Developing people

Every piece of research into employers' use of performance management finds that employee development is one of the primary objectives. The 1998 Industrial Society examination of performance management in 480 organisations reported that 94% of employers say the main purpose of their system is to identify individual training needs.¹ The survey also found that the most commonly reported benefit of performance management was better training planning. Similar findings were reported by the 1998 CIPD research, with almost three-quarters (73%) of those questioned either fully or partly agreeing with the statement: "The focus of performance management is developmental."²

Among our Case studies , employee development is a major influence on performance management arrangements. HSBC's current system still retains the strong emphasis on employee development that influenced the design of its earlier scheme (see case study 1, Case studies ). Standard Life's "contribution management" system also focuses heavily on staff development. So much so that the company's investment in "Open Access Development Centres" and the other options that support contribution management almost doubled employee development costs, from £7.5 million in 1996 to £13.5 million in 1998 (see case study 4, Case studies ). And Whitbread's implementation of 360-degree feedback is aimed solely at improving the development of its 3,000 managers (see case study 5, Case studies ).

The prominence given by employers to employee development is based on the view that increasing individual competence will make staff more effective in their jobs and so improve organisational performance. Organisations need to foster individual learning not only to change current behaviour but to develop a repository of valuable knowledge on which future corporate success will depend.

Performance management arrangements encourage individuals to engage in learning in a development framework. It aims to fill the gaps between performance expectations and the standards achieved. The performance management process begins with discovering where the individual employee stands in relation to current skills, knowledge and competencies. This process is important; not only does it provide information as to whether the employee has the necessary level of skill and competence to perform his or her job; but it also enables the organisation to plan for future development.

Performance management processes themselves can support individual learning. Preparation for and contribution to the performance review process can be described as learning events. Prior to the meeting, appraisees have to think about what they want to achieve and how they might get there. During the review, learning needs are analysed and specified. Usually the performance management process will include a development plan, often entitled a personal development plan (PDP), which identifies the skills and capabilities required of individuals to enhance their contribution to the business or to meet their career aspirations. Corporate commitment to the achievement of personal development goals and longer-term career aims demonstrates to staff that the organisation values them, which is likely to encourage greater loyalty and motivation among the workforce.

A GREATER FOCUS ON DEVELOPMENT

A 1992 study of performance management by the CIPD (then the Institute of Personnel Management) found that few organisations in the UK had adopted a "development-driven" approach to PM.³ This lack of employee development was also evident in a 1996 survey by the Institute of Management. Of the 909 managers participating, two-thirds said they appraised their staff but only 44% analysed their training needs.⁴ Management Review 2 - our earlier examination of performance management, published in 1996 - reported that the majority of organisations said employee development and reward were equally important.⁵

The picture today is slightly different. Armstrong and Baron, who conducted the CIPD's most recent research into performance management in 1998, said that one of the "broad trends" in the changing nature of PM was a greater emphasis on development.² They offered the following explanation for the shifting focus of performance management from performance pay to employee development:

"In the early days, performance management was associated closely with PRP, which to many people epitomised the 'system'. Lip-service may have been paid to the use of performance appraisal as a means of identifying training needs (to be met by sending people on courses), but the developmental aspects of the process were, strangely, neglected. It did not seem to be appreciated that the greatest added value to be derived from performance management was the role it could play in continuous development and self-development … the philosophy of planning personal development as part of the overall process has now become firmly embedded in the policies and practices of a large proportion of the organisations covered by our research."

MR2 reported several examples of organisations shifting the emphasis on performance management from pay to employee development. One such case was the London Borough of Bromley. Its new performance management process - covering all staff except senior management - no longer includes any element of performance-related pay.⁵ Moreover, performance development allows the borough's employees to develop portable competencies for use either within the council or to pursue a career outside. Employee development is further emphasised by the borough's pursuit of Investors in People (IiP) accreditation.

The addition of competency frameworks (see below) to the typical performance management scheme underlines the increasing significance being given by employers to employee development. Competencies and employee development are closely linked. As we have discussed elsewhere, employee development is the primary purpose of most competency frameworks.

Competencies are often seen as the best way to raise employees' skill levels and to change staff behaviour, because they offer employers a high degree of control over the type of development pursued, ensuring it is line with corporate values and objectives.

