When looking to the future, developing strategies and aligning the organisation to deliver those strategies, it is vital for the organisation to understand its present strengths and its areas for improvement. To have this picture produced by the organisation itself, a process usually called self-assessment, provides an enormous insight.
Using the EFQM Excellence Model as a framework for providing this picture gives not just the large-scale view of the territory for a management team, it also gives a detailed map for the people in an organisation to follow and help them identify their contribution in progressing towards the destination.
The Model (pictured above) provides a generic framework of criteria that can be applied widely to any organisation or part of an organisation and consists of nine criteria. Excellent results with respect to performance, customers, people and society are achieved through leadership driving policy and strategy, people, partnership and resources and processes.
The Excellence Model is used as reference point for good management practice and long-term sustainability. Each organisation is unique but because the Model provides a non-prescriptive, generic framework of criteria it can be applied to any organisation. The Model consists of the following nine criteria:
ENABLERS (what an organisation does):
Leadership: excellent organisations have a clear direction and the capacity to develop and facilitate the organisation’s objectives
Policy and Strategy: excellent organisations manage their activities with clear values, aims and accountability
People: excellent organisations enable people to participate, develop and fulfil their potential
Partnerships and Resources: excellent organisations develop partnerships and manage resources to maximum effectiveness
Processes: excellent organisations develop, manage and improve processes to support its priorities
RESULTS (what an organisation achieves):
Customer Results: excellent organisations constantly satisfy and fulfil customers’ expectations, they also measure and achieve outstanding results with respect to their customers
People Results: excellent organisations have totally satisfied and fulfilled people; they also measure and achieve outstanding results with respect to their people
Society Results: excellent organisations perform as responsible members of the community and society; they also measure and achieve outstanding results with respect to society
Key Performance Results: excellent organisations maintain a systematic approach to assessing and measuring performance; they also achieve outstanding results with respect to the key elements of their policy and strategy.
At the heart of the Model lies the logic known as RADAR. RADAR consists of four elements:
Results
Approach
Deployment
Assessment and Review.
This logic states that the organisation needs to
- Determine the Results it is aiming for as part of its policy and strategy making process. The results cover the performance of the organisation, both financially and operationally, and the perceptions of its stakeholders.
- Plan and develop an integrated set of sound Approaches to deliver the required results both now and in the future.
- Deploy the approaches in a systematic way to insure full implementation
- Assess and Review the approaches followed based on monitoring and analysis of the results achieved and ongoing learning activities. Finally, identify, prioritise, plan and implement improvements where needed.
When using the Model within an organisation the Approach, Deployment, Assessment and Review elements of the RADAR should be addressed for each Enabler criterion part and the Results element should be addressed for each Results criterion part.