Judges offer their advice on how to make your entry stand out from the crowd
You’ve worked hard all year and implemented the greatest HR or L&D initiative your organisation has ever seen. The CEO is delighted, and employees have never loved you more. Now it’s time to get the external recognition you deserve by entering the CIPD People Management Awards 2016 (PMAs), sponsored by Resource Management. Make sure your entry does your hard work justice by following these five steps to a successful entry.
1. Answer the questions
It’s obvious but – like in any ‘exam’ – make sure you answer the question on the paper, and don’t just deposit everything you know about your organisation and HR or L&D department. While you are welcome to enter more than one category, duplicate entries are unlikely to be counted – so it’s vital that you tailor your entries to the criteria of each category.
Charles Cotton, CIPD performance and reward adviser and regular PMAs judge, recommends asking someone who wasn’t involved in the project to look over the entry to make sure all of the questions have been answered and to check your spelling and grammar.
2. Quantify your achievements
The numbers will tell your story, so make sure you quantify what your workplace’s scheme or programme has achieved. Simply saying ‘the chief executive said it was great’ is not enough. Entries need to demonstrate measurable results and objectives, and winning submissions will explain how the organisation’s results link to the objectives and criteria for the award.
However, Katerina Rüdiger, chief community officer at the CIPD and PMA judge, says award entries need to “show measurement of the impact on an organisation and cultural changes; it’s about more than just the numbers”.
3. Tell the whole story
Explaining your organisation’s success contextually will allow you to demonstrate how you reached your goals and overcame any problems along the way. So it may be better to apply for this year’s awards if you have come to the end of your implementation journey – and have the numbers and case studies to prove your achievements – as opposed to having recently introduced a new policy or scheme.
Cotton also advises being honest in your application: “Highlight what worked and what didn’t.” It’s also important to show how the entire organisation engaged with the project – not just HR and L&D – and how the initiative aligned with other people management and business strategies. Be sure to display your ability to clearly road map your journey as a business.
4. Be succinct – yet detailed
With a 1,000-word limit for each entry, you’ll need to keep your submissions brief while cramming them full of relevant details. Be sure to include what the project achieved for your organisation and employees, and how these achievements relate to the category you’re entering. It’s also worth illustrating what is unique and innovative about your entry, and the scale of the improvements and changes that the project created.
Bear in mind that many of the judges will be giving up their free time to read the entries, so keep your submissions on-topic and demonstrate how effectively you can summaries and prioritise information. Make every word count.
5. Don’t limit your entry to HR and L&D
Your entry shouldn’t only include contributions from your HR and L&D teams. Show how your project positively affected employees by including short case studies about individual workers.
Doing this will prove the meaning behind your project or programme, and demonstrate the varied and unique experiences of your employees – something no other entrant will have.
Think your most recent innovation has got what it takes to bring home a PMA? You can enter the awards at www.cipdpmas.co.uk. Early bird entries close on 14 April, and the black tie awards ceremony will take place at Grosvenor House on Tuesday 27 September.