Learning

Employers have come to regard employee development as a key feature of performance management, sometimes at the expense of performance-related pay, because today's corporate environment requires a workforce that is both flexible and can respond quickly to change. Contemporary employee development is increasingly broad-based rather than the traditional job-specific training previously considered the norm. Broad-based learning focuses on the general growth of the individual and is usually unrelated to their present or (planned) future role. It differs from traditional training in a number of important ways. All training is a learning experience yet people learn not only from intentional teaching, as with a planned training course: they also learn from performing their everyday work activities, from observing how others deal with situations and from pursuing their own interests outside the workplace. In the past, training has generally failed to harness the capabilities that people acquire from unintentional or unplanned learning experiences. Importantly, broad-based initiatives, such as open learning, tend to be characterised as continuous development instead of one-off training courses.

Developing a broader range of skills is invaluable to both the individual employee and the organisation. Employees can build a portfolio of skills, competencies and knowledge that will benefit them in the outside labour market, while the flexibility and adaptability provided by staff with a range of skills will enable them to be moved around within the organisation as and when necessary. For individual employees, a portfolio of capabilities is becoming increasingly important as the "jobs-for-life" culture is replaced by a greater incidence of temporary contracts and part-time employment.

Broader-based development tends to involve the acquisition of problem-solving abilities - hence the growth of generic competencies - enabling people to analyse the tasks they perform and identify solutions to difficulties. The range of competencies at the Pet Plan Group, a wholly owned subsidiary of Cornhill Insurance, illustrates the type of broad areas of skills that individuals increasingly have to acquire:

1.       Task planning - organising of self, organising of resources, managing projects and business planning.

2.       Decision-making - researching and deciding.

3.       Creativity - enterprising and innovating.

4.       Motivating others - teamworking, leading, training and coaching, and developing others.

5.       Personal effectiveness - achieving, adapting and persevering.

6.       Communication skills - speaking, writing, listening, presenting and influencing.

7.       Business skills - key business processes, understanding customers, understanding/developing markets and understanding finance.

8.       Technical skills - acquiring knowledge and applying knowledge.⁶

The last Pet Plan competency gives a clue to another aspect of current organisational necessity that is fuelling the growing emphasis on employee development; the need to share knowledge throughout the business. It is a widely held view that the people who carry out tasks on a day-to-day basis are best placed to detect areas of improvement. Tapping this experiential or tacit knowledge - the knowledge locked inside a person's head that they have acquired "along the way" - tends to be the key to solving problems and achieving improvement. Ensuring people apply the skills and knowledge that they already possess or subsequently acquire - whether it has been obtained at or outside work - for the benefit of the business is one of the aims of many open learning schemes. Jaguar Cars' employee development programme, which funds individual learning activities pursued in the individual's own time, bases its decision to give financial assistance on whether the proposed development will benefit both the employee and the firm.⁷ The aim of the scheme, as set out in the guidance to staff, is as follows:

"To encourage all Jaguar employees to maximise their individual potential by developing wider skills and/or acquiring greater knowledge and/or obtaining formal qualifications which will improve their contribution to Jaguar."

MR19 - Knowledge management - reported that performance management systems are being adapted to include aspects of individual behaviour that support the expansion of the corporate knowledge base (see chapter four ).

Use of the term "learning" to refer to development that reflects a more holistic approach to staff training is growing. The concept of the "learning organisation", a term that refers to an organisational commitment to encourage employee development and to provide continuous learning opportunities to enable the business to adapt to continuing change and to meet future challenges, has emerged in the past few years. Welsh-based utility Hyder has a commitment to employee development, operating a programme that it calls the "learning journey". The "performance development review" is the starting point for establishing development needs of staff and an understanding of their "hopes and aspirations." Hyder describes this review as: "Where time is taken out by the individual and the person to whom he or she reports, to reflect on their performance in their day-to-day role." The company stresses that development does not mean promotion, but is a "key ingredient in creating an environment which clearly reflect the value of people".⁸

Various learning initiatives and how they relate to the different elements of performance management are illustrated in figure 6.1 .

Figure 6.1: The developmental aspects of performance management

Source: Employee development, Rosemary Harrison (1997)

Corporate change

As chapter two explained, organisations have responded to a continually evolving business environment by embarking on corporate restructuring and re-engineering; by introducing business strategies such as continuous improvement, total quality management (TQM) and customer focus and by elevating people management to greater strategic importance. The success or otherwise of corporate change strategies often hinges on training and development. This was the finding of Management Review 4, which looked at cultural change programmes.⁹ In particular, it found that IiP initiatives, training to build a multiskilled workforce, and the expansion of management skills and competencies were the most common development strategies used to support cultural change. The quid pro quo, as far as employees are concerned, for accepting that change is necessary is the offer of transferable skills that will enhance the individual's future employability.

