Building a Competency Model for Your Remote Workforce
When we combine the upskilling and reskilling priorities with digital upskilling, skills emerges as the most pressing concern across the world.” -LinkedIn 2022 Workplace Learning Report
The home office has become a personal HQ for most since 2020. Working from home has led to the need for adding and adapting necessary behavioral, technical, and leadership skills. As a result, competency models that incorporate these needs are vital to upskill and reskill our employees to perform in a virtual work environment.
“While competing priorities are pulling L&D pros in many directions, they’re still able to rank their focus areas. When we combine the upskilling and reskilling priorities with digital upskilling, skills emerges as the most pressing concern across the world.” -LinkedIn 2022 Workplace Learning Report
But how should building or updating a competency model be approached when employees are scattered in home offices across the globe? This question was asked in a webinar we conducted.
Ideally finding a time that works for everyone will lead to the highest level of creativity generated during a workshop. But with global participants and large gaps in time zones, this may not be feasible. So here are 2 options-
1. Facilitate separate Rapid Job Analysis and Task Example Workshops with the 2 groups and later merge the 2 finished products
Pros: Easy for participants familiar with all the tasks as they are written
Cons: Time-consuming & more cumbersome
2. Facilitate separate Rapid Job Analysis workshops leading to 1 set of shared Task Examples, and followed by separate Task Example Workshops to review
Pros: Less additional effort required (writing the task examples is the hardest/longest part)
Cons: Harder to review as participants will be seeing some things for the first time, which could lead to less participant buy-in
Recreating the feel of an all-hands-on-deck live brainstorming meeting that takes place during the Rapid Job Analysis and Task Example Workshops is no easy feat. So if you are in a situation where you must facilitate separate workshops to include everyone, we would lean towards option 2 as it allows for 1 set of shared task examples collected before the Task Example Workshops as opposed to merging the information following both workshops.