As an employee and as a team leader I have never been satisfied with the yearly appraisal system widely spread in large companies. I propose to complete it with additional tools for Department managers, team leaders and Human Resources managers.
The yearly meeting with your team leader defines objective for the year after. A year later you may end up concluding that your project and professional activities didn’t provide you with the opportunity to realise your objectives. Even worse, the yearly appraisal system might be connected to your yearly salary review policy and benefit plan. In such case, not meeting your professional objectives might impact you financially.
In the yearly appraisal system, people leaving the company are not often interviewed to verify how the objectives were met, how the company ensures that it will reach the objective associated to this personal targets ? And what about the resources engaged in these personal objectives which are not met, are they reallocated to the other team member to meet the team objectives of the current year ? The team will observe the results only in the next yearly evaluation, in the best cases.
The key of agility for companies evolving in complex environment with a rapid pace of change is to continuously review the need for team member skills:
- The identification of the team skills needed to complete projects of the pipeline allow the company to identify the future skills required by the projects about to start.
- While projects are running, team members can lead frequent one on one meetings with each of the team member to understand their appetite for learning new skills to face the current challenges of the project delivery. It is also the ideal frame for detecting in the team who can support training of other team members for the challenges identified.
- Project retrospective are occurring at regular interval of time in the iterative project management that Agile is fostering. When the project challenges are not addressed by the current team due to a common team lack of a certain skill, the project manager can try to find these resources in the other teams or raise a need for recruitment to the Human Resources.
- Project post-mortem closure meetings are eventually the place for collecting lessons learned. Amongst learnings, the evaluation of the skill sets required to address such a project is source for continuous improvement for the company team member competences.
All these source of information can be gathered in a MeWheel radar skill map. The skill radar map can be handled by team managers And department managers with the support of Human Resources team. A radar skill map features the current skills sets measured in the continuous project feedback described above and the ideal skill sets needed by the company and the team member to thrive. It allow to visual easy identify the areas where improvements are required and the progression toward the goal. MeWheels radar skill map is a tool of PeopleBlendIT to support the acquisition, the follow-up and the implementation of the Human Resources strategy by department managers with the support of Human Resources managers.
