WHERE
C3Perform has been designed by the C3 partnership to help social economy organisations in the West of England to improve performance. C3 is a pro-active new partnership of 11 organisations spread across the West of England sub-region, partly funded by the European Union through the Equal programme. The partnership, formed in September 2004, is made up of statutory, voluntary, community, social enterprise and co-operative sector organisations. C3 supports social economy organisations by promoting continuous improvement and quality standards. PERform is best done with a group representing a cross section of an organisation’s staff and volunteers and facilitated by a C3 performance improvement adviser.
Workbook approach to organisational self assessment
A wide range of clients are benefiting from C3Perform. About 45 clients have benefited from the tool at the time of writing this (Jan 2007). Examples of the diverse range of organisations are.
- WISH for a better future– a small voluntary organisation of three staff who have just become incorporated.
- SOFA Project – large social enterprise with 30+ staff and a household name within Bristol.
- IAP Services Ltd – a workers co-operative
- WECIL (West of England Centre for Inclusive Living) – large equalities led organisation with about 40 staff members.
WHY
Why was it developed?
C3Perform responds to an identified need of the social economy sector in the UK to adopt formal systems for improving the way that they work in order to be more competitive, confident and credible organisations.
C3Perform is based on the nine criteria of the business excellence model but is adapted so that it is more appropriate for the social enterprise sector. Key changes include a simplified scoring system, language changes and the addition of new sub-criteria.
C3Perform aims to encourage organisations to adopt the Business Excellence approach to Performance Improvement.
This approach was selected for three main reasons. It is holistic and encompasses all elements of an organisations performance. It is flexible because it is self determined so is suitable for the highly diverse social economy. It is proven to work, well respected and widely used.
HOW
What is C3Perform?
C3Perform is a diagnostic workbook designed to facilitate an evaluation and review process of an organisation’s performance against the criteria of the Business Excellence (EFQM) Model.
It consists of 46 positive statements, divided into 9 criteria and 2 sections, (enablers and results). Each statement defines the position of an ‘excellent organisation’ and invites organisations to identify strengths and areas for improvement relating to it. Each section requests two overall scores, one for where the organisation thinks it sits at the present time and one for where the organisation would like to be in 12 months.
C3Perform is designed to be facilitated by an adviser, although a set of guidance notes are being developed in order to allow organisations to revisit the process in subsequent years.
How is it used?
A 4-step process is used:
Step 1: Facilitated self assessment
Step 2: Action planning
Step 3: One to one support with action plans
Step 4: Embedding the approach into the organisation
Step 1: The facilitated self-assessment is completed with a selected group of between 1 to 7 staff and volunteers from the organisation. It takes on average 3 to 5 hours to complete, depending on how chatty the group are.
Step 2: The action plan takes the ideas for improvement identified in the self-assessment process and converts them into concrete (SMART) actions. The action planning is best done as a separate exercise. Various techniques can be used for this to help manage the information.
Step 3: Once the action pan is completed, support to implement the actions idendtified can be offered by performance advisers, or through training programmes.
Step 4: Performance Improvement advisers also offer support to embed the process in the organisation. This support includes additional training, assistance to write a performance improvement policy and represent PI within plans and strategies. It might in the future also involve a 12 month visit to facilitate a second self assessment process.
Experiences of Using C3Perform
C3Perform has proven to be a very effective tool at facilitating dialogue about how organisations need to improve. The action planning process also proves to be very effective at ‘drilling down’ a bit further to understand issues and need for improvement.
We have established (through trial and occasional error) the following guidelines for implementing C3perform. There will be more as we continue to develop our experience.
Depth of discussion. C3Pefrom is intended to be used as a fairly quick evaluation/assessment but there is a tendency for groups to go into quite a lot of detail in discussions. It is important to keep things to a tight timescale to avoid the group getting lost in detail. Otherwise it becomes difficult to develop a plan for action and improve! There is always opportunity to go into more detail at a later session.
Understanding of C3Perform, following on from the above learning point, it is helpful for each member of the group to be familiar with PERform as it enables a more focused discussion.
Understanding of the model. It is useful to keep reminding the group of how the model works. C3Perform intends to embed principles of Performance improvement into the organisational culture as well as to identify immediate improvements, so key staff need a thorough understanding of the model.
Group size and representation; Groups should be big enough to enable a thorough discussion but not too big to be unmanageable. A group of between 4 and 6 people is ideal. We cannot say decisively who the group should involve but a good representation of departments is useful. It is vital that the director is present and on board with the process and desirable that at least one member of the management committee are involved. The group should be careful of being too top heavy as it will miss out on the perspective of junior staff. When it is not feasible for larger organisations to involve junior members of staff, the C3Perform workshop can be offered to them. See C3Perform workshop case study.
Keep things lively: It is worth considering breaking up C3Perform with short activites which make the session more varied and even sometimes fun. A list of these methods is attached but summarised below.
- Sticky Wall or post-it notes to cluster and prioritise – useful for reviewing discussions and action planning. The benefit is that ideas/actions written on post it notes or cards on the sticky wall can be repositioned, reclustered and reprioritised.
- H forms – can be used to identify both strengths and weaknesses of each criteria of the model, to give an overall score and then focus on areas for improvement. H forms use a sticky wall.
- Taxi ranking – participants get up from their chairs and position themselves along a rank from 1 to 10 as defined by objects already in the room. For example, the door is 1, the window is 10. This process is also known as body voting.
- Quick questions – fire questions at the group to shake things up, for example, are you a social enterprise or a voluntary association.
- 1 minute Competitions - Who can think of most categories of customers in one minute?
Breaking sessions up, Food and Refreshments: It is good to break C3Perform into at least two sessions, one for enablers section and one for results. As well as not overloading the group with work, this permits the principles of the model to be highlighted twice. Food and breaks are important to keep energy levels up.
Tailor the use of Perform to each audience: Both the Business Excellence Model and C3Perform are flexible tools. Each organisation is different. We are developing a number of different approaches to using C3Perform. These include
- To deliver only a couple of sections of C3Perform, changing the order of the sections to fit the beneficiaries’ needs and understanding;
- Explore the enablers section in a workshop environment with a large number of beneficiaries and more junior staff members;
- Use the abovementioned workshop to elicit the views of junior staff members to report back anonymously to senior staff. This is useful to cross-reference the views of senior staff with those of junior staff.
- Use a quick assessment form as an introduction to give participants a brief overview of the model before going into more detail with Perform.
- Use the quick assessment form to distribute to all staff members to anonymously capture views of all staff in order to cross reference this with scores coming from the C3Perform self assessment session.
Improvements to PERform itself
C3Perform is continuously improving and a number of revisions will be planned over the course of the Equal funded C3 project.
It is likely that adaptations will be made to the format of the statements in the results criteria, for diversity questions to be re written and for some language to be simplified.
The general structure and scoring is likely to remain unchanged.
Transferability
C3Perform can be downloaded from the C3 partnership web-site for free. See www.c3partnership.org
Guidance notes can be obtained on request through the same website.
We do recommend that the self assessment is facilitated by somebody external to the organisation.
For more information: C3 Partnership