OracleBio Case Study
Developing an HR Framework for Growth
When Small and Medium-sized Enterprises invest in their people and prioritise culture, the results speak for themselves.
Over the past year, Bell HR Consulting worked closely with OracleBio to develop an HR framework that supports their ambitious growth plans while preserving what makes them a great place to work.
About OracleBio
OracleBio is an established Digital Pathology Contract Research Organisation based near Glasgow, with a global client base of pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. With the team growing exponentially to meet demand, maintaining their positive culture whilst scaling from 30 staff became a key priority.
The Challenge
OracleBio and Bell HR Consulting discussed the future needs of a growing organisation and defined a brief for a project to deliver an 'HR framework for growth'. The emphasis of the brief was very much on the organisation's desire to provide:
A clear career development pathway for its staff
Effective management of staff performance and meaningful career conversations
Clarity and fairness on remuneration
The ability to maintain the positive culture existing in the company as the organisation grows in number
Our Approach
Working closely with OracleBio's leadership team, we focused on four priority areas:
Career pathways - establishing clear progression routes across all roles
Performance management - enhancing career conversations and development
Salary benchmarking - ensuring competitive, fair remuneration
Behavioural competencies - defining cultural standards as the team grows
Career Pathways
Investing in its staff and offering opportunities for growth and promotion is a priority at OracleBio. In a high-performing environment, the need to provide development opportunities and maintain staff morale and engagement is inextricably linked to the company's success.
The organisation has a mix of both scientific and support roles. The former being the majority in number with existing tiers of grading based upon experience and responsibilities. The latter, including client services, business development, marketing, finance and IT, provides the organisational framework and support for the scientists to deliver. The objective was to establish clear career pathways across the breadth of the organisation.
Working with the company's directors and stakeholders, we made an assessment of the existing organisational structure to get an understanding of the roles and responsibilities as they were defined. Then, using an externally sourced job evaluation framework, each role within OracleBio was assessed against defined criteria to produce a job evaluation score. This provided an objective basis for analysing the responsibilities of each position and enabled the development of a clear grading structure for the company.
The resulting OracleBio framework provided transparency around career pathways and supported line managers in guiding the team on the personal development and opportunities needed to progress to the next role.
In a small business, creating career pathways for support roles can be difficult, particularly when there is only one person responsible for specific functions. The review of job descriptions and the job evaluation process not only encouraged valuable discussion about the scope of those roles, but it also provided an opportunity to explore how those roles could be expanded during company growth, to create career progression for individuals in those support functions.
Performance Management and Career Conversations
Building on the development of career pathways, we worked with OracleBio to assess how best to bring this to life for the team. We recognised that individual employees have a role to play in defining their own career goals, but the line manager also has a key role to play in helping to shape this, bring it to life and provide appropriate opportunities to gain experience.
OracleBio had a well-established performance appraisal process and feedback from the team showed that this was working well. As part of this project, we developed the existing process to incorporate career conversations and provided line managers with training to help them get the best value out of this process. This equipped managers with the tools and confidence to have meaningful development conversations.
Salary Benchmarking
The job evaluation process helped us understand the position of each role within the organisational structure. As a natural extension, this analysis was then used as a foundation for external salary benchmarking, carried out using external market surveys to identify competitive market rates for each role. The resultant salary levels were aligned to wider market standards.
Such parity across the marketplace was important to OracleBio, helping the organisation to attract new talent, retain existing talent, and support ongoing performance and employee engagement.
Behavioural Competencies
OracleBio's senior management team recognised the organisation's strong, positive culture is underpinned by a number of key drivers: effective communication, willingness to collaborate, innovation and the commitment to deliver high-quality work, exceeding client expectations. With a growing team who often work remotely, a competency framework was identified as a valuable tool to define behavioural standards and drive best practice.
To develop this competency framework, one-to-one meetings were held with a cross-section of staff from OracleBio, using structured questions to gather information on the behaviours that are important for success. Then, with a member of the senior management team, the information was used to create five categories of behavioural conduct. For each category, several examples of best practice were listed, divided into two levels:
Core Competencies - applicable to all employees
Management and Leadership Competencies - applicable to those with people and study management responsibility
OracleBio now has a tool that has utility across the entire employment process, from assessing candidates during interviews against defined behavioural standards to providing feedback at performance appraisals or helping to put development plans in place.
Feedback from the Directors
"Working with Alison has been a genuinely rewarding and collaborative process. OracleBio's senior management team brings a range of experience from a range of organisations and that perspective has been invaluable. By combining that experience with Alison's depth of HR expertise, we have been able to put in place career frameworks that are practical, fair, and, most importantly, designed to support and develop our staff as the company grows."
Help your team grow without losing what makes your culture great.
If you're scaling your business and want to maintain the positive culture and talent that got you here, now's the time to put the right HR foundations in place. We're currently working with ambitious SMEs across the country to build frameworks that support growth whilst preserving what makes them brilliant places to work.
Get in touch with Bell HR to secure your HR strategy session.
