Defra

Walkgrove won two performance management consultancy projects from Defra in competition with other preferred suppliers. Essentially, Defra felt that the managers who most needed training and development were actually the last to either recognise this or put themselves forward for any development activities. Their audience was quite cynical of HR driven initiatives and had an innate distrust of consultants. Nothing particularly new there!

Walkgrove presented its research, undertaken via questionnaires, focus groups and face to face interviews with selected staff, as an operationally driven project rather than an HR initiative.

Our deliverable after an intense period of research, was a report highlighting the gaps in training provision and suggesting ways of plugging these gaps and also suggested the development of a self assessment online questionnaire delivered via the Walkgrove LMS, to dovetail with the Defra 360 degree appraisal system.

The questionnaire has now been piloted and gone live. Managers complete the questionnaire and then their line manager completes it. In this way anomalies become apparent and can be discussed and addressed.