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2024 Award Criteria


The core values and concepts are embodied in seven Criteria Categories:

LEADERSHIP (Category 1)

Leadership addresses how your senior leaders' actions guide and sustain your organization, setting organizational vision, values, and performance expectations. Attention is given to how your senior leaders communicate with your workforce, enhance their leadership skills, participate in organizational learning and develop future leaders, create a focus on action, and establish an environment that encourages ethical behavior and high performance. The category also includes your organization's governance system and how your organization fulfills its legal, ethical, and societal responsibilities and supports its key communities.

STRATEGY (Category 2)

Strategy addresses strategic and action planning, implementation of plans, how adequate resources are ensured to accomplish the plans, how accomplishments are measured and sustained, and how plans are changed if circumstances require a change. The category stresses that long-term organizational sustainability and your competitive environment are key strategic issues that need to be integral parts of your organization's overall planning. Decisions about your organizational core competencies are an integral part of organizational sustainability and therefore are key strategic decisions.

While many organizations are increasingly adept at strategic planning, plan execution is still a significant challenge. This is especially true given market demands to be agile and to be pre-pared for unexpected change, such as volatile economic conditions or disruptive technologies that can upset an otherwise fast-paced but more predictable marketplace. This category highlights the need to place a focus not only on developing your plans, but also on your capability to execute them.

CUSTOMERS (Category 3)

Customers addresses how your organization seeks to engage your customers, with a focus on listening to and supporting customers, determining their satisfaction, offering the right products, and building relationships that result in loyalty through customers' investment in your brand and product offerings. The category stresses customer engagement as an important outcome of an overall learning and performance excellence strategy. Your customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction results provide vital information for understanding your customers and the marketplace. In many cases, the voice of the customer provides meaningful information not only on your customers' views but also on their marketplace behaviors and how these views and behaviors may contribute to the sustain-ability of your organization in the marketplace.

MEASUREMENT, ANALYSIS, AND KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT (Category 4)

The Measurement, Analysis, Review, and Knowledge Management category is the main point within the Criteria for all key infor�mation about effectively measuring, analyzing, and improving performance and managing organizational knowledge to drive improvement and organizational competitiveness. In the simplest terms, category 4 is the "brain center" for the alignment of your organization's operations with its strategic objectives. Central to such use of data and information are their quality and availability. Furthermore, since information, analysis, and knowledge management might themselves be primary sources of competitive advantage and productivity growth, this category also includes such strategic considerations.

WORKFORCE (Category 5)

Workforce addresses key workforce practices - those directed toward creating and maintaining a high-performance work environment and toward engaging your workforce to enable it and your organization to adapt to change and to succeed. The category covers your capability and capacity needs and your workforce support climate. Your workforce focus includes workforce engagement, development, and management, which should be addressed in an integrated way (i.e., aligned with your organization's strategic objectives and action plans).

To reinforce the basic alignment of workforce management with overall strategy, the Criteria also cover human resource or workforce planning as part of overall planning in the Strategy category (category 2).

OPERATIONS (Category 6)

Operations addresses how the work of your organization is accomplished. It examines how your organization designs, manages, and improves its key work processes and the work systems of which they are a part. It stresses the importance of your core competencies and how you protect and capitalize on them for success and organizational sustainability. It calls specific attention to the need to prepare for potential emergencies and to ensure continuity of operations.

Efficient and effective work systems require effective design; a prevention orientation; and linkage to customers, suppliers, partners, and collaborators, as well as a focus on value creation for all key stakeholders; operational performance improvement; cycle time reduction; emergency readiness; and evaluation, continuous improvement, innovation, and organizational learning.

Work systems must also be designed in a way that allows your organization to be agile. In the simplest terms, "agility" refers to your ability to adapt quickly, flexibly, and effectively to changing requirements. Depending on the nature of your organization's strategy and markets, agility might mean rapid change from one product to another, rapid response to changing demands or market conditions, or the ability to produce a wide range of customized services. Agility also increasingly involves decisions to outsource, agreements with key suppliers, and novel partnering arrangements.

