How to Use the Skill Will Matrix in Strategic HR to Improve Workplace Performance
When we think about HR, we often think about the individual meetings along the employee journey. We think about employees that get written up. We think about uncomfortable conversations. We think about rules and regulations and policies. However, HR can and SHOULD be so much more than this. It can play a pivotal role in aligning workforce capabilities with the business needs and objectives. In this article, we will dive deeper into strategic HR and how to use a Skill Will matrix to not only meet the needs of the business but also improve workplace performance.
Table of contents:
Understanding the Business Needs
Pinpointing Your Required Skills and Minutes
Assessing Your Workforce Skills Vs. the Business Needs
Introducing the Skill-Will Matrix
Plotting Your Workforce on the Skill Will Matrix
Identifying Your Model Employees
Are You Having the Honest Conversations?
A Crystallized Framework for Your HR Strategy
Identifying Single Points of Failure
A View of Your Organizational Weak Points and Strengths
Understanding the Business Needs
At the heart of effective HR management lies a profound comprehension of the organization's core functions and objectives. Every organization has a purpose for why it exists. Part of that purpose is that it solves a problem for a client. In order to solve that problem, it needs to execute a series of processes. HR's role begins with deciphering these business needs and understanding the blend of skills and talents required to fulfill them.
For example, in order to get the accounting file done, you have to do the accounting. For that accounting to be done you’ll need a level of paper pushing, a level of actual skill to figure out whether the ones and twos add up, and somebody to review the file on the other side. You need your naggers, you need your doers, and you need your reviewers. You probably need about an hour of review time versus four or five hours of doing time, and however many hours of nagging time to get all the information. To summarize, do you know how much time of what skills are required for your business to operate? That is the start of understanding the business needs when it comes to strategic HR.
Pinpointing Your Required Skills and Minutes
Let’s jump into this further. It is critical that you have some sort of understanding of what kind of work you deliver and how much time it takes to deliver that. If I were in your shoes right now, I would stop and look at the schedule of work that you’ve completed over the last several months. At the very least, take the last couple of months, ensuring there’s no seasonality in it, and reflect on the skills and minutes required to do the jobs that your organization did. This thorough understanding of the business ensures HR can optimize workforce resource allocation and identify areas to improve workplace performance.
Assessing Your Workforce Skills Vs. the Business Needs
To bridge the gap between organizational objectives and workforce capabilities, HR must conduct a thorough workplace assessment of existing skill sets. In other words, a competency matrix. This helps you understand what you actually have in your business, between the jobs you do and the different skills required to do that job.
Most people struggle to fill out a straight competency matrix because competency comes down to not only technical proficiencies but also behavioural competencies, such as business and customer acumen, and people and leadership skills. Some call them hard skills and soft skills. We have found that the easiest way to overcome this challenge and get there is through a Skill Will Matrix.
Introducing the Skill Will Matrix
You’ll notice that this looks like a simple two by two and within it are four different quadrants. On the Y-axis sits skills and on the X-axis sits behaviours. Every organization has a set of skills that matter more than others, and every organization has a set of behaviours that they cherish more than others. This workplace assessment exercise provides an important head start to seeing all of your people in one place.
Plotting Your Workforce on the Skill Will Matrix
When plotting your staff in the four quadrants, there is one golden rule:
25% of your people need to go in each quadrant.
The reason is not to say people are good or bad. The reason is to get a baseline by which we can improve, and it's to force an honest conversation between what matters and what doesn't in your organization.
Important Note: This will be uncomfortable for you the first time you do it. Recognize you are not judging people to prove. You are not judging people to put them in a place they can never recover from. You are plotting people on a visual so that you can see where they are today. It's only by seeing where we are today that we can improve for tomorrow.
The Top Right Quadrant:
In the top right quadrant are your high performers. Those are the ones that have high skill sets and they embody the behaviors you want to see in the organization. That's normally the easy quadrant to fill out.
The Bottom Right Quadrant:
Just below that quadrant is the one where you have the people who have the behaviours you love being around. They're a joy in the organization, but they don't quite yet have the skills of the high performers. This is an important quadrant. This is normally the quadrant where you can spend the most amount of time training for the most amount of return. These are the people who want to be here, want to learn, want to develop.
