How do we support employee growth and development to combat disengagement with the day to day work and the overall direction of the organization?
Professional development has become increasingly important in libraries as new skills and expectations shape jobs and initiatives.
In a recent article, Dena Schwartz argues that organizations should not only look at performance reviews, but talent reviews. Whereas performance reviews are retroactive and focus on what could be improved, talent reviews focus on the future, and address career aspirations and strengths, and can form the basis of a career development plan. While there is no one specific way libraries can go about doing this, it is important to think about the entire picture of an employee’s journey, and establish a strong base for recruitment, onboarding, and retention which often gets left up to the individual supervisor and is not done on a consistent basis. Start with an employee satisfaction survey, with the understanding that these tools are not perfect and may raise additional issues that are peripheral to what the administration really wants to know. Your human resources department should be able to provide some guidance on how to structure a survey or discussions of this type so that they are effective and useful.
The University of British Columbia offers a great template for getting started on this type of planning and there are other areas such as job crafting that may also be beneficial to consider. These are more individual approaches so that each supervisor would have to decide if these are useful tools in helping those who are interested to gain a more structured perspective than simply saying they want to move into administration or something similar. If these approaches work, they can be integrated into a larger and more formalized mentoring program either within the library or in collaboration with other units on campus or within a system so that the entire organization can benefit.
Even if you are not a top-level administrator, doing something for a specific unit or division within the library would help you work through the details and iron out any issues before asking the dean or director to consider scaling the program up to the library. Another alternative might also entail working through some of these methods with a colleague to help generate some ideas that can be brought to a department or in another venue such as visiting other branches/library/divisions, or building in opportunity for highlighting personal skills through programming or project management.
Cinthya Ippoliti, Director, Auraria Library
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