Burning Questions: How Do We Inventory Skills Without Causing Anxiety?
As part of our on-going Burning Questions series we’re diving into the topics, concerns, and questions that we hear most commonly when we speak with HR professionals and leaders who are embarking on skills management initiatives.
This week we’ll be taking a look at a question that has major implications for both the success of your initiative and the mental health of your employees: “How do we inventory and assess skills without causing anxiety?” It’s one of the most common questions we get when we talk about implementation, and it’s tightly connected to the perceptions people have about the role of HR and their security at the organization.
What’s Making Your Employees Anxious?
Change can be intimidating and for many organizations the activities around a skills survey can be seen as a prelude to a big change like layoffs, a reorg, or even a merger or acquisition. This is a natural, albeit frustrating, response to this type of initiative – but it can be avoided.
4 Steps You Can Take To Put Your Employees’ Minds At Ease
We’ve identified four tactics that can be put in place to help head off a negative reaction to a skills management initiative.
Address the elephant in the room
Pay attention to the language you use
Include what’s in it for employees
Communicate frequently
Let’s take a quick look at how each of these can be implemented to put your employees’ minds at ease and help ensure that they’ll take a positive, engaged approach to participating in the skills management rollout.
Address the elephant in the room
If you think your employees are going to have concerns, take the time to acknowledge and address them directly – and do it upfront. Put yourself in their shoes and think about how you would perceive the rollout – that way you can empathize with them, identify the questions they’ll likely have, and control the narrative.
Pay attention to the language you use
The language we use is a big part of the way that we’re perceived by others. Even something as trivial as calling something a “survey” as opposed to an “assessment” can have a big impact on your employees’ reactions. Just think about the images each of those words conjure up – a survey is non-threatening, maybe a bit bureaucratic, but generally inoffensive. An assessment on the other hand makes the person feel like they’re being tested and just serves to put people on edge.
Include what’s in it for employees
Skills management initiatives don’t only benefit the company – done right, they also have a positive impact on the individual. By inventorying the skills of their workforce, HR reps can more easily identify great internal candidates for new roles, managers can justify budget for trainings or certification courses, and project leaders can more tightly align an individual’s skills with the work that they’re doing on a day-to-day basis. Talk about a win-win.
Communicate frequently
Last, but not least, don’t go radio silent after the initial rollout. Embarking on a skills management initiative should be an ongoing, iterative process and you should communicate frequently with people as you analyze your findings and refine your processes.
There you have it – four things you can do to help ensure a positive reception to your skills management rollout. Now it’s up to you to get the ball rolling.
If you want to learn more about this topic and the other burning questions that we’ve been hearing from people like you, download our eBook, “7 Burning Questions in Skills Management.”