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Auditing your organisations's capability
We have noticed an increased interest in organisations to undertake
a 'capability audits'. So what exactly is a capability audit?
A capability audit is an assessment of the strengths and vulnerabilities of
an organisation i.e. it assesses whether the organisation has the
employees to get the work done, now and in the future.
The audit process gathers information from a number of sources to identify
those areas that require attention to build and maintain capability. These
areas may include recruitment, retention, management, use of contractors
/consultants, training and culture.
Typical questions that are covered for each of these
areas are:
Recruitment:
- are we attracting the right/best people?
- are we hiring the right/best people
Retention:
- what
is our turnover rate and what are the reasons for loss?
- what is our
profile of turnover?
Management:
- what is the quality of our
leadership?
- how is leadership selected and developed?
- how well
does management achieve productivity from people?
Development:
- how do we identify and develop talent?
- is our development
effort increasing our pool of talent or just replacing the talent that we
lose?
- is training activity focussed on areas/people that will
produce high impact?
Contractors/consultants:
- how effectively do
we employ external resources to complement our internal, rather than
replace a shortfall we should address internally?
- how effectively do
we transfer learning from outsiders to insiders?
Culture of
the organisation:
- how well are our capabilities integrated across
the organisation?
- how quickly can we deploy/redeploy capabilities?
- how effectively can strengths in one area be leveraged into another?
Some organisations need
to spend time and effort collecting information for an audit. Most,
however, will already have access to the information they need, the audit
processes just requires them to look at it in different
way.
Typical sources of
information include:
- strategic goals in the
organisation
-
performance against objectives
- customer
satisfaction
- staff numbers
- where they are employed and
turnover
- education levels
- experience
- culture /
satisfaction surveys
- participation rates in training / education
- skills / competency assessments
- management / key personnel
interviews
The advantages of undertaking a capability audit are
potentially:
- better use of HR / HRD time and resources
- avoiding
future talent shortages
- higher levels of
productivity
- better retention
For more
information on the types of questions you would ask yourselves during
a capability audit contact Leonie.
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