By Holly MacDonald

Many HR practitioners are currently experiencing pressure to manage costs, especially since we know the majority of any organization’s costs are tied up in HR.  If there are pressures on your HR department to make cuts or changes, there is a methodology you can use to make long-term changes that will positively affect the organization and may reduce the likelihood of short-term staff reductions which provide immediate savings on salary costs, but may hamstring the organization’s longer term performance. 

ISPI’s human performance technology (HPT) methodology is used extensively by performance consultants to analyze and change workplace behaviours.  The critical question central to this method is “what do you want people to do differently”?  This is an outcome-based question and allows organizations to make changes that will have immediate impact but long term success.  It is a powerful question and focuses attention on both the desired behaviour and the outcome.  For example, in a sales organization, this might translate into how the sales force sells (consultative style, processes, use of technology, etc) instead of just what they sell (how many sales, how high each sale should be, etc).      

At the core, this model/methodology is based on doing a gap analysis – defining current behaviour and charting desired behaviour and identifying the gap between the two.  Many organizations have not documented the desired behaviours and fewer have linked them to the outcomes.  It is a straightforward activity, but is often assumed that what your want people to do is already “part of training” or “in the policies and procedures”.  We all know how dangerous assuming can be.

How to use this model?

This is a good time to gather your key stakeholders together and talk openly about how things are working within their business units.  Let your group know that you are taking steps to improve individual performance in the organization to optimize the substantial investment in HR and need their help in making smart recommendations.  Ask them to list their 3-5 biggest performance challenges within the organization and start dissecting one of them.   Ask as many questions as you can think of to get a really good picture of current and desired behaviour.  Here’s some sample questions that you can ask:

1. Describe current performance – what are employees currently doing?
   1. Which roles are you referring to when you describe this performance?
   2. What are employees typically doing or not doing?
   3. How common is this?
   4. Does this performance change during the process– are there some places where employees demonstrate the desired performance?
2. Describe desired performance, including quantitative information (time, money, size, etc) and qualitative information about the performance. 
   1. Identify individuals/groups where desired performance already exists
   2. Have employees ever done the desired performance?  What was different?
   3. Can you pinpoint parts of the process where this is more/less apparent

Continue to define until you have a full picture of what is currently happening and what the stakeholders want to have happen.  A simple comparison will show what the gap is.  With a little bit of effort, you could also identify the cost to the organization, which may get people’s attention.  If people did behave as you wished them to behave, what sort of impact would it have on costs or revenues? 

The next step is determining the cause: why is there a gap?   If I had a loonie for every time that I was asked to create training for something that was not a training problem, I’d have a lot of loonies!  Training is linked to skill or ability and there are many other reasons why people aren’t doing what you want them to do.  The request usually sounds like this: “I want you to create a training course on X, because sales people aren’t doing X and they need training on doing this”.  Being a performance consultant, I know that there are other possible reasons why employees aren’t doing X – it’s too cumbersome, they are not rewarded for it, they are rewarded for the opposite behaviour, they didn’t know that they were supposed to, they have not had feedback about their performance, and so on – so our job is to figure out what the cause is.  Whenever I experienced resistance to this step, I reminded them that as a professional it behoved me to do my due diligence before spending money on training, especially when it involved external vendors.

Take the gap analysis and for each item on it, explore each of the individual and environmental aspects.  Narrow the causes and then you can focus on interventions that will change behaviour and performance.

Holly MacDonald is a Human Resources Strategist with over 15 years of demonstrated success in developing learning, talent management, employer brand strategies, coupled with solid project management techniques, to craft workable, scalable, business oriented solutions.  Holly is an independent consultant and can be reached at holly@sparkandco.ca.