All change programmes have had an impact to a greater or lesser extent on employee development and learning initiatives. Corporate restructuring exercises usually result in a sharp reduction in numbers of staff, as organisations seek to focus on their core activities. Also, management hierarchies are generally condensed as organisations seek to make organisations less bureaucratic and more responsive to their customers. The effect of workforce reductions and flatter organisational structures is that the staff who remain, particularly those at the lower level, are required to take on a wider range of tasks and responsibilities. Hence there is a need for broader-based employee development.

Individuals need not only to master the new abilities and knowledge required of a multiskilled workforce: they also have to develop problem-solving and decision-making capabilities so that they can successfully manage their own activities, and to develop the interpersonal and communication competencies necessary in a teamwork environment. In traditional workplaces, any training that takes place - and it is, by and large, infrequent - is generally limited to teaching people how to do a specific job in a prescribed way. In contrast, organisations that are pursuing a quality-driven agenda, such as TQM or continuous improvement, need to provide frequent and regular training to update their employees' skills. The emphasis, moreover, is on analytical competencies: skills that enable employees to analyse and solve problems on their own.

EMPLOYEE OWNERSHIP OF DEVELOPMENT

Businesses have attempted to prepare employees for the end of the "jobs-for-life" culture and the advent of limited vertical career opportunities, and the other challenges posed by continual change, with a variety of learning initiatives. Management Review 8 - Learning strategies - identified the three most common methods to encourage employability.⁷ The three approaches were as follows: personal development plans (reported by 81% of the 97 organisations surveyed); National Vocational Qualifications (80%); and open learning arrangements (75%). This suggests that employers are predominantly promoting self-development initiatives and employee ownership of learning as a way of responding to change. We noted in chapter two that part of the evolution of performance management has been to encourage individuals to take responsibility for their own development.

Graeme Cree, education and learning director at Xerox UK, which promotes individual ownership of development, describes the company's attitude in the following way: "We're trying to move away from a conventional approach to development, to one where employees take an interest in and responsibility for their own development and career management."¹⁰ Under the Xerox system, the company provides the raw materials and the individual is expected to take control. The company says that in terms of skills, activities and knowledge, standing still is, in today's climate, the same as going backwards, so everyone must drive themselves forward as much as they can if the company is to stay in the game.⁵ The open learning manager at ScottishPower, the larger of the two Scotland-based electricity companies, explains the rationale behind company's decision to supply staff with development resources as follows:

"[The company was] looking for a new approach which would empower employees and get them to share responsibility for their own development … we have seen a good deal of change in the organisation, a lot of restructuring and reorganisation. To help people cope, we wanted to provide them with the resources to develop as whole people, not just in their jobs."¹¹

There are numerous examples of organisations that have attempted to create and encourage greater employee responsibility for their own learning (see also chapter two ). Exxon Chemicals plans to gain a competitive advantage through a competency-based education and training programme that requires all employees in its worldwide operations to identify and manage their own learning.¹² Abbey National's use of personal development "diaries" is, in part, intended to "encourage individuals to take more responsibility for their own appraisal and personal development."¹³ Likewise, the personal development plans at Tesco are a key element of the company's training credit system that is designed to promote responsibility for self-development.¹⁴

Individual ownership of development is the logical outcome of change programmes that have resulted in flatter organisational structures with more responsibility devolved to lower-level staff. Employees now have to determine their own training requirements in line with organisational needs and their own career aspirations - whether that involves lateral movement or a switch to a totally different direction. Alternatively, the employee acts in partnership with the employer - who provides the necessary support and, possibly, the resources - to realise mutual benefits in terms of individual and organisational objectives. It was suggested in chapter two that in flatter and leaner organisations employers have constructed a new psychological contract with employees that offers them a chance to develop skills that will boost their employability in return for greater output and improved performance.

