From Assessment to Growth: Measuring and Improving Your Team’s Capabilities
In any organization, project success and deliverable quality heavily depend on the team’s skill level. Whether managing designers, developers, or other professionals, it is crucial to understand and assess their skills for individual growth and overall team performance.
However, the following situations can cause significant trouble within the organization:
- Absence of career-level guidance
- Lack of a skill specification guide per role and level
These scenarios can result in unclear workflows for quality checks and individuals can not work effectively carrying out tasks due to a mismatch between their abilities and the company’s needs. This can also affect managers and lead to significant challenges, such as impacting time, money, and the quality of work.
To address these issues, here are some strategies to effectively measure the skill level of your team.
1. Set a Clear Career Level
Before you can assess individual skills, it’s essential to define the career levels within your organization, as this directly impacts the scope of skills required at each level. The scope of responsibilities for a junior level will naturally differ significantly from that of a senior level.
If you don’t have a clear definition of career levels, the skill metrics you develop may become ambiguous, particularly when evaluating and comparing the performance of junior and senior team members.
For Example:
From the first example, you might think, “The junior can indeed do it, but the quality, speed, and complexity of the tasks differ from the senior level. Does the rating given still appear fair and objective?”
Now, let’s check the following example:
As you can see, each level has its distinct area of responsibility, making the assessments more fair and objective. Therefore, before determining the required skill metrics, you must first establish the framework for each level.
2. Set a Clear Skill Metrics
The next step is to determine the required skill metrics for each role and describe the scope of each skill according to the level. The question is, how do you determine these skill metrics?
If you have senior employees, you can ask them what skills are essential for individuals working in that role. However, if you don’t have senior employees or need inspiration to create these skill metrics, you can benchmark educational platforms, Medium articles, articles from reputable institutions/organizations, and more. For example, if you’re looking for the technical skills of a Product Designer, you can refer to NNg as your first reference.
What types of skills should you look for?
This depends on your company’s needs, but ideally, the skills will be divided into Technical Skills, Interpersonal Skills, Leadership, Collaboration, and Initiative. Each of these skills will naturally have sub-skills required for each role.
3. Assessment Process
3.1 Self-Assessment
Encourage your team members to self-assess their skills. Self-assessment allows individuals to reflect on their strengths and weaknesses, which can lead to increased self-awareness and motivation to improve. Additionally, this point can serve as a comparison with peer and manager assessments.
3.2 Manager & Client Assessments
Manager assessments are crucial for viewing an individual’s abilities from a stakeholder’s perspective and helping managers measure their team’s skills and performance. The manager providing the assessment should be someone who interacts directly with the individual or can be replaced by a team lead.
For teams that directly impact customers, customer satisfaction can be a key indicator of skill. High customer satisfaction scores usually correlate with a skilled and efficient team. Regularly measure and analyze customer feedback to gauge how well your team is performing. However, you must carefully choose which clients should review because not all clients can understand all the skill metrics you will provide. The solution is to simplify the skill assessment so that your clients can easily respond.
Disclaimer: Ensure that the manager conducting the review is someone competent in the field. If your team’s manager/lead is still considered lacking, the results of their assessment may only lead to protests from the assessed individuals.
3.3 Peer Reviews
Implement a peer review system where team members evaluate each other’s work. This not only helps identify areas for improvement but also fosters a culture of continuous feedback. Peer reviews are valuable because they provide different perspectives on an individual’s skills and can highlight strengths or weaknesses that may not be apparent in a formal assessment.
You can set peer reviews to be conducted by a maximum of three people who have worked closely with the individual in the past three months. Ideally, the group should include at least one person with the same role as the assessed individual, with the rest coming from different roles.
3.4 1-on-1 Session
As a manager or Design Ops overseeing this assessment process, you are the first person to view the overall assessment results. We need to understand the interests and vision of each individual to help them grow and align with the organization’s needs. You can discuss with the individual how to proceed with an action plan based on their interests and talents.
4. Set Clear Performance Metrics (OKR)
Measuring skills isn’t a one-time activity; it’s a continuous process. Keep track of each team member’s progress over time with tools like OKR (Objective Key Result). You can set OKR according to your company’s vision, the ideas/innovations you want to pursue, and your team’s growth targets within three months. With OKRs, individuals have clear targets to achieve within three months, which helps managers evaluate their performance.
Here is the format I usually use to maintain our team:
5. Track Progress Over Time (Training & Development Program)
Spend time observing your team in action. Pay attention to how they handle tasks, solve problems, and interact with one another. Observation can give you insights into interpersonal skills like communication, teamwork, and leadership, which are often harder to measure. Additionally, during this monitoring process, you can provide feedback on the individual’s improvement process, such as guiding them to attend seminars/workshops, inviting mentors for sharing sessions, providing technical challenges and direction under the manager’s supervision, learning through articles/YouTube/books, and scheduling sharing sessions.
6. The Outcomes
The most visible results can be seen in the quality of work produced by the individual. Has it improved? Has communication and coordination become smoother? If so, congratulations! You have successfully supported your team to grow. Formally, you can track your team’s improvement progress through the KPIs you and your team set within three months. You can evaluate the progress and results to determine if there is anything that needs to be improved for greater effectiveness and efficiency.
After completing all these phases, you can either revisit the skill measurement process or continue with the action plan for further assessments. Don’t forget to appreciate your team for following all these phases and successfully achieving the growth targets set!
Conclusion
Measuring the skill of your team is a multifaceted process that requires a combination of objective metrics, regular assessments, and continuous feedback. By implementing these strategies, you can gain a clear understanding of your team’s capabilities, identify areas for improvement, and ultimately drive better performance and outcomes. Remember, the goal is not just to assess skills but to foster an environment where continuous learning and improvement are encouraged.
If you would like to discuss further about determining the skills of your UI/UX team, you can contact me directly on LinkedIn.
