The HR Director of a national museum wanted to update employee performance management – the existing system was generic and did not reflect the behaviours and competencies that were core drivers for the museum’s development.  The museum didn’t have staff within the HR team experienced in systems development and I worked with the HR Director to understand where the gaps in performance management were.

As part of the new system, I created appraisal paperwork that ensured behaviours and competencies were covered.  I grouped roles into four ‘job families’ and held focus groups with staff from each job family.  These meetings tested the concept of job families and relevant competencies.  I then created a competency framework with both generic competencies that applied to all 1500 staff and several job family specific competencies.

I was then asked to implement the system and ran sessions with recognised trade union representatives to demonstrate the framework and explain how it would be used. I then rolled out use of the framework across all four sites using members of the focus groups as advocates. The framework was successfully adopted and was evaluated and found to increase the understanding of the importance of behaviours and values as well as objectives.