Self-managed development is based on the premise that people learn more when they have control over what is learned and how it is achieved. Tough, an American writer, has said that learning experiences that are "most meaningful and beneficial to the adult learner are those that are self-designed and implemented."¹⁵ Tough's conclusion is supported by other research that suggests that learning is more successful where the individual has autonomy over the learning process.¹⁶

Employee development is more successful where individual interests are included in the objectives. As a result, they should feel motivated to improve their performance even if the opportunity for vertical career progression is limited by a flatter corporate structure. For example, people who are interested in lateral thinking and new ideas will perform better if both their jobs and development aims involve them using these interests. Over time interests are likely to alter, but an effective performance management system - because of ongoing two-way communication - should be able to identify and react to any movement. Consequently, the individual's employee development plan should exhibit interests that they have expressed.

The ability of individuals to take responsibility for their own development, with guidance and advice from their employers, depends on various factors (see also figure 6.2 ):

Figure 6.2: Self-development process

A contemporary performance management system that focuses on development and apportions ownership of learning to employees will help to achieve these objectives. The performance management process will analyse people's current knowledge, skills, expertise and competency to indicate the areas in which they can improve. Performance management systems attempt to align individual development needs with corporate needs via personal learning agreements - usually jointly agreed between the individual and his or her superior - that also outline what the employee can expect from the organisation in terms of support and facilitation.

The "contribution management" system at Standard Life involves employee ownership of the development planning process (see case study 4, Case studies ). All individuals have development plans in which they and their manager record the agreed ways the person can improve the job performance with support from the manager or wider organisation. The plan can also include information on career development - ways of building skills and competencies to move to another job - which is mainly the responsibility of the individuals themselves. Development activities include formal training, coaching, mentoring by other staff, job swaps and secondments and use of the materials in the Open Access Development Centres (OADCs) of which there are five at main Standard Life centres. Each Standard Life employee is issued with a "Horizons" pack, comprising a PC disk and booklet with tests and exercises they can use to assess their own skills and competencies, values and interests and preferred learning styles. The aim is to give them a clear view of their own development preferences and needs.

The development review and planning process is now described in more detail.

FEEDBACK AND GUIDANCE

There are two necessary enabling conditions for greater employee ownership of personal development: feedback and ongoing guidance. Periodic and precise feedback should be given to each employee so they understand how well, or how badly, they are performing in relation to their development plans. Performance reviews are the most common way of supplying feedback to individual members of staff. These should be designed to provide accurate, reliable and useful information on performance that will aid improvement (see figure 4.3, Chapter four , for guidance on performing appraisals). The process assesses an individual's strengths and weaknesses, agrees objectives and expectations and identifies training and development needs. It should also present employees with a clear picture of how the organisation views their contribution and inform them about their future prospects. And as we noted above, the appraisal process itself should be considered a learning opportunity.

Rosemary Harrison, author of the CIPD's core text on employee development, says that for a review to be developmental "it must have objectives and an approach to appraisal that reflect that aim; the full commitment of management and staff and a consistency with the basic management structure of the organisation; the opportunity for mutual learning and understanding; and a process that emphasises review, diagnosis and action planning."¹⁷

Prior to the development review meeting, individuals should focus on personal priorities and interests, while the manager must be in a position to offer advice even if the chosen development path is difficult or over-subscribed. Development review meetings should be two-way discussions, although the manager or training analyst should focus on listening as the aim of the exercise is to "learn and understand, not to judge".¹⁷ The review needs to identify immediate needs and longer-term development objectives that are in line with the individual's career aspirations as well as the future direction of the business.

Some organisations have separated the developmental and appraisal parts of the performance review process, especially where pay recommendations are the outcome of the latter, in order to ensure the parties focus on development needs. At HSBC, for example, the "development review" takes place outside the annual performance review cycle and is concerned with planning the individual's long-term future development (see case study 1, Case studies ). The bank was clear from the outset that the development part of performance appraisal should be a distinct process, entirely separate from the performance review, which is linked to compensation. In this way, possible conflicts in assessing performance can be avoided and honesty in discussing personal development needs encouraged.

