Company Background

The Coventry, Solihull and Warwickshire Partnerships (CSWP) was created as a company limited by guarantee in 1994, but the three constituent organisations - Warwickshire Careers, Quality Careers Coventry, and Connexions - were formally pulled together as one in 2002.

It aims to unite all sectors of the area’s economy, and seeks to ensure that they are all working together, and pulling in the same direction. The not-for-profit organisation employs just over 350 staff and provides information, advice and guidance on a number of subjects such as careers and funding.

The organisation works with partners on bids and proposals to bring economic development and regeneration into the Coventry, Solihull and Warwickshire areas. Such partnership action is now a pre-requisite for the attention of public sector finance, and to secure private investment.

The Challenge: Using Profile

CSWP has a highly dispersed staff base with over 100 ‘delivery points’ based in schools and colleges around the region, as well as its head office in Coventry. Each of the original three organisations were recognised in its own right by Investors in People, but the new organisation was first assessed as a whole in 2003.

Debra Gill, Training and Development Manager picks up the story: "In one way it was easy as there were established standards throughout the organisation, however, they were often quite different in terms of policies, procedures and working practices which needed to be pulled together.Job descriptions, terms and conditions and wage rates all varied across the three groups."

She continues: "We were lucky that staff motivation was good, and they understood the benefits of using the Investors in People practices. Our WMQC advisor was impressed with people’s commitment to the new organisation - although in some cases it had led to working in a different way.” Debra explains: “The difficulty for us was that whilst there were processes in place, they weren’t necessarily the same processes for everyone. We needed to pull everyone together from an organisational point of view. “ In 2006, CSWP decided that it would undertake the new Profile assessment, because it considered that the more detailed feedback it provided would be useful.

Profile uses the Investors in People Standard as a foundation and then opens fresh possibilities for improvement by embracing a wide range of people management issues, which are not contained in the Standard itself.

The Results

Debra states: “Our Advisor was useful in guiding us through the complexities of moving from three ways of working to a single unified system, and was invaluable in helping us work towards gaining consistency. We are now delighted to have just one set of consistent policies and procedures.”

The company have found that people are much clearer about what is expected of them and how their contribution is relevant to the organisation.

The individual organisations had previously been effective in their separate units, but when they were brought together it highlighted the lack of consistency. The new Profile assessment highlighted that the organisation had lots of good practices in terms of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), but did not have a policy for this.

The organisation has now developed a clear CSR policy, which incorporates many of the existing elements. Debra comments: "Our last Assessment highlighted a weakness in succession planning. We were good at recognising individual career progression through the company, but we had nothing specific about planning where people were going in the longer term.

We are developing a talent management strategy incorporating succession planning to meet this objective." Debra summarises: "I am a huge fan of Profile. It has given us a detailed and thorough analysis of our people management systems, along with an accurate measure of how well they are working. We have a greater insight into how the organisation can continue to develop, and guidance on where there is room for improvement.

It also enables us to benchmark our organisation against others, and has highlighted areas such as CSR, where much was in place but it was not formalised."