10 • Continued from previous page Competencies are the skills, knowledge and behaviours that are required to perform certain activities well and which are critical to success in building a resilient organisation. In other words, public officers are competent if they know what to do; know how to do it; know when to do it; know why you do it; and can do it consistently well; A Competency Framework was recently disseminated by CARICAD for the guidance of its Member States. It identifies a number of core competencies and behavioural anchors for increasing professional competence in the public sector. In short, the competency framework defines how people employed in the Public Sector are to work. All key HR practices including recruitment, selection and retention; job descriptions; results-based performance management; accountability; integrated information systems; engaging public officers in proactive programmes of resilience training, among others, should operate in harmony to drive employee engagement. These programmes should seek not only to foster general well-being and enhance the immediate working experience for public officers, but also equip them with skills and strategies to embrace future challenges, change and uncertainty. Reinforcing Business Processes Public sector organisations continue to be subject to government initiatives and legislation which result in the need to improve processes. From time to time it is necessary to design new processes to change and improve efficiency and effectiveness. In building Resilient organisations, Process Improvement is one of the ways public sector organisations can address the challenges of increasing Effectiveness, Efficiency, Capacity, Flexibility and Responsiveness. This will require application of organisation development principles. Organisational resilience supports the organisation’s ability to reinvent business processes and strategies as circumstances change. This requires strategic flexibility, high performance work systems, and multi-skilled public sector employees to steer the course through the environment. Workforce Planning A simple, often quoted definition, is that workforce planning involves ensuring that there are the right number of people, with the right skills, in the right place, at the right time. Workforce planning is therefore simply about arriving at existing and future demand for different types of employees, matching this to the likely future supply, and assessing the impact on training, recruitment and retention plans. • Continues on next page
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