Best strategies in skills utilisation

1. Best strategies in skills utilisation A report summary Graham Thom and Alasdair Yuille 12 January 2010

2. Introduction • Our task • The challenges • Key findings • Reflections

3. Task • To conduct a set of case studies • Focussed on the key sectors, plus construction • Reporting • Overview report • Individual case studies • Updated literature review, more impact focussed

4. Challenges • Identifying suitable cases • Convincing companies to participate • Measuring the benefits

5. Findings - motivation • Driven by: • senior management and the culture and values that they wish to be held by the company • a response to market forces, including staff attraction and retention, and the desire for a quality product • In all cases the implementation of practices had evolved over time • to meet specific issues as they arose in the business • affordability • Important to have buy-in and leadership by managers at all levels. • the ethos with which actions are pursued appears as important as the individual practices themselves

6. Findings - activities • No really big surprises! • A wide range of practices undertaken by businesses interested in getting the best from their staff. • Our findings are broadly consistent with the wider literature: • appraisal systems and regular communications about the firm are the most common practices • there is more frequent reporting of employee involvement and getting the HR practices right than of reward and commitment practices • no silver bullet • Although… differences around market strategy and needs of production (cuts across sectors)

7. Findings - measurement • Firms strongly associate their performance with skill use practices • in one case company turnaround was seen to have been underpinned by the introduction of such approaches • However, most firms do not formally measure the impact of skill utilisation on bottom line business performance • Firms do often monitor proxy issues such as • recruitment and retention • staff motivation

8. Reflections • Underpinned by a lot of issues that are not about skills per se • … more about organisational development • Important to have building blocks in place • skills use then focuses on • job and production process design • learning transfer Multi-skilling • job rotation

9. Contact Graham Thom Associate Director SQW Consulting t. 0131 225 4007 e. gthom@sqw.co.uk w. www.sqw.co.uk