I got an opportunity to join a consulting firm as partner. My mandate was simply “to look after” our thirty or more consultants. Our consultants had a combination of skill sets ranging from business analysts, project managers and software developers. Their level of experience was also varying with a combination of junior, intermediate and senior resources. The majority of our consultants were contracted to a client, an organisation in the utilities industry.
I immediately setup one on one meeting’s with each of the consultants. The purpose of these meetings was to get to know my team better but more importantly to understand what the burning issues in the environment were. The feedback I received from the initial meetings with my team highlighted two important issues for me. There was no formal performance measurement process in place; the consultants felt that their salary increases were at the discretion of the management of the consulting firm. They felt that their line managers at the client did not contribute towards giving feedback on their performance which would be a fair measure of their overall performance. The second issue that was raised was that junior resources felt they did not get enough support from the organisation before being deployed at the client sites, “the environment was tough and they were simply thrown into the deep-end”, they said.
The management team had given me budget to hire additional support staff if the need arose. Without wasting any time, I started looking for a human resources specialist to assist me. I officially placed an advertisement for the HR specialist; and asked for referrals from a few other people. After, a thorough shortlisting and interview process, I finally employed an HR specialist to be part of my team. When she came on board, we immediately started putting performance appraisal processes in place. We engaged