Organizational and staff development (OSD) for EMBs addresses their long-term capacity-building and skills requirements, and takes into account staff career development. OSD aims to unify the EMB’s strategic objectives and the skills required to attain them and its staff’s career and personal development goals. An active OSD element will contribute to the EMB’s sustainability.
It is important for an EMB to develop both short- and long-term strategies to address its OSD requirements. OSD requires a substantial, and preferably separate, dedicated budget, so the EMB will need to prioritize its training and development needs. For example, the Russian EMB has decided that training of core staff (rather than polling station staff) is its priority.
OSD is based on a needs assessment, which may be conducted in house or by outside contractors or management consultants. This needs assessment identifies all EMB tasks, compares the skill levels of staff with these tasks and identifies the gaps—from which specific organizational and individual staff training needs, and the appropriate training methodologies, can be determined. OSD programmes aim to train each EMB staff member to perform his or her tasks with maximum efficiency and professionalism.
When assessing needs and developing OSD plans, EMBs may sense a need to choose between (1) training staff to ensure they have the skills to do their current jobs and (2) providing them with a broader set of skills, firmly based on the core principles of sound electoral administration, which they may not need immediately, but which will improve their ability to perform a range of different functions over time. EMBs that ensure staff are diversely skilled may be better placed to cope with change in the long run—and more able to respond with agility to evolving demands of the electoral environment—than those that have focused predominantly on current needs.
Depending on the needs analysis, OSD can include:
- general skills development, for example in:
– written and verbal communication;
– creativity, innovation and enterprise;
– team building;
– critical and strategic thinking and problem solving;
– self-management;
– dispute resolution skills;
– project management;
– using technology;
– leadership, management, coaching and supervisory skills; and/or
- the development of technical skills relevant to the specific EMB division.
Staff development may take a number of basic forms, such as customized short- term informal training in the form of staff meetings and reviews, retreats and seminars; the formal or informal mentoring of staff by senior EMB or another organization’s officials; and long-term formal training such as courses or academic development programmes. Continuous horizontal and vertical communication within the EMB not only contributes to development objectives but also greatly helps maintain organizational focus and improve staff performance. Open internal communication also reinforces the importance of transparency, and helps staff build knowledge of the organization and its activities on a continuous basis, outside the framework of formal training or mentoring.
Some EMBs have had an institutionalized separation of responsibility for the training and development of core EMB staff on the one hand, and polling staff on the other; the latter has often involved areas specializing in polling operations rather than longer-term staff development per se. Such an approach may be sub-optimal in countries where polling staff might be a potential source of core EMB staff.
