In a report by Glassdoor’s chief economist, published in the Harvard Business Review, allowing someone to stagnate in their role is one of the main reasons why employees choose to leave their company. Without a doubt, giving employees an understanding of where their skill set currently stands and what they need to improve on to accelerate their career progress is critical for engagement and retention.

With Leapsome’s Development Framework, you can clearly define the expectations for each individual skill at different seniority levels within the organization and present this on a Skills Matrix.

As a Leapsome admin, you can set up and define the Development Framework for your company in the “Admin Settings” panel. Each new skill within the framework can be assigned to “Everyone” (i.e., applicable to the whole company) or a specific team. Skills can also be associated with a category, which is useful for the aggregation of skills in analytics.

You can also use the “Levels” feature to create unique descriptions for each individual skill level. What’s expected from a junior employee for “Problem-solving” might be very different from the expectations for a senior-level executive. All of this is now easily viewable on the Skills Matrix.

The Development Framework is tightly integrated with core parts of the Leapsome platform, including Performance Reviews, Goals & OKRs, and Instant Feedback.

The Development Framework in Performance Reviews

Performance reviews become extremely powerful once the Development Framework is set up and each employee is assigned a level (this data can also be imported from your HRIS via one of Leapsome’s integrations). When setting up a performance review, questions can be tied to specific skills within the Development Framework. The reviewer will then see the description for each skill that corresponds to the reviewee’s level when writing a performance review, ensuring that feedback is objective against the criteria for the reviewee’s seniority. Once the review process is complete, the resulting analytics data is mapped to the Development Framework skills.

As an individual employee, you’ll see your performance review results under “Development Profile.”

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As an Admin, you’ll also see aggregated results for your organization. Those can be filtered and grouped across various dimensions to allow for comparisons.

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The Development Framework in Instant Feedback

Similarly, skills can be used within Leapsome’s Instant Feedback feature. This means that, in addition to providing overall feedback, you can write comments linked to a specific skill and rate the individual’s skill on a sliding scale. With feedback tied to the company’s core skills, it’s easier for the recipient to understand their current performance levels.

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The Development Framework in Goals & OKRs (& 1:1 meetings)

When creating a new goal in Leapsome, you can now make it a “Development Goal” by associating it with a corresponding skill. This helps you create an action plan and keep track of your progress on your way toward building deeper proficiency in certain areas. These development goals are also displayed in the 1:1 meetings between employees and their manager.

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With the new Development Framework and Skills Matrix feature, we aim to help you facilitate employee development, foster fair reviews, and boost engagement. As we’ve discussed, knowing where someone can improve and where they’re already doing an outstanding job is critical for employee satisfaction — and this can surely help you reach organization-level goals much faster!

— To learn more about Leapsome’s Development Framework and Skills Matrix, request a demo.