Innovapost bridges the competency gap: Helping employees understand and meet expectations
| Published date | 12 August 2007 |
| Pages | 20-23 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/14754390980000982 |
| Date | 12 August 2007 |
| Author | Brent Charland,Melanie Leclair |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour |
20 Volume 6 Issue 4 May/June 2007
NNOVAPOST WAS CREATED in 2002 as a
joint venture between Canada Post and CGI with a
mandate to provide IT services to the Canada Post
group of companies. One of the benefits to Canada
Post of the new company was the consolidation of IT
services. Consequently, it was necessary to integrate IT
staff from a number of source companies into the new
entity. This meant that a large proportion of the
employees came from different organizations,
particularly Canada Post, Purolator Courier and
Accenture, all of which have their own strong, and not
always mutually consistent, cultures. Clearly, one of the
biggest challenges faced by Innovapost was the creation
of a unique culture that would bring the employees
together and foster a sense of unity and belonging.
The initial step in this initiative involved the
development of our core values. The senior leadership
team spent considerable effort discussing and deciding
what kind of company they wanted Innovapost to be,
and finally settled on five core values:
1. Leadership
2. Honesty
3. Teamwork
4. Integrity
5. Respect
Setting employee expectations
In some ways, this represented the easiest part of the
process; now we had to find ways to make these core
values real to our employees. If we expected our people
to live these values, it would be necessary to define the
expectations against which they would be measured. To
do this, we embarked on an initiative to provide job
descriptions for all employees. We first defined the
unique types of work that took place at the company.
These job families were defined by type of work, rather
than organization, so that changes to the organizational
structure wouldn’t affect the job descriptions. Within
each job family we then created descriptions for each
level of employee that included the scope of
responsibilities, key deliverables and, most importantly,
a competency profile.
Through a series of workshops and discussions with
senior management, we settled on seven behavioral
competencies that would form the centerpiece of our job
profiles. The competencies are:
1. Innovation
2. Business knowledge
3. Communication
4. Customer focus
5. Teamwork and commitment
6. Achievement and results focus
7. Leadership
In order to clearly define expectations, each competency
was broken down into five levels of increasing
complexity. For each job description, the expected level of
Innovapost
bridges the
competency
gap
Helping employees understand and
meet expectations
The creation of joint-venture organization Innovapost
involved the integration of strong and disparate
corporate cultures. Brent Charland and Melanie Leclair
from Innovapost’s HR department explain how the
company’s Professional Development Series helped
employees to understand and meet the expectations
of the new organizational strategy and structure.
by Brent Charland and Melanie Leclair, Innovapost I
© Melcrum publishing 2007.For more information visit our website www.melcrum.com or e-mail info@melcrum.com
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