One aspect of employee ownership of development is giving individuals responsibility for seeking feedback from managers themselves. Nortel, the Canadian manufacturer of telecommunications equipment with several sites in the UK, is one company that places the onus on staff to seek reviews with their managers.¹

Guidance is the other key ingredient on which employers need to concentrate if they are successfully to encourage staff to accept responsibility for their own development. Armstrong suggests that employers can encourage self-development if they ensure that learners:

In relation to the first point, the identification of training and development needs often takes place by way of self-assessment or self-awareness activities. Meanwhile, organisational guidance in relation to development needs can be provided by in-house careers counselling or through developmental workshops and seminars.¹⁷ A Department for Education and Employment (DfEE) survey of 582 organisations found that employers can encourage staff to take more responsibility for their own training and development if they provide better advice and guidance (86%); better information (85%); give staff responsibility for identifying training needs (77%), and joint employee/employer funding (69%).¹⁹

Ongoing feedback and support throughout the year supplements the formal review process and provides guidance. At Heathrow Express, for example, managerial coaching and mentoring for staff goes on throughout the year.²⁰ Mentoring is a "highly valued" feature of development for ward managers at Queen Victoria Hospital NHS Trust in East Grinstead.⁷ A ward manager's competency dictionary provides a general framework for development. Mentors, either at senior level in the trust or in outside organisations, provide support and guidance in areas of competence that require improvement. For example, one ward manager needed to develop her understanding of the "bigger picture" (trust-wide issues and objectives) to be more effective. She sat in on a number of meetings and arranged for one of the trust directors to act as her mentor, and has since been promoted to a more senior position.

Guidance on development at BP Exploration takes the form of the "Development map".² The map is a competency model outlining technical and professional skills, behaviours, business skills and knowledge, and corporate leadership competencies. It also gives information on the courses and training opportunities available to staff to achieve competence in these areas.

PLANNING DEVELOPMENT

Personal development plans are the main outcome of development reviews. The use of PDPs as part of the performance management process has grown substantially over the past few years. Chapter two reported the findings of a previous Management Review study, which showed increasing use of PDPs among employers, with more than a third of firms establishing such arrangements between 1996 and 1998.⁷ The 1998 CIPD research found PDPs were part of the performance management process in 67% of surveyed organisations, and 69% of those reported that the planning aspect was very, or mostly, effective.²

The title "personal development plan" indicates a degree of ownership for development: they are unique to the individual who is responsible, along with the line manager, for their construction and for progress in achieving the stated aims. PDPs allow individuals to identify where they want to go and how best this can be achieved within the confines of the organisation, or outside, in their own time. They have the advantage of helping people analyse non-work-related skills and giving them the knowledge to judge how these can be applied in their day-to-day activities or to support future career aspirations and ambitions. Hence, employees benefit by developing a portfolio of transferable skills and knowledge, making them more flexible and more adaptable to changing circumstances, as well as improving their chances of securing alternative employment.

Employers use PDPs because they can be a good way of aligning individual goals with corporate objectives. The Institute for Employment Studies (IES) claims that PDPs are a cost-effective method of encouraging self-development.¹³ Communication between staff and line managers often improves due to the increased feedback and guidance that should form the core of the process (above). PDPs also support the notion of continuous development: longer-term career objectives are generally at the heart of such a plan, and participating members of staff tend to view it, and therefore development, as an ongoing process.

American Express Services Europe provides an example of the corporate aims for including personal development plans in the performance management process.⁵ The company specifies the following three objectives: "Achieving the goals of your current role; achieving your longer-term career goals; and achieving your 'life' goals."

An Abbey National employee expressed the link between personal development plans and continuous development in the following way:

"Personal development plans combine the flexibility to meet individuals' different starting points and aspirations, with the provision of a framework to give guidance and direction. They can also contribute significantly to the establishment of continuous development as a key organisational value."¹³

Planning process

Identifying suitable career development, whether it involves upward progression, horizontal movement or simply improvement in performance in the current role, requires careful development planning. The typical personal development plan begins with an assessment of current capabilities, individual interests and values. Job satisfaction, which largely determines how well someone performs and their level of commitment, rests on whether the activities performed are personally of interest and of value. The assessment of current skills is generally self-generated, although the appraisal process or a development centre - that is, a process to evaluate personal attributes by observing individual behaviour in specific situations, such as performing practical exercises - can help to evaluate these by recording major work-related and external achievements. A skills analysis will often uncover capabilities people did not know or realise they possessed. The process focuses on how the individual accomplished something, and so mirrors the shift to competencies.²¹

The next step is to see to what degree, and with what level of proficiency, the identified skills are used in the individual's current job. The line manager usually performs this part of the process. The aim is to come to a consensus between the manager and individual on what skills are essential for the job and the level of competence displayed by the employee (see figure 6.3, Chapter six  for guidelines). This analysis indicates the skills gap and priorities for development. Knowing the skills people possess enables them to build on their strengths and make best use of those capabilities now and in the future. A skills analysis will also identify those skills individuals enjoy performing and those they are less happy doing. Future development might involve building on those skills that give pleasure, possibly by moving to another role, and, where possible, limiting use of the skills which cause concern.

