WHERE
C3 is a pro-active 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.
You can use both individual interviews and group sessions to solve communication problems
The partnership is piloting a range of new business support services and providing expert advice in improving the performance of social economy organisations. C3 aims to influence the range of support services delivered and how they are delivered in the future.
WHY
Social Enterprise Works, one of the delivery partners of the C3 partnership was approached by the manager of an organisation that was keen to introduce a performance improvement framework, using the C3 approach, across all of its projects. The manager was particularly concerned about the performance of one project, partly due to tensions amongst team members, poor teamwork and poor communication.
For this particular project, the manager wanted to implement a process for continuous improvement but also wanted to address some of these problems with communication and teamwork in the short term.
It was thought that team tensions would hinder a group self-assessment session using C3Perform, which focuses on stimulating a dialogue between participants, because staff would not feel able to speak freely, and if they did, this might provoke unwanted conflict.
HOW
The solution was to use C3Quick Perform on a one to one basis with staff to allow staff to speak freely and without having their comments attributed to them. C3Quick Perform is a tool for quickly evaluating an organisation’s relative strengths and weaknesses against the EFQM criteria.
For a detailed description of C3Quick Perform click here.
Here is an example of the questions in the Leadership section of C3Perform:
C3Quick Perform can be completed by an individual without guidance from an adviser, but it was decided to complete it at a one to one meeting with an adviser in order to facilitate a good discussion and to allow staff to talk through their issues. Due to the sensitive nature of some relationships between project staff and volunteers, it was also important to monitor comments to ensure that they were not inflammatory.
After careful discussion and planning between the C3 adviser and the manager of the organisation, the following process was agreed and implemented.
- One to one meetings were held with six people to complete the C3Quick Perform workbook. These six particiants were the manager, the chairperson, the project co-ordinator and three project staff. Interviews lasted from between 30 minutes and 1 hour. Both scores and detailed comments were recorded. The C3 adviser completed the workbook as the participant spoke. Most comments were checked for accuracy by summarising each section at the end. The wording of controversial comments was carefully discussed and agreed.
- The C3 adviser produced a report that summarised the scores and listed all comments. This was emailed to all six participants. The lowest scoring criteria within the model received most comments identifying need for improvement, showing that comments and scores demonstrated the same need.
- The six participants were asked to identify four or five improvement actions to discuss at a group action planning session.
- A group action planning session was held to identify and agree improvement actions and solutions to the issues that were summarised in the report. This session involved all six participants plus the organisation’s new human resources manager who was not able to be involved in the earlier stages. The session was carefully facilitated in order to avoid conflict. Participants were reminded to focus on positive improvement actions, and not to dwell on the issues identified in the report. Ground rules were established. The workshop then had a number of key steps.
a) Each participant was invited to write the four or five improvement actions that they identified before the meeting in large letters on post it notes.
b) One by one participants presented their improvement actions to the group and placed the post it notes on the wall.
c) As the session proceeded and the wall filled with post it notes, the group was encouraged to start ordering the post it notes into groups of similar actions, for example , communication, customer results and feedback.
d) The group then discussed the benefits of each and were able to agree several courses of improvements.
e) These were recorded in an action plan and a schedule for monitoring progress against this was established. - writing an action plan which sets timescale and identifies who will be responsible for agreed actions.
Experiences
The process was successful at addressing some of the teamwork and communication issues, moving the organisation forward and introducing concepts of performance improvement. Positive feedback from the organisation showed that participants felt they had moved on as a result of the process.
The action plan listed a good number of clear actions. Some of these actions addressed the issues of communication and teamwork, others addressed longer term performance improvement needs such as the collection of results. An action plan was written as a result of the group session which set out a timetable of future discussions to discuss specific issues further in a new structure of team meetings. Also a second in depth planning session about the collection of results was planned that the C3 adviser will facilitate.
The process offered all staff an opportunity to raise issues of concern in a safe environment. Each issue was acknowledged and recorded and the organisation was able to begin to move on to look at solutions. It can be likened to a truth and reconciliation commission.
However, there is a lot more work to be done in the organisation. There was still some resistance and tensions in the group action planning session and for some actions, agreeing to talk about it at a future date was the best outcome that could have been achieved. Complicated personal issues can not be solved overnight.
Lessons Learnt
C3Quick Perform was not initially designed for in depth one to one interviews. Its main constraint is that it emphasises scoring over dialogue. In this case the dialogue was very important so that it was not really a QUICK process. It was used because C3Perform would have been too long. Also, its focus on scoring each of the 32 statements was useful because it gave a more objective view of the main issues in the organisation and this confirmed the comments recorded.
If the process were to be repeated, it would be important to redraft C3Quick Perform specifically for the one to one interview process to allow space to record comments for each of the 32 statements. (At present there is a small space for each of the 9 criteria.
Although effort was made to check comments with the adviser, this was difficult. Some comments had to be edited by the C3 adviser to ensure that they were not inflammatory. Experience of this process in this situation would help with this. The process could be tightened up by recording comments on a computer and checked with the interviewee at the end of each of the 9 criteria.
Transferability
This case study shows how the approach of using Quick PERform as a basis of one to one interviews was successful at mitigating conflict and also addressing some of the problems with teamwork and communication. However, C3Quick Perform was not designed for this purpose and there were some limitations to its use, as discussed above. The C3 partnership would recommend that careful thought should be invested in understanding the dynamics and risks of the organisation in hand and that some effort should be taken to amend C3Quick Perform so that it provides an accurate record of comments made.
For more information:
Please contact Stuart Griffin through the C3 partnership