Skills mapping: improving team productivity

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What is skills mapping? Its importance and role

“When I talk about developing your skills, I’m not talking about all areas of this industry. It’s not very realistic. I mean, the area of your expertise in this industry.
-Pooja Agnihotri

Skills play a key role in the performance and contribution of employees to the growth and development of the company. Businesses need team members with varied skills for the overall growth of the business. CEOs, managers and others in senior positions in companies are always on the lookout for qualified talent who can transform the company’s work and increase productivity.

However, to succeed in today’s fierce competition, you must not only hire top talent but also frequently evaluate the skills of your team members. This will help you in continuous improvement and identify potential gaps and opportunities for improvement. Moreover, it is necessary to utilize their skills to the maximum to ensure harmonious growth of the company and the individual. In this article, we will understand skills mapping and skills matrix, thereby developing a holistic approach to assess the core skills of different team members and leverage this data to facilitate development opportunities and minimize recruitment costs .

What is skills mapping?

Skills mapping refers to the process of identifying and assessing the skills possessed by different employees in your organization. This mapping process helps you understand your employees’ skills and sort them for various tasks.

Skills mapping plays a key role in pre-employment forecasting and the onboarding process. You are able to evaluate candidates and assign them to different teams accordingly. Additionally, you can plan and organize the necessary training programs accordingly for continuous and seamless skill development (1).

Importance of skills mapping

Skills mapping contributes to overall improvement in productivity organisation. Employees are able to work fully and easily resolve obstacles.

Key aspects of skills mapping

1. Make members aware of their skills

An effective skills mapping activity will help you identify the skills of a particular team member. In a number of cases, employees themselves do not know the skills they possess. With detailed insights and reporting, you are able to identify and refine the capabilities of your team members. This helps them streamline their skills in a specific and useful direction that successfully contributes to personal development as well as the organization.

2. Make sure members are aware of their responsibilities

Often your team members are not even aware of their roles and responsibilities (2). They continually work on their respective tasks without really understanding the overall outcome for the business. This leads to fatigue and restlessness, without much improvement in personal performance or business performance. Skills mapping helps you identify precisely how each team member works; hence, you can effectively focus on providing a proper roadmap for overall performance improvement.

3. Assess hiring needs

In a number of cases, the lack of qualified resources is the main reason for project failure. With effective skills mapping, you will be able to understand the resources you have available. You can schedule any type of hiring activity in advance, ensuring progress on task-related activities.

4. Monitor overall progress

With effective skill mapping, you would be able to track the overall growth and performance improvement of individuals. You can also use these metrics to understand their key contribution to the organization. You can identify areas where your team members are performing exceptionally well and identify areas for improvement. This will not only help you improve overall company performance but also improve retention rates as members will feel like their skills are being used to their full potential here.

5. Reduced workload

Just like I said in the point above, skill mapping will provide you with resource utilization. This helps you identify team members with a heavy workload. You can schedule various activities based on the baseline workload to ensure that team members have a pleasant and smooth working experience. Overall, skill mapping plays a key role in making data-driven decisions that lead to the overall growth of the organization. By identifying skills gaps, you are able to conduct effective training, leading to continuous improvement and growth of the organization.

Best Ways to Assess Employee Core Skills and Competencies

Now that we have learned about skills mapping and its importance, let’s now look at the best ways to assess employee skills. There is no perfect method for assessing employee skills, but it is an ongoing process and a combination of the two methods described below should prove useful.

1. Analyze KPIs

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are a qualitative method for measuring the overall effectiveness and performance of members working on your team. They help you identify weak areas and assist you in creating an improvement roadmap. KPIs play a vital role in assessing employee skills. You can start with set realistic goals then motivate your team members to achieve them.

Short-term goals help to effectively evaluate the performance of your team members. When you clearly understand the potential of your team members, you can assign tasks and set goals with confidence. KPIs provide you with valuable qualitative information that helps you evaluate the progress of tasks and create motivating roadmaps for them. Evaluation also plays a key role in identifying weak points and areas for improvement.

2. Comments and reviews

Feedback refers to the process of providing opinions or evaluations to team members, with the primary goal of improving their performance. A review is an assessment primarily focused on providing decision makers with potential information to make choices with confidence. When it comes to feedback, a number of different perspectives present themselves. Let’s see a brief description of the most commonly used feedback mechanism:

360-degree feedback
This primarily focuses on anonymously collecting information and performance on a particular team member. This includes managers, peers, and others directly, as well as feedback indirectly related to team members. This helps you assess behavior and specific training needs.
Customer Feedback
This plays a crucial role in the overall growth and progression of a team. When a client evaluates your team’s performance on a project, you better understand the issues and how your team responded to them. This helps you create a roadmap with a better understanding of the skills displayed by your team members.

When it comes to assessment, an individual performance review provides continuous learning, guidance and a defined roadmap to improvement. Individual performance reviews mainly take place between managers and team members. These reviews should not be limited to just once a year. Regular and frequent assessments boost the morale of your team members by identifying their skills and motivating them to perform better.

Now let’s talk about the time and money you could save by effectively using skills mapping to minimize recruiting costs, eliminate bad hires, and improve employee retention.

Leveraging Employee Skills to Minimize Recruitment Costs

A single or Individual bad hire could cost the company an average loss of around $15,000 and, alarmingly, three out of four employers are affected by bad hires. Skills mapping helps leverage the skills of your team members and identify areas for improvement. You can achieve this by building a talent pipeline in advance. This is possible by hiring potential employees with skills and then providing them with continuing education software (3). This helps improve employee skills as well as improve retention rates.

Additionally, through effective skill mapping, you would be able to identify gaps in your team. This helps you effectively search for specific employees who would fill that particular gap. Internal transfers and mobility come into play through precise skills mapping. You can readjust employees on your teams to meet the typical needs of your project. This contributes to the smooth completion of project work as well as the creation of a versatile and adaptable environment. This will help reduce the need for urgent external hiring and give you ample time to plan hiring activities, ensuring that the employees you hire are fully needed by your organization.

Conclusion

By understanding the individual skills of your team members, you are able to create a confident work environment and instill a sense of growth and continuous improvement in your employees. Additionally, when you are able to identify performance weaknesses, you are able to create a positive work culture environment with adaptability and flexibility. This ensures that your team members are aware of their individual roles and responsibilities, ensuring continuous improvement in the quality of the delivered project.