Quality and HR Manager: Have you implemented the Sharing of Experience?

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A new trigram has been added to the several trigrams of the world of work ... The Sharing of Experience! But what does it mean? Where is it from ? And what is it about?

The Sharing of experience has always existed, but it is highlighted following the transition of the ISO 9001 standard to the 2015 version. The Sharing of Experience is THE big change in the standard for the Human Resources part. It is therefore of direct concern to the HR services of all the companies and company quality control departments certified ISO 9001 2015 version.

Why does it appear in ISO 9001:2015

 

It was assigned to the HR department to obtain the Feedback from collaborators following a training session or an internal apprenticeship or tutoring, for example. These feedback were notably taken into account during the evaluation of the training providers or during annual individual interviews depending on the companies.

 

Today, the standard requires the services concerned to go further. In addition to feedback, they must measure the ability to share experience of all their employees. The goal of this expectation or requirement is to know WHO among all employees is able to share his experience to ensure business continuity.

 

The ultimate goal may seem far, abstract, questionable ... Quite the contrary! That way, the company measures in an underlying way its strength from the human point of view. A topic that until then was little or not taken into account in the development of business strategies, although in the end , the Human is at the center of everything.

 

Indeed, many companies are forced to outsource certain parts of their business following the loss of skills, internally. This situation is also highlighted by the proliferation of service providers, as well as by their activity increase.

How to measure the Sharing of Experience

 

First of all, this subject should not be considered solely by the HR and Quality departments. The reflection must be conducted by all members of the management team, because it is the direct managers who are best able to assess the level reached by an employee on the various aspects of his position.

 

Several approaches can be considered. But according to my experience, the management team (Manager and HR) shall start by defining all missions and tasks related to positions. I recommend using it to update the associated function sheets. In fact, the adequacy between the two is highly likely to be verified by the auditors.

In my opinion, this inventory sets the basics for the following reflection: In what way have the skills necessary to carry out these mission / tasks been acquired?

 

This part of the process belongs to the HR department; the most likely to know the initial training of each employee and training attended internally (or via external organizations).

 

The data collected during these two stages must then be confronted in the presence of the entire management team to define the level of maturity of each skill per employee. Is the person novice? confirmed? Would they be able to share their knowledge and skills?

How to decide

Here again, several approaches can be envisaged, but I recommend to opt for a calculation matrix at first. It can take into account the level of training, the seniority and the evaluation of the manager for example. Each company must define the input data they consider relevant (level of education, age, type of degree, autonomy when holding the position, professional experience in similar positions ...). Everything is possible if we know how to justify it. However, be careful not to create a kludge which becomes very hard to handle after passing the certification audit!

 

With this method, we obtain for each skill of each employee the level of ability to share their experience. For example, on a scale of 1 to 4:

  • Level 1: The person is novice
  • Level 2: The person still needs additional training
  • Level 3: The person knows their subject but still lacks some practice
  • Level 4: The person is confirmed and able to share their experience

Once this work is done, the company can consider associated programs leveraging the Sharing of Experience to achieve the goals of its strategy. For example, Nurseries projects during which people on work experience contracts or on professionalization contracts are integrated into certain departments so that the end of their studies corresponds to the period at which the company needs to recruit, given the growth prospects defined in their strategy. In this way, the ensure that the sharing of experience is done upstream and that in case of confirmation of need, they can hire a collaborator that is already operational.

 


This type of program is particularly appreciated by auditors as they can see that the company has pushed its approach in the long term and will be able to reassess the Sharing of Experience capabilities of each employee periodically.

 

At a time when the aspirations of each person no longer aim to carry out their entire career within the same company or the same position and where companies are constantly forced to retrain employees to a position (problem of turnover), the Sharing of Experience makes all sense. Knowing who is best able to make a counterpart quickly operational at a job is a strength. Recruitments, especially recruitment failures have a cost, let’s not forget it.

 

So, ISO 9001 or not, think of the Sharing of Experience and mostly the advantage you will get from measuring the Sharing of Experience capacity of your employees! I highly recommend it to you!

 

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