The Top Left Quadrant:
This is one of the most difficult places to get right. The top left quadrant is where some of your most talented people sit, but they don't always embody the behaviours or values of the organization. Where are those people?
The Bottom Left Quadrant:
The final 25% in the bottom left are the people who don't quite have the skills and don't quite have the behaviours that the organization wants.
Do you have 25% in each quadrant? If you can’t do that, you are not looking critically enough. The first step to becoming a leader is understanding the world the way it is, not the way you wish it was.
Identifying Your Model Employees
Now that you have everybody placed in the different quadrants and had an honest conversation with your senior leadership team, or just with yourself, I want to add a little bit of nuance. Across the top, you will see that the top 10% are the critical talent you have in the organization. We need to understand who sits there. They're the rainmakers in the legal firm. They're the top sales person in the professional services firm. They're the top mechanic on the line. They're the top painter that you have. Where does that critical talent sit?
On the far right-hand side, there’s a line that you draw straight down, where you see those that exhibit the behaviours the most. Those are your highest potentials. Where that line crosses in the top right corner is your model employee today. The person you would point to and go ‘Look at the way they show up every day.’ Normally that is 2-5% of your organization.
Are You Having the Honest Conversations?
It's important to see the top 2-5%. It's also important that we have the honest conversation on the bottom left corner that encompasses the 2-5% of your organization that you've been avoiding a difficult conversation with. I worked with a restaurant once and we had this conversation, and immediately you could see the blood drain from the faces of the two owners as we went through this exercise. They knew as they plotted the people on there that their head chef needed to go. They had been tolerating and avoiding that discussion for two years. This exercise spurred them to go have that difficult conversation. After that conversation, the kitchen operated at a totally new level. They had eliminated problems that they thought they would have to deal with and improved their entire workplace performance.
A Crystallized Framework For Your HR Strategy
By understanding your critical talent and your high potentials, you get a crystallized view of what you value. Having conversations about why somebody is better at something than someone else and why that’s more important to your organization, provides great insight into your business needs and overall objectives. You will start to see the technical, business, and behavioural competencies that matter. This holistic view is the start of getting a handle on HR and your business.
This has been game-changing for so many business owners I’ve worked with, and here’s why: They were feeling a pain, and they saw that pain through an individual they believed was underperforming. So, often when you get to this final view, what we see is that it was not in fact under-performance, but the wrong work for the wrong person. Or they were asking too much of one person for where they currently were in their career. This holistic view is so critical for the next decisions you will make as a leader.
Think about it this way. If you have enough customers for four mechanics, and you're driving with three mechanics and two juniors, and you're always either thinking the mechanics are too slow or the juniors aren't keeping up, you're probably right. But you're not right on the solution. You do not have enough of one competency to deal with the load you have.
There are a lot of ways to improve the processes of an organization, but as soon as you do that, you need to understand the people who are going to execute those processes and whether you’re asking too much or too little of them. Once you can see this framework, you can see, do I have enough of what I need?
Identifying Single Points of Failure
When completing the Skill-Will and competency matrices, you will see one more critical thing: Any single points of failure. Do you have a skillset tied up in a single individual that could leave? As a small and micro business, you will not have the luxury of having all of those single points of failure with redundancies. You won't have the luxury of having backups in all the positions. But you need to know where the potential risks are.
A View of Your Organizational Weak Points and Strengths
Once you see your competency framework, you will also be able to see where your organizational weak points and strengths are. We worked with an organization that didn’t realize all the strengths they had in one area. Once they realized this, they were able to take the sales team, sell more of that service, and fill those people up with more of what they liked to do and were good at. As soon as you get this holistic view, it will give you all kinds of opportunities for change. It will effectively improve workplace performance.
Conclusion
HR's strategic role extends far beyond administrative tasks and regulatory compliance. By embracing a holistic approach to HR management, organizations can effectively align workforce capabilities with business objectives, driving sustainable growth and success. From workplace assessments to nurturing talent and informing strategic planning initiatives, HR plays a pivotal role in shaping the future trajectory of the organization. By prioritizing the understanding of business needs and fostering a culture of continuous improvement, HR professionals can truly unleash the potential of the workforce and propel the organization toward its goals.