge inside their heads, or available via their personal networks) is increasingly becoming the differentiator between average and great performance.

The implementation and future embedding of appraisal within organisations is not just a project implementation but for many a cultural change initiative that requires a mix of capability to deliver effectively. We have found that a number of organisations struggle to implement high quality appraisal. There are a variety of reasons behind this including:

• “We’ve struggled to get the implementation of appraisal off the ground.”
• “We’ve managed to increase the quantity of appraisals, but our staff are feeding back that we’ve lost the quality.”
• “We’ve not really tried to implement appraisal in full as it feels too complicated and we’re not really sure the best way to achieve it.”
• “Our managers see appraisal as a distraction, rather than a core part of their management toolkit.”
• “We’ve managed to get the appraisal embedded within a few key areas of the organisation but are struggling to engage other groups.”
• “We have a lack of resources required to implement appraisal.”

If any of these statements resonate with the situation within your organisation then we can help you to move forwards towards full implementation of appraisal and help to really embed appraisal and a competency framework within the culture of your organisation.

Our appraisal training courses cover the full range of theory and practice of motivating and managing employees to align their activities to organisational goals. We also provide specific feedback skills courses for managers, as we see accurate and constructive feedback as the most important element of a good appraisal and competency management system.

We also have deep expertise in creating an open feedback culture in an organisation, and thereafter implementing a 360 degree feedback programme, to help teams and individuals receive accurate information about their competence, development and performance in order to make positive changes.

For more information about implementing effective competency frameworks, please contact us.