The Foundation of the Award Programme

The two awards judging criteria are based on the world-famous Baldrige Excellence Framework and its spirit.

The framework upholds below core values and concepts:

• Systems perspective
• Visionary leadership
• Customer-focused excellence
• Valuing People
• Agility and resilience
• Organizational learning
• Focus on success and innovation
• Management by fact
• Societal contributions
• Ethics and transparency
• Delivering value and results

The framework assesses performance in seven key categories:'

1. Leadership
   The Leadership category asks how senior leaders’ personal actions guide and sustain the organization. It also asks about the organization’s governance system; how the organization fulfills its legal and ethical responsibilities; and how it makes societal contributions.
2. Strategy The Strategy category asks how the organization develops strategic objectives and actions plans, implements them, changes them if circumstances require and measures progress.
3. Customers The Customers category asks how the organization engages its customers for ongoing success, including how the organization listens to customers, determines product and/or services to meet their needs, builds long-term customer relationships, and enhances the customer experience.
4. Measurement, Analysis & Knowledge Management The Measurement, Analysis, and Knowledge Management category asks how the organization measures, analyzes, reviews, and improves organizational performance and how the leaders manage information and organizational knowledge assets.
5. Workforce The Workforce category asks how the organization addresses workforce capability and capacity and provides a workplace climate to support high performance. The category also asks how the organization engages, manages, and develops the workforce to utilize its full potential in alignment with the organization’s overall business needs.
6. Operations The Operations category asks how the organization designs, manages, and improves its products and/or services and work process, and ensures operational effectiveness to deliver customer value and achieve ongoing organizational success.
7. Results The Results category asks about the organizations ‘s performance and improvement in all key areas – product and process results; customer results; workforce results; leadership and governance results; and financial, marketplace, and strategy results.

“Integration” is the fundamental emphasis of the framework. The figure below illustrates how the framework connects and integrates the criteria categories.

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

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.

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.

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.