CHAPTER 5: RESULTS PRESENTATION
5.3 Interview results
5.3.2 Human resources
Employees play a significant role in terms of creating organizational knowledge. This was a statement presented to the interviewees in order for them to answer the questions within the HR section while bearing it in mind. The first question asked interviewees how they believed employees within the Department had been positioned in their ranks according to their expertise and qualifications. All Directors mentioned that employees within the Department had been placed according to their skills and qualifications. One Director even pointed out that:
In terms of appointments, employees are appointed because they meet the requirements in terms of qualifications, experiences and exposure.
However, two Directors identified challenges associated with the placement of employees in their positions as follows:
101 Director 1: The challenge is in terms of ongoing learning, as people become content that they have their qualifications and forget about ongoing growth where they can acquire more knowledge, which affects other aspects of our work.
Director 2: The challenge we have is the respect, understanding and culture of the rest of the Department with respect to what these employees are about, who they are in terms of their qualifications, skills, and what they are supposed to deliver.
Directors were asked how often (if ever) they revisit employees’ skills to check whether they are still relevant to their tasks. All Directors identified performance management assessments as a mechanism used within the Department to revisit employees’ skills and they all indicated that this is done on an annual basis. One Director further elaborated that:
This process provides an opportunity to check if there has been any changes in employees’ duties, and if there are any changes, employees must ensure that they are ready and able to do what is expected of them in terms of the new changes.
Another Director stated that:
Employees also get to know their skills gaps at various points, like when one is doing the performance management and that is where they pick up gaps and identify what is to be done as part of the training to fill in the gaps.
One of the Directors highlighted that on a monthly basis during staff meetings, an item on the agenda specifically discusses staff matters such as the Personal Development Programme (PDP), via which employees are also encouraged to stay up-to-date in terms of improving their qualifications through further studying. However, another Director identified an obstacle to employees studying further by stating that:
In as much as you can identify the gap, getting access to that training becomes a challenge sometimes because of the limited funding. Nevertheless, employees who are hungry for knowledge go out and try to build those skills on their own without waiting for Departmental funding.
102 To confirm the results from the questionnaire regarding the capturing of tacit knowledge, Directors were also asked how the Department captures the tacit knowledge of retiring or departing employees. The shortfall in capturing the tacit knowledge of retiring or departing employees was identified as:
A mistake that needs to be addressed by the Department
All Directors agreed that there is:
No system in place to capture tacit knowledge.
Two Directors identified an exit interview or questionnaire as a means of capturing tacit knowledge. Three Directors elaborated more on the issue of capturing tacit knowledge as follows:
Director 1: As an organization, we are not strong on capturing tacit knowledge with regard to the exit interviews that are done sometimes. There has never been a time where the interviews for a particular period are discussed at a senior management level.
I feel that we lose a lot of information when people leave the organization because we are not enforcing the approach of having exit interviews, and to consolidate all the reasons why people leave the organization.
Director 2: At this stage, we do not have a system available to make sure that the knowledge, skills and expertise that the retiring employee has acquired over the years is restored within the Department, and I think that it is something that we still need to work on as a Department. However, the exit questionnaires that are administered when employees leave ask particular questions, but I do not think that they address everything in terms of ensuring that the skills that they had would be left with the Department in as far as knowledge and expertise are concerned.
Director 3: It is difficult to capture tacit knowledge due to human factors such as people not wanting to share their knowledge or skills.
103 One Director mentioned the ways in which his section manages to capture tacit knowledge by noting that:
A folder is used on a drive, where employees store the documentation of a particular project instead of their laptops. This helps not only when the employee leaves the Department, but also when they are not at work or on sick leave and the section needs to access the documents. Moreover, documenting lessons learned and experiences gained from a project is necessary so that we do not undergo the same lessons and experiences each time we have a challenge.
Interviewees were asked whether the Department provides in-job training for new employees or whether they learn ad-hoc from their mentors. Three Directors agreed that the Department does provide in-job training for new employees, which is a continuous process, and that they learn along the way from their mentors. One of the Director mentioned that:
Most of the learning is done through practice and there is strong dependence of new staff on learning alongside their mentors.
Another Director stated that:
Since the growth levels of people in the job are different, I do intervene with those employees who are struggling and spend time with them irrespective of their rank.
A compulsory induction programme was one of the types of in-job training methods identified by two Directors. This programme allows new employees to acquire an enhanced interpretation of the Government operations and processes in order to achieve better service delivery.
However, one Director opined differently regarding this issue, as indicated with this remark:
The issue of in-job training does happen; if only it could be structured, it would lead to more benefits for the organization. Now, people are just thrown in, they just have to
‘swim or sink’, and we expect that by virtue of their appointment they know everything.
Even in our compulsory induction programme, we only rely on the provincial induction course done by Office of the Premier (OTP) instead of the Departmental one.
104 The final question from this section asked Directors how the Department captures the experiences and lessons learned from a completed project. All four Directors chose to answer this question at a sectional level. Three Directors identified similar ways in which their sections capture the experiences and lessons learned from a completed project in a form of shared drive, specific folder and from the Persal system, which is employed to capture what an employee has learned from that project. This is stored in the employee’s personal profile and as a result, it may pose challenges for other employees to access that information if required. The other Director stated that:
There is a lot of learning that can be gained from individual performance, which is not captured, as there is no repository in which to store this knowledge gained from the project or task.