Managing creative people demands intelligence, flexibility, resilience and subtlety but it also helps to have clear, open and understandable HR policies. We work with architectural practices to create tailored management systems that allow their staff to blossom within a framework that also reflects the practice ethos.

Ways that we have helped include:

Skills and competencies audits
Using the generic Colander tasks and skills matrices as a starting point, we can help you to document the skills and expertise that you require to achieve your business and architectural ambitions. This can then be reviewed against the skills that are available within your existing workforce, so identifying skills gaps or shortages, while also raising awareness of the latent talents that are inherent in your current team. Your practice’s skills and competencies matrix can be used to generate job descriptions and appraisal documents; also to provide objective criteria for salary reviews, job promotions and the more difficult conversations about poor performance.

Psychometric testing
Where appropriate, we encourage our clients to use psychometric testing to bring clarity to complex inter-personal or management issues.

Job descriptions for architects and support staff
Hand in hand with our work on practice structures, we can help you to write job descriptions for both your architectural employees and your support staff. This can be done either using the generic Colander tasks and skills matrices or by building on existing arrangements.

Appraisal systems
We can help you create or update your appraisal documentation, to reflect new working methods or streamlined HR systems. This often goes hand in hand with appraisal training, to ensure that the people then doing the appraisals do so successfully.

Personal Development Plans (PDP’s)
PDP’s are an important part of a co-ordinated HR policy that focuses attention on each individual in the practice. A PDP simply documents a person’s current position, identifies their personal aspirations in their working environment and the ambitions that the practice has for them, then plans a route to achieve these aims through on-the-job project or management challenges, training, mentoring or coaching. We can help you to organise and implement PDP’s across your practice.

Reviews and appraisals for senior people
It is as important to review the work of your Partners or Directors as it is to appraise your staff; however, the methodology for senior reviews is likely to be very different. We have undertaken a number of 360 reviews of Partners and Directors, talking to clients and other contacts in the outside world about their ability to lead and represent their practices, and to their staff about what it is like to work for them. Reporting these findings back to the individuals concerned can be done confidentially on a one-to-one basis or through a more general review with the entire senior management team.

Our consultancy work in this area is closely linked to our coaching services and dovetails with the training courses that we also run on this subject:
Appraisal training
Attracting and retaining staff (public course) (in-house course)
Being more efficient (public course) (in-house course)
Developing assertiveness
Essential staff management skills (public course) (in-house course)
Leadership skills
Time management