By Rachel Lewis and Emma Donaldson-Feilder, Affinity Health at Work

A new maturity model will help organisations support managers to develop the skills and behaviours needed to enhance well-being and engagement in their teams

Despite all the evidence demonstrating that employee health, well-being and engagement are important for organisational success, and that line managers are one of the most important influences on both engagement and stress, CIPD research found that less than half (43%) of the 1,091 HR professionals surveyed believe line managers are bought into the importance of well-being. Further, although the majority of an organisation’s training and development budget is spent on developing managers, until now there has been a lack of a unifying model to demonstrate how to develop managers effectively and sustainably.

To help address this, we at Affinity Health at Work have worked with the CIPD, IOSH (the Institute of Occupational Safety and Health) and the other members of our Research Consortium, to develop and launch a series of evidence-based practical tools. The purpose of these tools is to help organisations equip managers with the skills and behaviours needed to engage and protect the well-being of their teams on a day-to-day basis. We’ve produced checklists, case studies, top tips documents and a maturity model; plus a full scientific report on the research that underpins the practical materials. The new materials were launched in February 2017 and build on a framework first published in 2014; they have been developed in conjunction with more than one hundred UK organisations.

One of the key new tools in the updated suite of materials is the maturity model. This will enable organisations to design management development programmes according to their current level of maturity. So whether you’re starting out on developing a programme or you have an established one you want to improve, the maturity model will help identify which of our resources you need.

Maturity Model for Management Development Programmes aimed at addressing employee health, well-being and engagement

A maturity model allows an organisation to have its methods and processes assessed against a clear set of external best practice benchmarks, allowing it to determine its current level in comparison to other organisations and/or a best practice standard. They are widely used in Organisational Development, however they have rarely been applied to the consideration of health, wellbeing and engagement.

The advantages of using a maturity model are that it can provide:

• Simple, precise information to an organisation on their maturity level, allowing clarity about where to prioritise activity in order to continue to improve and develop
• An independent, evidence-based set of ‘benchmarks’ or best practice standards for an organisation to work towards
• The opportunity to compare an organisation’s maturity level with other organisations, or other parts of the organisation

There are four levels in the maturity model, from ‘little or no capability’ (level 0) to ‘competence’ (level 3). The maturity model is ordered chronologically (before, during and after running a development programme), enabling practitioners to pinpoint the specific factors pertinent to them at their particular stage in their development programme. In addition, factors within each chronological stage (and at each maturity level) are divided by three considerations: manager (factors to do with the individuals being developed), intervention (methodological factors such as content and design of the intervention) and organisation (factors to do with the wider organisational context). 

To provide a demonstration of how the model can be used, let us take an example of a practitioner who has run leadership development programmes in the past, has moved to a new organisation, and is now tasked with revising and improving the existing leadership development programme within his/her new organisation.

• The practitioner uses the maturity framework as a guideline from which to ask questions of the organisation about their approach and current leadership development offering.
• Using the responses from the organisation, the practitioner is able to diagnose that they are currently between level 0 and level 1 in the framework (considering some, but not all of the level 1 factors). 
• The practitioner uses the checklist to identify the key priorities for consideration in order to improve the programme.  Having identified the organisation is currently approaching level 1 maturity, the focus needs to be on the level 1 items that are not currently being addressed to target initially.  Although presently at the planning stage, the practitioner would look at what needs to be considered across all three chronological stages.
• The practitioner can also use the maturity framework to get an idea of what would be required to make the programme more effective still by reading the level 2 considerations.  At this stage, the practitioner may be able to highlight some elements of level 2 that could be integrated into the current programme – and others to work on and develop at a future point when they are ready to move up a further maturity level.