Cost and cycle time reduction may be achieved through Lean process management strategies. Defect reduction and improved product yield may involve Six Sigma projects. It is crucial to utilize key measures for tracking all aspects of your operations management.

RESULTS (Category 7)

The Results category provides a results focus that encompasses your objective evaluation and your customers' evaluation of your organization's product offerings, as well as your evaluation of your key processes and process improvement activities; your customer-focused results; your workforce results; your governance, leadership system, and societal responsibility results; and your overall financial and market performance. Through this focus, the Criteria's purposes - superior value of offerings as viewed by your customers and the marketplace; superior organizational performance as reflected in your operational, workforce, legal, ethical, societal, and financial indicators; and organizational and personal learning - are maintained. Category 7 thus provides "real-time" information (measures of progress) for evaluation and improvement of processes and products, in alignment with your overall organizational strategy. It calls for analysis and review of results data and information to determine your overall organizational performance and to set priorities for improvement.


The framework connecting and integrating the Criteria Categories is given in the figure below.

From top to bottom, the framework has the following basic elements:

ORGANIZATIONAL PROFILE

Your Organizational Profile (top of figure) sets the context for the way your organization operates. Your environment, key working relationships, and strategic challenges and advantages serve as an overarching guide for your organizational performance management system.

SYSTEM OPERATIONS

The system operations are composed of the six Baldrige Categories in the center of the figure that define your operations, and the results you achieve.

Leadership (Category 1.0), Strategy (Category 2.0), and Customers (Category 3.0) represent the leadership triad. These Categories are placed together to emphasize the importance of a leadership focus on strategy and customers. Senior leaders set your organizational direction and seek future opportunities for your organization.

Workforce (Category 5.0), Operations (Category 6.0), and Results (Category 7.0) represent the results triad. Your organization's workforce and key processes accomplish the work of the organization that yields your overall performance results.

All actions point toward Results - a composite of product and service, customer, market and financial, and internal operational performance results, including workforce, leadership, governance, and social responsibility results.

The horizontal arrow in the center of the framework links the leadership triad to the results triad, a linkage critical to organizational success. Furthermore, the arrow indicates the central relationship between Leadership (Category 1.0) and Results (Category 7.0). The two-headed arrow indicates the importance of feedback in an effective performance management system.

SYSTEM FOUNDATION

Measurement, Analysis, and Knowledge Management (Category 4.0) are critical to the effective management of your organization and to a fact-based, knowledge-driven system for improving performance and competitiveness. Measurement, analysis, and knowledge management serve as a foundation for the performance management system.


There are 17 items, each focusing on a major requirement. They are expected to be included in the Final/Written Submission. Maximum point values that can be scored for each item are shown in the chart below.

Preface: Organizational Profile

P.1 Organizational Description
P.2 Organizational Situation

   
Categories and Items Point Values
1.0 Leadership 115
1.1 Senior Leadership 65
1.2 Governance and Societal Contributions 50
 
2.0 Strategy 90
2.1 Strategy Development 45
2.2 Strategy Implementation 45
 
3.0 Customers 85
3.1 Customer Expectations 40
3.2 Customer Engagement 45
 
4.0 Measurement, Analysis, Review, and Knowledge Management 90
4.1 Measurement, Analysis, and Improvement of Organizational Performance 45
4.2 Information and Knowledge Management 45
 
5.0 Workforce 85
5.1 Workforce Environment 40
5.2 Workforce Engagement 45
 
6.0 Operations 85
6.1 Work Processes 40
6.2 Operational Effectiveness 45
 
7.0 Results 450
7.1 Product and Process Results 120
7.2 Customer Results 80
7.3 Workforce Results 80
7.4 Leadership and Governance Results 80
7.5 Financial, Market and Strategy Results 90
 
  TOTAL POINTS 1,000

Award Criteria in details