- Development of a company-wide competency model that aligns HR tools and processes with the corporate vision
- Top-down incorporation of senior management’s strategic considerations for the future
- Bottom-up integration of employees’ perspectives on the company’s specific characteristics to foster acceptance
- Five clearly defined and operationalised competency areas form the basis of all HR tools
The brief for one of our clients – an IT consultancy and end-to-end service provider specialising in the tourism sector – was to underpin the company’s existing vision with a competency model, thereby enabling a strategic and sustainable approach to HR work.
We tackled this challenge using both a top-down and a bottom-up approach, so that – naturally – on the one hand we could incorporate management’s strategic considerations for the future from the top down and reflect these in the competency model. On the other hand, however, we also adopted a bottom-up approach – thereby fostering acceptance – to capture the perspectives and internal specifics of the company from the employees’ point of view and integrate these into the model. This basic idea gave rise to a project approach and a procedure comprising 3 clear project steps:
- Analysis phase
Analysis of existing tools, such as job descriptions, and the conduct of semi-structured interviews with the managing directors and division heads, several middle managers, and selected employees from all parts of the organisation. - Concept phase
Consolidation of the results from the analysis phase, creation of a rough draft, and discussion and refinement of this preliminary concept in a series of workshops with the company’s managers and staff. - Implementation phase
Approval of the basic concept by the management team and the design and implementation of the competency model in collaboration with an agency.
In addition, communication throughout the project, including the launch announcement by senior management and the communication campaign for the introduction of the competency model.
The result is a competence model that serves as a clearly formulated and versatile compendium: each of the five clearly defined competence areas is assigned three sub-competences, which are in turn specified by behavioural anchors.
Through various workshop sessions and feedback from managers and staff, it became clear that the new competency model resonates strongly with users and achieves a high level of identification and acceptance. In practice, the competency model forms the basis, for example, of the company’s internal talent management, particularly in the process of identifying and selecting talent for the company’s three career paths – specialist, project and leadership careers – as well as in the development programme built upon this.
