Staff Development
Good staff development ensures that the staff team is well informed, trained, motivated and resourced to deal with the challenge and opportunity of a new building. Staff development will take on different forms at the successive stages of procuring the building and staff in various positions will be affected to differing degrees.
Be Open and Communicate
Some of your team may find the prospect of a big step forward daunting. Keep the team posted along the way on the likely timeline and its changes. Recognise the challenge and point out the opportunity too. Listen to proposals and ideas and take on board what makes sense. Have the building project as a standard item on the agenda of your regular team meetings.
Away Days
At the right point, when the decision to go ahead has been made, take the staff team away for a day to discuss implications. The first purpose will be to explain the rationale in detail, the business case; why it makes sense, and how you know it stacks up. The staff team should already feel a level of involvement from ongoing discussions, but the second purpose is to listen to colleagues’ questions, comments and suggestions. At this stage you might start to hear more concerns expressed as people start to worry about the effects of change.
Later organise a team visit to a similar organization that has taken on a building and is learning the lessons. As well as group discussions on a visit like this, get people talking to their counterparts in the host organisation one on one.
Keep People Focused
The team must not lose sight of the core business. Ongoing services must be delivered and development and improvement of the core business must continue.
Leadership and Project management
Acquiring the building will place a particular burden on leadership and management. Start thinking early about options such as:
- appointing an external project management team
- employing a project manager for a fixed term
- employing someone to take on much of the Chief Executive’s existing role thereby freeing up resource
If you do go for outside expertise remember that someone has to manage the relationship with those outside experts from the inside.
Think about staff development in three Stages:
- Scoping and feasibility;
- Development;
- Operation.
Scoping and Feasibility Stage:
- Your staff development activity needs to fit in to your ongoing staff training and development systems. If you do not already have effective HR support and staff development in place you need to address this now. A major challenge (and acquiring a building is a major challenge) needs to proceed from an already strong and healthy organisational platform.
- Use the development as a team building process through the away days and visits suggested above.
- Ask people to think about how the development will affect their role and their service or activity. Make this part of ongoing line management meetings setting targets for staff members and helping them to identify their individual opportunities and the challenges.
- Project or contract managers in particular should be asked to consider how their projects or contracts might respond to the new context, for example in relation to possible expansion.
- Educate and train all of the staff team on the financial implications of the building. Debt, operational costs and depreciation need to be financed by rent and letting fees. Full team buy in to the new building project needs to be achieved. Explaining project based accounting can demonstrate how all departments (projects) need to play their part in achieving a financially viable operation.
- Review options on how the development process will be best managed and discuss and agree with board. Identify internal roles in relation to project management and managing professionals and consider impact on wider managerial workloads. Be open about the likely impact and look for people to take on added responsibility to achieve the outcome you all want.
- Review detailed training needs for all those affected including those who are acting in new roles and commission the necessary training. Consider mentoring arrangements with suitable leaders of other centres for the key managers driving the process.
- When the decision to go forward is made, team support and ownership needs to be there already. Identify the decision to go ahead as a marker to launch the crucial development stage.
Planning and Development Stage:
- Maintain effective communication across the staff team during the development stage. Keep people posted on progress and be honest when you hit snags and delays.
- You will already have built your forward business plan to include the overall operation with the new building. Provide support to project and service managers to plan in detail how their activities will deal with the transition to this new context.
- Plan for the new staffing structure and schedule the recruitment process.
- Focus on the marketing and promotion needs well in advance and assess staff resourcing for this aspect. If letting units and selling meeting room and conference space is a big part of your plan, take outside advice on how to resource this activity. Again, look at how others have addressed this and with what degree of success.
- In particular appoint your centre manager or director well in advance of taking ownership from contractors. Do you need a senior caretaker who can make the building run well from a logistical point of view or is the role to connect with the local community, handle the financials and report directly to a board or committee?
- Explore the options for having security and cleaning as internal staff or contracted out. For some organisations it works well to appoint contractors for cleaning and security for the first few months while ‘bedding in’ and then to take cleaning in-house. Security is usually best left contracted out.
- Before you take possession, organize a planning meeting to address the logistics of moving in for your own operation and for any early tenants. If you designate one of your team to lead on this then make sure other managers, especially senior managers, leave it to him or her and stay out of the way!
Operational Stage:
- Be ready for glitches as you move in and try out new systems. New and old staff will need to work together, systems that you have set up may not work and will need changing, roles will not have covered everything, facilities will not be exactly as expected and I.T. will not be perfect immediately. This is normal so maintain a sense of humour! Encourage staff to take ownership of the problems and to work out how to resolve issues themselves.
- If your new facility entails a higher level of contact with the public through, for example, a busy reception desk watch out to see how the front line staff manage. If there is any doubt about the excellence of the service then invest in customer care training. Your front line staff will influence the extent to which people want to locate at or visit your facilities.
- Keep a close eye on marketing and promotion. Are you doing enough? Is it effective? What additional resource or training is needed for the delivering staff?
- Invest senior management support in the early team meetings of the building management and operational staff. This should ensure teething troubles are addressed promptly.
- Rumours: By communicating well and making sure everyone knows what is happening you will ensure that the team engages well with the process of taking on a property.
- Re-inventing the Wheel: Many groups have been down this road. Seek out advice from those you know and trust locally and from national umbrella and membership organizations which bring resources and information together.
- 'Making Do’ and ‘Cutting Costs’: While good cost control is essential do not cut corners in relation to getting your staff team ready, providing the training that’s needed and employing the right new staff.
- Rushing at it: Once you move in, let a little time go by before deciding on final arrangements with regard to bookings systems, security and cleaning. Use contractors to provide what you need until you are clear that you can take on a fuller level of responsibility with in-house staff if that’s the way you want to go;
- Losing Focus on the core business: At all stages make sure that the core business of the organization is to the fore and that the effort of acquiring your building does not take resource and energy and leadership away from what you are there to do.
A guide to training best practice by the CBI, TUC, BERR and DIUS