Staff Needs Prioritised Over Managers?

Just before Christmas, David Woods wrote an article for HR Magazine stating that "Managers have vowed to put the development needs of their teams a top priority in 2010, ....."

When I was employed as a sector director in a building consultancy, I tried very hard to encourage the right development of staff, but found the process to be very hard going due to the resistance of HR and more senior managers, which resistance was basically caused by cost.

The cost never seemed to be seen as an investment.

Now that I am not employed, and looking at staff development from a different perspective, I have come to realise, as other managers seem to have done, that investment in the development of existing staff will improve long term income through several factors; e.g. reduced churn, more efficient use of resources, better understanding of client needs, and a more focussed approach to value for money.

The biggest problem that employers have is assessing the baseline from which development is to start. Speaking from my own experience of being assessed, most assessments are carried out subjectively, with no baseline, and no defined objective. Any development of me was through my own requests. No assessor ever suggested that I should attend a Presentation Skills seminar, I had to suggest that myself. Other development requests were ignored, year after year, even though I knew the particular training was vital to my success, and therefore my employer's.

The main problem is a complete lack of role definition. I was employed as a project manager. When I started there was no definition of that role, nor was there any definition of what sort of person made a good project manager and a good employee. The only definition was a list of the services a project manager had to provide to the client. The Quality Assurance Certification produced tick boxes of what had to be done to satisfy the services, but, until now, there was no system in place that allowed an employer to specifically define not only the qualifications and experience of a potential employee, but also the "fit" into the ethos of the company.

Now there is such a system, that allows the employer to precisely define the sort of person they wish to have as an integrated part of the company. That definition is used as a baseline for the development of any employee through appraisals, it can be used to promote staff, to recruit staff, or, in these horribly difficult times, to terminate staff. The beauty of this system is that it is objective, rather than subjective, and meets all equal opportunities requirements.

Details of the system can be found at www.pariprofile.com.

The report that David Woods referred to was issued by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI). This report also highlighted three key barriers which may prevent managers from doing what they know they need to do. These were; lack of time (75%); reduced budgets (42%); and a reduced workforce (33%).

I would have thought that a reduced workforce would have made it easier to set up a good system, and I know that the system I referred to takes very little time to produce each definition, and the cost of doing so can only be measured in time, as there is minimal money involved.

I really hope, for the sake of employees throught UK, and for the sake of each and every employer, that this resolution to develop staff is pursued vigorously.