Yesterday, November 3, 2011, we held our second Supporting All Employees – Classified Advisory Committee Meeting.  We discussed our plans going forward.  Our primary focus right now is ensuring that we have the supports in place to provide classified staff with the opportunities to develop and grow in their positions before we launch our performance appraisal process.  We discussed the recommendations from the Teacher Effectiveness Task Force that the LAUSD worked with over a year ago.  While many of the recommendations of that committee were intended to be specific to teachers, many apply to classified employees as well.  We will be aligning with many of the recommendations on our work for classified staff.  Click here for the agenda, and here for the presentation.

As an initial analysis, we plan to launch a brief survey to all 38,000 classified employees in the LAUSD late next week.  We want to find out how familiar folks are with the supports that we already have in place.  Additionally, we will ask staff to self-identify themselves if they are interested in joining focus groups throughout the District to help us improve our support mechanisms.  The survey will be available here once we launch.

We invite anyone interested to join us at our upcoming Advisory Committee Meeting. It will take place on Thursday, November 3, at LAUSD Beaudry headquarters, room 12-192, from 3:00-5:00 p.m. If you would like to attend but are not housed at headquarters, please comment to this post and we will enter your name into the building's visitor management system.

At the meeting, we will present some information regarding
* the organization of the Talent Management office,
* plans for a survey that we will be sending to all LAUSD classified employees,
* how to better engage our stakeholders, and
* other related topics.

Since starting on this work a few months ago, we had determined a plan of action for moving forward.  We were going to be looking at performance management by working with one classification, or a small group of similar classifications, at a time.  With over 1,100 classifications in the non-teaching service of LAUSD, we realized that this would take us a long time.  So, we’re taking a step back and looking at things from a different perspective.

We are starting by asking the question:  What does it mean to be a supported employee?  We align to the Superintendent’s core strategy of Supporting All Employees so that seems like a good place to start.  Employees will understand that we are looking at performance and building a performance management and evaluation process, but we want to ensure that the proper supports are there for employees once they, with the help of their supervisors, determine their career path through LAUSD.

We have started to look at the various supports that are available through our human resources department as they apply to non-teaching (classified) staff.  But, we realize that we need to find out what employees want/need.  We are exploring ways to gather that information in a systematic manner. 

In the meantime, how about sharing with us what you think it means to be a supported employee.  Please be sure to include some background information about yourself so that we can help determine how to best use the information – are you an LAUSD non-teaching employee?  are a community member who has some ideas in this area?  are you an employee of another organization and have strong feelings regarding what it means to be a supported employee?  are you a parent with a student in one of our schools and you see the work that our non-teaching staff do and have some ideas about how to support them?  We welcome all input!

Hi all.  Thanks to everyone who has viewed this blog, and everyone that has commented.  I would love it if more people would weigh in…

In this work, I see that currently LAUSD does not have a good classified employee evaluation process in place, let alone an employee performance management process.  However, there are managers, sites, and even departments that do have good programs that they have developed on their own.  If you are aware of any of these, please share that information here.

As we work to develop an employee performance management process, we find that we need to better align the functions within the personnel cycle.  This will help us make the cycle consistent and transparent.  We are starting with updating our job analysis process, as mentioned in my previous blog.  We plan to not only look at the knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) needed for the job, but also look at the competencies (the other or personal characteristics – the Os/Ps of KSAPs, KSAOs).  We also want to ensure that we have a clear understanding of where classifications sit in the District’s organizational hierarchy, what the typical duties are, benchmarks of strong/weak performance, and a variety of other relevant information.  If you are familiar with any good multi-purpose job analysis models that you have used or heard about, please share.  In addition, any recommendations/ suggestions for reporting of the information captured in order to provide information to current and potential employees would be appreciated.

I have a question – please weigh in.  What would you expect to be the outcome/s of a good employee performance management system?

Finally, some links to websites, reports, etc., that are relevant to various phases of this project, and that I found of interest:

§  Civil Service Reform:  Preserving the Promise of Government, City and County of San Francisco (I especially like the line on page 2 that states “Our system has become, in several key aspects, a triumph of process over purpose.”)

§  Performance Management Home Page, Denver Public Schools

§  Management/Administrative Support Performance Evaluation, Albuquerque Public Schools

§  Management/Administrative Support Performance Evaluation Instructions, Albuquerque Public  Schools

§  Performance Management Home Page, U.S. Office of Personnel Management

§  Strategic Plan 2014, Area Two:  Performance Management, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (the CMS site has some great dashboards and metrics, if you are interested in that kind of thing)

Most of you are probably aware that we held our kick-off meeting for the Classified Performance Management Advisory Committee on Monday, May 23, 2011.  In case you have not been to the Supporting All Employees website on LAUSDnet, I have included the meeting agenda, presentation, and notes here.  Our next meeting will not be until September, when most of our schools are back in session.  However, that does not mean we have been idle this summer.

I have conducted some research on best practices in other public agencies, especially in the area of performance evaluation for non-teachers.  I have also done some research, and met with several people that have been working in the area of competency-based models.  My previous post has a link to an easy-to-understand, basic document on competency models.

I have also been working with a team in our classified personnel office to revise the job analysis process.  Currently, LAUSD may go to subject matter experts (SMEs) two or three times in order to review the requirements of a job classification.  One team collects information that they will use to develop the class description and minimum job requirements.  A different team collects information to develop assessment tools.  Yet another team may collect information in order to develop training programs.  While these teams all have a different purpose, this process may seem redundant to the SMEs.  We are developing a multi-purpose job analysis approach that will address all of these areas, as well as additional, relevant information.  We have prepared a draft approach and are preparing to review it with the relevant stakeholders in classified personnel.  We will post it here once we have vetted it.

In the meantime, please post your comments, suggestions, etc., so that we can all stay involved.

Welcome!

Welcome to the new Classified Performance Management blog.  I hope to use this as a way not only to send you information, but also to have us all share our thoughts with each other.  Please feel free to share this site with anyone interested in the topic of Employee Performance Management.  Additionally, I welcome all your comments and thoughts on any of our discussion topics.  In case you did not receive it, here is a link to an article titled, “Competencies – New York State Workgroup Final Report.”  It provides some good background on the use of competencies in personnel.  In LAUSD, we use a competency model for classified personnel activities, and we are expanding that throughout the entire employee personnel cycle.