Skills: The Supply Question

The world is moving along, life is slowly resuming, and companies are continuing to hire and promote, which means HR departments are processing new-hire/promotion paperwork, opening/closing requisitions, reworking organizational charts, and yes, trying to manage performance evaluations.

Shortfalls You’ve Already Noticed

If you’ve been on the reviewing side of the evaluation process, you might have observed that performances are often undercut by the absence of basic or necessary skills. A motivated employee might have the right mindset to succeed, but their overall effectiveness is limited by what they don’t know… by what they haven’t learned. Added to this is the possibility that skills development has been a lower priority since the early months of 2020 – after all, just adapting to remote work became a sizable priority for thousands of companies.

A Delay You Can’t Afford

A challenge associated with that skills gap is the time-delay aspect. You don’t always know where an enthusiastic employee might be missing out on essential training until after the performance has started to suffer. The promising news for you is that your HRIS has clues and outright answers to offer, if only you’ll take a moment to listen. An integration of your software tools, the ones meant to house selective data sets pertaining to employee performance, will reveal “dark matter” indicators of what your team members should be learning/practicing to keep current with their professional obligations and growth goals. It’s just a matter of knowing how to interlock those systems and where to train your attention once the integration is complete.

Communicating the Findings Ahead of Schedule

Your next step is to articulate what you’ve found in real-time. Setting up regular one-on-one meetings ahead of any formal review process will ensure your team members will have the notice they need and the essential direction to begin plugging any holes in their skillset(s).

The structured meetings that follow will take on a current quality, one that indicates a steady progression of skill refinement and a consistent evaluation of daily output. Rather than allowing deficiencies or “dark matter” liabilities to accumulate, only to be revealed during semi-annual conversation, harness the information your systems have already been aggregating, and do so in a way that leads to actionable growth measures.

Carrying It All Forward

Remember that performance evaluations are not terminal, they are part of natural person-to-person discourse which allows for important things to be communicated naturally and in ways to which your team will prove receptive. Engineer your skills development plans around the hard data but communicate their specifics in ways that correspond with organic exchanges. Extract the “dark matter”, make a training plan, share it, and carry the plan forward.

Let The Growth Happen At Its Own Pace

Drawing from your data reserves will be simple once you know what to extract. The difficult part will be not rushing ahead with training programs that should be carried out patiently. Take the intuitive path and build slowly – you won’t regret having taken things in stride.