This is a real, live case study.
In other words, it involves real people in a real organisation and it is happening as we speak.
So, it has moments of frustration, small successes, delays and unexpected reactions.
For me it has also had big moments of “when I have read about this stuff in the professional HR magazines it all seems much more smoother, more seamless than anything I have experienced”.
INTRODUCTION
My previous experience of values was at an insurance company called Lincoln. Our US parent company had researched characteristics which were associated with Abraham Lincoln. They came up with seven attributes which were adopted as their values. These were adapted to the UK environment and I think came into their own when we came to the redundancy programme. Here, I think they proved invaluable in guiding our actions and this was demonstrated in the constructive and positive way in which people left the organisation.
QCA
What is it?
We are a non-departmental public body, funded by the government and accountable to a board that is appointed by the Secretary of State.
Our role is to make sure that examinations, qualifications and the national curriculum, with its associated tests, are delivered fairly, are of a high and consistent quality, and are appropriate to people’s needs.
QCA is the regulatory body that looks after what people are taught, how they are assessed and how they are recognised for what they have learnt.
Where is it?
QCA is based in Green Park, Piccadilly, Mayfair.
600 staff plus 50 temporaries and consultants.
What sort of people does QCA employ?
We employ roughly two groups of people:
accountants, IT, HR, legal, administrative, logistics, process engineers
academics and ex-teaching staff
QCA is a serious organisation with a serious contribution to make to society. The people who work for QCA are intelligent, articulate and committed. They are pleasant, well intentioned, earnest and well mannered. They are all friendly, polite and approachable.
They are well educated and passionate about education. There is a research orientation to their way of thinking, an almost academic approach to issues and problems. They are enthused by the opportunity in their job to make a contribution at a national level to improving standards in education. They have a strong ethical focus.
At a more junior level in the organisation there appears to be a certain degree of cynicism and people seem generally defensive rather than open about their job role and their contribution to QCA.
Once a system has been accepted it is managed well and adhered to. But proposed changes are greeted with suspicion.
Once that suspicion has been overcome there is a need for a very prescriptive approach to how that system has to be managed. It is only in this way that our people are change adaptive – when they are sure of its rationale and that there is a way for it to be managed.
As a result, there appears to be a heavier than normal focus on process and which can occasionally detract from the focus on delivery. Sometimes, it seems, we can pour more energy into debate than into outcomes – a classic feature of education, in my view. The environment is friendly, relaxed, liberal and co operative but - again perhaps as a characteristic of the public sector - there can occasionally seem that there is no strong sense of urgency.
People care genuinely, are conscientious and are committed but there is no accountability for delivery. As with much of the work in this area, success is is often not quantified.
What is a value?
A value is something we hold dear. It is a principle, a belief, an ethic.
All of us have a set of personal values which characterise us. Not necessarily immediately obvious. But define who we are, how we do things, our relationships.
It is a quality or a behaviour which an individual attaches importance to and believes that people ought to display.
Organisations are just the same. Successful organisations all have a very strong set of values. The best performing organisations have a clear identity and values contribute to this organisational identity.
In pursuing our organisational objectives choices will always have to be made.
Values help us make the right choices, they create a clear identity for an organisation and they support us in doing the right things for our customers.
WHY DID QCA NEED A SET OF VALUES?
Despite our clear sense of external direction, somehow we have not quite achieved a consistency of focus internally. QCA appears to mean different things to the people who work there.
We needed to develop characteristics of working at QCA which are common to all staff. We need to develop a clear-cut identity shaped by a common set of values and behaviours.
We deal with a huge number of stakeholders, some of whom have very different agendas. In addition, these stakeholders do different things through different channels. As a result, our “business” at QCA is a loose confederation of different units, and working at the QCA means different things to different people. There is no single work focus in the way you might have a single commercial focus.
But we employ very Values-driven people. They believe passionately in education and what it can help people to achieve. They sometimes have their own, very strong ideas on what values should be acknowledged in QCA – as these comments from the workshop sessions we held, demonstrate.
Values = create identity for QCA.
The organisation had gone through a fair amount of turmoil before I arrived – we were embroiled in a crisis over A levels, there were changes at the top of the organisation and we lost our Investors in People status. The values programme was therefore to create an identity for the QCA, a common reason for our people to feel proud that they worked there.
GETTING STARTED IN DEVELOPING THE QCA VALUES
The Development of the QCA Values
The sequence of events in developing the QCA Values has been:
June 2003 - Senior Management Team discusses QCA Mission and Vision Statements. Out of this discussion emerged some ideas about the organisational values of QCA, or what they should be.
Originally, the discussions about the values started as a discussion about the mission statement of the organisation and it speaks volumes for the complexity of our stakeholders and what we do that this is still only in “draft” form. However, we thought that the adoption of a strong and appropriate set of values would give a definite direction to our people regardless of their role.
Through the process have reported back to Senior Managers Group on Development of Values from their original brainstorm.
The senior managers group has responded positively to the further “moulding” of their original ideas.
July – August 2003 – small project group explores the ideas generated by the SMT to see if a set of organisational values could be developed.
September 2003 – the project team drafts a set of five values. These are discussed with the SMT. General agreement is reached on these values.
October 2003 June 2004 – the first QCA Values Project Team, a voluntary cross-divisional project team, is established with the aim of finalising the values and developing an implementation plan.
1st Project Team
Small project team
Staff were asked to volunteer
Attempted to take each of the then 5 Values and define it.
Process of defining what the Value meant was hard and difficult.
I became dissatisfied with the progress we were making.
Reasons:
team was enthusiastic, but ultimately, too junior
this was an additional task for them in their day to day work and occasionally it sank to the bottom of the “to do” list
not representative enough
without more senior input and a definite timescale, we were losing momentum
July 2004 – April 2005 – I d ecided to change approach and so set up the 2nd QCA Values Project Team works on the values.
2nd Project Team
This was a larger project team
Representation from each part of QCA
A couple more senior people
More ideas - oriented
At this stage we asked fe3 to help us. fe3 brought:
Previous experience of developing and implementing Values.
Facilitated some key meetings.
Gave us a structure and framework which previously we had been struggling to develop.
Having developed what we felt was a workable set of Values we took them to a series of focus groups with staff to test their credibility and to gather further views. We didn’t feel that it would be possible, given the type of organisation we work in, to hoist a set of values onto employees without some consultation.
First Focus Groups
In the summer 2004 we held a series of focus groups with staff. About 60 staff participated in these focus groups. As a result of feedback we make some changes to the values.
The experience was valuable, both in giving publicity to the values, gathering views (positive and negative) and in starting to “recruit” people to them. Responses from staff were typical:
“These Values are a good idea but what are you going to do with them?”
We made a number of changes to the Values. A key issue to emerge was that we needed to include a new Value of working as a team.
October 2004 – April 2005 – the QCA Values team continues to redefine the Values. We end up with four values with a definition of each Values and a set of behavioural indicators for each Value.
May – June 2005 – the new QCA Values approved by the QCA Executive Team and communicated to the Senior Managers Group.
July 2005 – implementation begins.
ACTION PLAN
These are some of the things we’re going to be looking at in the next few months