Figure 6.3: Guidelines for the initial planning meeting

Source: "Personal development planning", Marion Gannon (1995), in The performance management handbook, edited by Mike Walters

Future planning and development goals should be in line with organisational needs. This requires a thorough understanding of current business needs, the strategic plan, trends within the industry and the challenges facing the company.²¹ Gathering information on these and other issues will enable the individual to plan his or her future by engaging in development to enrich or to meet changes in the current role or to move to some other position.

The personal development plan is an action document. Priority should be given to development activity that focuses on improving performance in the current role, while development for the future, especially that designed to progress the individual's career, will be largely carried out in their own time and possibly at their own expense. Gannon says the personal development plan should include information on all of the following:

Harrison offers a similar list, believing PDPs should note:

Practical examples of how organisations use personal development plans are provided by:

1.       Achieving individual workplace goals.

2.       Performance improvement.

3.       Team strengthening.

4.       Personal/career.

Coaching sessions use as an agenda the individual's answers to questions such as:

Problems and issues

IES reports that personal development plans can help to integrate other human resource areas, such as reward and succession planning.¹³ However, using personal development plans for wider personnel practices raises questions about the confidentiality of the information contained in the PDP and may prevent staff from being open with managers in discussing the plan.

Another potential difficulty is that where development centres are used to determine training needs, the costs can rise considerably, making them an impractical method of needs analysis if applied to all employees in a large organisation. Also, although it has been argued that PDPs offer a consistent and systematic appraisal process in which employees have confidence, there is a question mark over some approaches to appraisal (see chapter three ). Appraisal systems typically focus on the current job or future prospects within the organisation, whereas development reviews take a more holistic approach to development needs and include future "life" issues, such as ambitions and aspirations.

Line managers play a central role in planning the PDP and, as a result, they will need to acquire the skills required to provide staff with the necessary support and encouragement and the ability to instill confidence in employees who may be apprehensive about engaging in learning activities. This will entail further costs. Also, line managers, especially where there is pressure to deliver results, will often be inclined to support personal development that is of immediate benefit to the department rather than those linked to long-term ambitions.

Figure 6.4 summarises the pros and cons of using personal development plans.

Figure 6.4: Pros and cons of personal development plans

COMPETENCIES AND EMPLOYEE DEVELOPMENT

The use of competencies as a development strategy produces two overriding benefits for business - "their in-built link to corporate objectives and values; and the overall consistency and common approach that they afford to the management of human resources."²³ The link between competencies and corporate goals also allows the employer considerable control over the span of employee development. The nature of competencies - they are usually tailor-made (see Chapter three) - means that they tend to be specific to the organisation. Competency-based analysis of development needs is aimed at producing effective performance in a role, job or function. It is about establishing compliance to specific norms of behaviour. The competency approach strips a job down into its component parts and provides a guide to performance - what has to be done and to what standard. Although core and generic competencies provide individuals with a range of transferable skills, there is less scope within competency frameworks to pursue development linked to personal interests and values or to the development of general capabilities to improve employability.

As far as employees are concerned the competency approach "helps them to map out a career path and understand how they can develop".²⁴ Aside from developing useful transferable skills, such as communication, customer focus, teamwork and leadership, the development of core or generic competencies may facilitate lateral career progression - an important consideration when businesses are generally becoming flatter, and vertical career options are limited.

Chapter three explained how companies develop their competency frameworks. Bringing staff up to the required standard normally involves the creation of a personal development plan based on an analysis of current performance (see above).

Practical examples of how organisations develop competencies are provided by the following:

"To provide opportunity for all individuals to influence, develop and enhance job satisfaction and skills by means of:

1.       Increased involvement and participation.

2.       Raising awareness of business unit needs.

3.       Encouraging creative attitudes.

4.       Developing levels of self-motivation."

PDMs give equal time (and space on the form which records the discussion) to considering past job-related targets and supporting competency development, and identifying future targets and accompanying competencies. A list of 52 key competencies, which are split into two categories - attitude (including appearance and hygiene, decision-making, flexibility and self-motivation) and vocational (such as analytical skills, discipline, negotiation and verbal communication), is used as a menu from which two or three are chosen for improvement at each PDM.

