In today’s fast-paced world, business models are changing and companies are striving to remain relevant. Most efforts to modernise work practices include implementing innovative technologies and creating new job roles, but what about your existing workforce?
If efforts are not made to ensure that your employees not only remain skilled but are capable, then you will soon run into the same problems again. One critical aspect that is often overlooked is capability assessments and capability matrices.
What are Capabilities?
Capabilities refer to processes, behaviors, or abilities that your employees, or your organisation, are capable of achieving. A capability is something with a tangible outcome.
Examples of Capabilities
While at first, it might be difficult to differentiate capabilities, skills, and competencies some of these examples might help:
- Achieving goals
- Meeting KPIs
- Facilitating change
- Managing resources
What are Capability Assessments?
Capability assessments are tools used to measure your workforce’s expertise. Through a series of standardised or custom evaluations, your employees skills can be assessed to determine their current capabilities.
They help shape business transformation and nurture inclusion while inspiring self-reflection. These assessments combine processes, tools, knowledge, behaviors, and competencies. Most importantly, they allow evaluation to be conducted in a non-judgemental manner.
Next read: Learn about competency training for your organisation.
Benefits of Assessing Capabilities at Work
Assessing capabilities comes with multiple benefits. This is a fact-based method for identifying organisational strengths and weaknesses. By pointing out the weak points, the capability assessment process helps your business remain relevant by keeping your workforce at the desired level.
It acts as an input into the prioritisation of your most important business elements. Even better is that it uncovers business opportunities for enhanced growth.
Tip: Learn more about the importance of an effectively trained workforce.
How to Conduct Capability Assessments
Building your organisation’s workforce is one of the most significant parts of business planning. This is where a capability assessment comes in handy. These assessments address your challenges and drive your outcome. They make your workforce more capable!
It’s all about investing in hiring, training, compensation, communication, and other aspects of trade. They increase your competitive advantage within your industry.
To get the most out of your capability assessment, make sure to follow our recommended standard operating procedure.
1. Determine your organisation’s goals
In this first step, ask yourself whether you’re measuring the right things. The best capability assessments measure your organisation’s capacity, vision, and strategy. Remember, not all capabilities are equal in terms of business value.
Selection plays a key role in your capability assessment exercise. In order to quickly find the gaps in your existing team, know your organisational goals. This assessment parameter ensures the potential areas of improvement for your workforce are maximised.
2. Define the assessment criteria
Your capability assessment criteria should affect the dimensions that need to be assessed. For instance, effective communication skills will need to be assessed for roles that require verbal interactions while critical thinking is required when employees participate in marketing brainstorming sessions. These assessment criteria add value to your bottom line and will vary according to the nature of the services you create.
3. Execute the assessment
Once you’ve conducted and defined the assessment criteria, your value service execution assessment measures performance by determining whether your workforce has the knowledge to carry your organisation through. Needless to say, one of the best qualities of a sound assessment process is execution in the right way.
4. Analyse the results
The data generated after executing the assessment should be supported for effective benchmarking. This systems analysis is an important tool for informed decision-making. Leveraging this information will help drive conversations about closing the capability gap between the current state of business and the desired future state. Associating business capabilities with business objectives will help drive results.
Capability Assessment Software
If you’re looking to improve your organisation’s internal processes and management efforts, the first step is to objectively know your current capabilities and responsibilities. A capability assessment software will determine your organisation’s maturity level and highlight any gaps that you may have.
This tool will help you determine whether you’ll benefit most from a standard or customized assessment. Once this assessment is complete, it will allow you to interpret the results and shift your focus towards problem areas. If you’re looking to stay ahead of the game when conducting a capability assessment, then learning and development software could be your best bet.
Cloud Assess is one such software that can help. With the use of our online assessments and capability matrix, it’s never been easier to keep your employee’s skills at the level they are needed.
Grow Your Organisation’s Current Capabilities
Conducting an effective capability assessment requires clear communication, a pragmatic approach, and the use of a well-defined assessment mechanism. The idea is to facilitate discussion and impact change.
Assessing your business is crucial in fostering a shared view of what’s possible in the near term and what could be done in the long term. Capability assessments should exemplify your commitment to change by discussing and addressing your business goals, challenges, and solutions.
Next read: Take your company to the next level with the latest training & development methods.
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