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HR etc’s!! Employee Life Cycle (ELC) is an organizational model that frames the employee-company relationship in six stages from pre-recruitment to post-separation.
By applying this model, you can measure overall organizational effectiveness, manage a workforce to increase performance, and maximize savings on the costs of hiring, developing, and managing top talent.
Click on the stages below to learn more.
Building a Competency Model
By Carol Spicer
Competencies are sets of skills, knowledge, abilities and attributes—characteristics—that enable people to successfully perform jobs.
In 1995, I was part of a team of human resource and training and development professionals who set out to build a common set of competencies for Luxottica Retail, a group of eyewear stores. Our goal was to define and build business drivers that managers could use to hire, measure performance and train against. If we hired and developed associates based on these skills, they could apply the skills to a variety of jobs for today and the future.
We built our competency model to support our associate life cycle—selection, performance management, training and succession planning. All of our tools—pre-hire selection assessments for field and store positions, performance management criteria, succession planning programs for top talent, and training and development curricula—would be anchored in these competencies.
All of this sounds so easy, but it takes effort to make a competency model stand the test of time. Here’s how we did it.
Worldwide Applications
In 1995, Luxottica Retail of Mason, Ohio, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Luxottica Group in Milan, Italy, consisted only of one retail brand—LensCrafters. We have learned, 14 years and multiple brands later, that properly validated common competencies can extend to a much larger, more complex organization comprising many brands, business units, associate levels and global adoption.
Today, we see competencies shared in some of our retail brands, including Sunglass Hut, Pearle Vision, Sears Optical, Target Optical and EyeMed, at facilities throughout North America. The shared competencies became evident as we developed the same tools for each brand over time.
A major step in building our competency-based program was partnering with our brand operations teams. We started by meeting with the operations teams to understand their strategies for current and future business trends. It continues to be critical for our brand teams to own and support the competencies.
Once each brand team identifies key performance indicators (KPIs) that drive its business, HR and training and development professionals recruit and train associates who can be promoted to leadership positions. Some examples of KPIs include the ability to make sales, grow a business unit and engage customers.
Working with a Vendor
At this point in 1995, we selected a consultant who led us through the following steps:
- Developing questionnaires focusing on business drivers. A custom questionnaire was developed for each position.
- Administering questionnaires to a significant number of associates, their managers and their managers’ managers. We started by administering questionnaires to workers in retail jobs, such as regional and zone managers, store managers and assistant managers, and sales associates, and continued on to corporate office staff.
- Holding focus groups with associates to confirm findings.
- Meeting with executive teams on current and future brand strategies, making sure that everyone agreed on the skills needed for each job.
- Summarizing the results of the questionnaires, focus groups and executive meetings.