The individual rates the demands of the job and assesses his or her own level of competency against these. This assessment is then used to draw up a personal development plan to fill the gaps. Information from the development review is used to develop a company-training plan, listing the development options available for each competency. These include work experience, coaching, mentoring, work shadowing and secondments as well as the more traditional courses.

Griffin plans eventually to encourage staff to look at the competencies needed in other jobs to facilitate career planning.

Problems and issues

Competencies can bring significant problems, however. For example, they may give rise to equality issues. IES found that managers of both sexes tended to make gender distinctions between different behaviours, such as intelligence and dynamism (male) and organisation and honesty (female).²⁷

Other problems include the amount of time it takes line managers to assess and document each employee's competency levels. For example, although competencies proved useful in stimulating development activities and improved performance at Blue Circle Cement, some managers complained about the time they took up and that they were a distraction from "the real job". Such managers tended to set non-stretching targets and to hold only the minimum number of meetings - one a year for each member of staff. Other managers have "over-promised" on training and have then been unable to release staff from their day-to-day commitments to undertake it, leading to disillusionment among employees.²⁵

An over-emphasis on the development of competencies might be to the detriment of more generalised capabilities that might be needed in the future. As such it narrows the focus of performance management. Harrison says that competencies should be "integrated into a balanced performance management system, where the need for control does not override the need for development." 17

¹     "Performance management", Managing Best Practice 52, Industrial Society, October 1998.

²     Performance management: the new realities, Michael Armstrong and Angela Baron (1998), Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, London, ISBN 0 8529 2727 4.

³     "An overview of policy and practice", Stephen Bevan and Marc Thompson (1992), in Performance management in the UK: an analysis of the issues, Institute of Personnel Management, London.

⁴     Reported in Personnel Today, 22 February 1996.

⁵     "Performance management", IRS Management Review 2, July 1996.

⁶     "Competency-related pay for teams: Pet Plan Group", Competency & Emotional Intelligence vol 8 (1), Autumn 2000.

⁷     "Learning strategies", IRS Management Review 8, January 1998.

⁸     "Hyder maintains long-term partnership", IRS Employment Review 662, August 1998.

⁹     "Cultural Change", IRS Management Review 4, January 1997.

¹⁰    "Competencies for knowledge workers: Xerox", Competency vol 6 (1), Autumn 1998.

¹¹    "ScottishPower opens the doors to learning", Employee Development Bulletin 94, October 1997.

¹²    "Exxon Chemicals: worldwide education and training", Competency vol 3 (4), 1996.

¹³    Personal development plans: case studies of practice, Institute for Employment Studies (1994), report 280.

¹⁴    "Tesco experiments with training credits", Employee Development Bulletin 86, February 1997.

¹⁵    The adult's learning projects, A Tough (1979), 2nd edition, Learning Concepts, San Diego.

¹⁶    Organisations and the psychological contract, Peter Makin, Cary Cooper and Charles Cox (1996), British Psychological Society, Leicester, ISBN 1 8543 3168.

¹⁷    Employee development, Rosemary Harrison (1997), Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, London, ISBN 0 8529 2657.

¹⁸    Performance management, Michael Armstrong (1994), Kogan Page, London.

¹⁹    Individual commitment to learning - employers' attitudes, Policy Studies Institute (1995).

²⁰    "Heathrow Express takes off", IRS Employment Review 688, September 1999.

²¹    "Personal development planning", Marion Gannon (1995), in The performance management handbook, edited by Mike Walters, Institute of Personnel and Development, London, ISBN 0 8529 2579 4.

²²    "Work-based learning at Riverside Community Health Care Trust", Employee Development Bulletin 82, October 1996.

²³    Competency, annual benchmarking survey 1996/97.

²⁴    "Adams Childrenswear: building for the future", Competency vol 3 (4), Summer 1996.

²⁵    "Rewarding employees in the 1990s", IRS Management Review 3, October 1996.

²⁶    "Tweaking competency-based appraisals: Griffin Credit Services", Competency vol 6 (1), Autumn 1998.

²⁷    Merit pay, performance appraisal and attitudes to women's work, Stephen Bevan and Marc Thompson (1992), Institute for Employment Studies, report 234.