Recognising people for developing their skills at Yorkshire Building Society
The challenge for Yorkshire Building Society is making sure we have enough people with the right skills for the transformation journey we are on. As an organisation, we need to understand not only the capabilities we need right now, but also those we will need in the future, and the levers we are going to pull to make sure we get them.
Many workforces consist of employees managing processes and completing tasks often documented in a job description. There’s now a real shift towards developing people, equipping them with skills that enables colleagues to move around a business in an agile way, rather than being just focused on the role they perform today. We are beginning to move towards a skills-based culture in which colleagues are open and curious and want to develop new skills. It’s quite a cultural shift and means we are having to rethink some of our core colleague moments to encourage this.
Reward and recognition
We need to think about moving away from traditional performance and development tools and contemplate how we reward and recognise people for developing their skills. We also need to consider using the broader employee lifecycle to engender future skills and capabilities.
We recently introduced a people risk framework that encourages leaders to consider whether they have enough people with the right skills, acting in the right way. We run regular engagement and pulse surveys, tracking our change agenda and how colleagues feel about that. We also do lots of colleague listening, which starts at the board level all the way down. We use that feedback to drive action.
