Highly tailored, developed in close conjunction with the client’s HR Team ‘Enabling People Managers’ is a blended programme equipping line managers with the knowledge, skills and confidence to address conversations and situations that can be viewed as more challenging or potentially ‘difficult’.
Overview
In many organisations, line managers are required to conduct or lead formal and semi-formal reviews on matters ranging from interviewing and selection, appraising performance, to those such as ‘return to works’ or even grievance and misconduct investigations.
Whilst some of these matters are viewed in a more positive light than others, all carry the potential for consequence if managed ineffectively, even if only at the level of missing out on a good potential candidate or de-motivating an employee who feels they have not been given a ‘fair hearing’.
The Prescience ‘Enabling People Managers’ programme is designed to remove some of the mystique that can be associated with such reviews and works at two levels;
- Providing participants with the knowledge and understanding of the organisation’s people processes and procedures and where information / support can be accessed
- Developing participants’ skills and confidence in conducting such reviews and in applying what are often the same techniques in differing contexts
Utilising a blended learning approach, incorporating client specific case-studies and co-facilitation with client HR team members, key elements of the programme are as follows:
Programme Outline
Pre- work
- Pre-attendance briefing with the participant’s HR Business Partner covering the client’s people management processes / procedures and where to access information
- A self-assessment quiz to help participants identify any remaining gaps in their respective procedural/process knowledge
Workshop (3 days)
- Understanding our behaviour and its impact;
- Introduction to Transactional Analysis and TA role-plays
- Managing communication impact; the EQUIP communication framework and application
- Set-up of action groups and participant peer-to-peer observation
- Participants are provided with ‘observation sheet’ guidelines and are assigned a colleague to observe and provide feedback to during the workshop
- Getting the right person on-board and competency interviewing;
- Competency interviewing skills practice and phased feedback review
- ‘On-boarding’ and helping people perform in a new role
- Assessing performance ‘readiness’ – Managing Ability / Managing Motivation
- Key actions to effectively support new starters / people taking on a new role
- Managing performance appraisal
- Participants generate a list of key challenges faced when appraising staff performance
- Participants discuss strategies and tactics to address identified issues and practise these with colleagues and facilitators
- Prepared case-study skills practise
- Working in two sub-groups, participants undertake a number of prepared case-study scenarios covering an under-performance issue, a raised grievance, a return to work interview, and a question of potential misconduct
- The role of the staff member in each case is undertaken by the programme facilitators to afford the correct degree of authenticity / challenge for the participants and to provide consistency
- Post each practice scenario:
- Colleague observers and the facilitator share feedback with the individual undertaking the ‘manager’ role
- Participants discuss and determine what their next course of action would be, based on the information they have gained from the discussion
- Determined courses of action are reviewed in plenary discussion with the HR co-facilitator providing observations / recommendations regarding the proposed next stage actions and the advisable outcome.
