‘Roadblocks: Think again.’ [part 2]

Our quest to build better organisations (for people interested in organisational development, skill-based work and all HR practitioners)

After establishing the mindset that skills will be the leading dimension (link to part 1 ????) in all the work we do, we had to prove with the different use cases that it was possible. I always think of use cases as the frontend, the visible side, and any type of architecture or API as the backend.?

Most companies that grow need at some point a job architecture to structure, compare and scale work. For HR practitioners, a job architecture is directly connected to levels, grades and titles and is widely used for compensation and career pathing purposes.

But we were looking for more: Looking for a backend or a talent API that could support us with all the frontend use cases along the employee lifecycle and that combined employee experience and organizational view.

That is why I will be using the term ‘architecture of work (AoW)’ when explaining the type of backend we built. For 1,5 years it was underground ?? work, literally building a tunnel system under the city which is a lot of hard work and no visible results to show for. We are 14,000 people at Viessmann and we started with the biggest business area that had about 10,500 people. Each person sits on one position and a group of positions is considered one job; a group of jobs is considered one job family.

But how do you group the positions now into one job?

Our Director Talent Acquisitions Joanna Pysden has observed over the years that managers come with a set of activities, call this a job and are surprised when they don’t find candidates. She says that a lot of her work is to explain what a job is and what a job isn’t. We established that a job needs to be grouped less by activities, but by skills needed.?

So, we started to web crawl through different activities, job and social media sites for granular skills and started to group with the help of algorithms - it was about 100,000 granular skills and with technology as enabler possible to cluster them into jobs. Overall, with 10,500 positions we clustered skills into 300 jobs and 13 job families. Phew…???

That was a piece of work with many roadblocks. Let me dive deeper and talk about three of the bigger roadblocks.

Roadblock 1: Do we still need a skill-matrix aka competence model?

Traditionally, you always have a skill matrix, also known as a competency model or a skills inventory which, is a tool used by organizations to assess and track the skills and competencies of their employees or team members.

These skill matrices sound good in theory, but are tricky in practice as they have some limitations: Firstly, they operate under the assumption that it is possible to assess a person’s skills objectively, but studies show that individual performance data is skewed and unreliable. Secondly, the static models don’t adapt to the fast changing needs for skills and therefore don’t record any future skills. With our architecture of work (AoW) we were able to bypass both limitations. We neither assess a person’s individual skills (read more ????), nor do we use a static competence matrix, but an ever-updating skill database that allows to take future skills into account. This was a real breakthrough and proof point! ??

Roadblock 2: How to get relevant market insights from HR service providers?

Another roadblock was the fact that our AoW needs to work for standard use cases like salary bands, compensation benchmarks and career pathing. When we started to work with some of the big Benchmark-companies, we didn’t know how to translate our skill-clustered job families and grad logic into their system, so that we could use the market insights that we needed. Fortunately a lot of the HR service providers were also looking into skill-based logic and very open to co-create translation terminology with us ??.

Roadblock 3: What about the people that don’t want to be part of a learning journey?

The reskilling-learning journeys are one of the use cases that are in full swing (read more ????), but before it started we weren’t sure if people would actually be ok with being part of a learning journey for no other reason than the fact that they were role holders of a certain job, e.g. Service Technicians.?

I believe that a key reason for a successful learning journey is that the intake-process (who is part of it and why) is just as important as the actual learning modules itself. We often spent too much time on the creation of the content and too little on the composition of the learning-cohorts. We carefully composed cohorts in a way that the quality of discussion within the colleagues was highly valuable.?

In fact, the satisfaction score of the learning journey was highly determined by the level of engagement with other colleagues. In short, the risk that people didn’t want to be part of a learning journey was mitigated by the fact that they did it as a group.?

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I hope you enjoyed Part 2 of our insights on building a better organization.?If you want to find out more about our quest and other use cases like skill-based compensation, skill-based career pathing and skill-based recruiting, part 3 ‘Not just start, but finish: Think through.’ is coming soon.

It is not about how you start, but how you finish…

Here is some posts from colleagues to dive deeper into the topics I mentioned:

Mathias Huber - on assessment of individual skills?

https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/mathias-huber-2092132a_viessmann-teamvi-upskilling-activity-7127209738697601025-D909?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Thomas Heim - the CEO’s perspective on Skilling

https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/thomas-heim-242b733_energy-nextlevel-highfive-activity-7123965131138490368-Qx33?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Carolin Sophie Widenka - on global scaling

https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/carolin-widenka_energytransition-energytransition-viessmann-activity-7122102343835217920-3_1r?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Recap part 1 'Conflicting views: Think forward'

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/conflicting-views-think-forward-part-1-frauke-von-polier-0hi0e%3FtrackingId=bD153jngRlOrpaUPxB72Zg%253D%253D/?trackingId=bD153jngRlOrpaUPxB72Zg%3D%3D