Surrounded by spreadsheets? How to migrate from spreadsheets to Progression for your organisation

The humble spreadsheet has been an office staple for decades now. Centred around data analysis, spreadsheets are still the go-to method of organisation for a lot of companies. However, when it comes to tracking career progression for your team, why are we still using a tool centred around numbers when we should be centering people?

Migrating from spreadsheets to the Progression platform will allow you to navigate your frameworks using an intuitive user-friendly interface that fosters collaboration and transparency for your team. Not sure where to start? Here’s a helpful guide on how to migrate from spreadsheets to progression as efficiently as possible.

How to migrate from spreadsheets to Progression

Build your frameworks

The first step when building career pathways is creating your content, but it can be tricky to know where to start. With Progression, you can create and manage your frameworks using an intuitive and modern user interface that your entire team can engage with.

You can add your existing skills, competencies and behaviours into our Progression’s framework structure.

We know it’s tough to get started. If you’re stuck for inspiration or want to emulate the success stories of other organisations, you can build on skills and frameworks from teams you've heard of using Progression’s library. There are 228+ pre-made skills in our library which act as building blocks to adapt for your own framework, as well as tons of other research.

Share your pathways

What’s the use in creating a Progression framework for everyone if no one can see it? By sharing your career frameworks and pathways, you’ll be welcoming your teams to explore. You can even create public links to share with the world - show them how it’s done.

As well as being available to the public, all parts of a Progression framework are visible to your team. All team members will have access to all roles, so there'll be no secrets between departments or hierarchy. This transparent approach to career progression encourages flexibility and will empower your team.

Measure Growth

Measuring growth shouldn’t be about numbers, it should be about people. After all, every member of your team has their own set of skills, strengths and goals. You’ll soon find allowing your team to see their own growth and development is hugely empowering. With Progression, you can let your team members browse career pathways, compare roles and check in to track growth over time.

Our check-in tools can help create a dialogue between you and your team nice and easily. They’re designed to be quick to complete, stimulate ideas for goals and actions and feel like a fair conversation. The last thing you want is your team to feel judged or monitored, measuring career growth should be a conversation, not an interrogation.

The benefits of migrating from spreadsheets to Progression

• Allows collaboration: Spreadsheets are great for analytics and crunching numbers, but at their core they weren’t built for collaborative work. If you’re looking for a platform to promote teamwork and conversation, Progression allows teams to create frameworks collaboratively. For example, team members are able to share their career pathways publicly, compare roles and track their growth over time. Collaboration is also a great way of promoting transparency and creating a culture of honesty in the workplace. If employees collaborate with managers to create a career framework, they’ll feel involved at every stage of the process and know the managers are on their side.
• Adaptable: Spreadsheets often contain codes, shortcuts and formulas that are useful to whoever created the spreadsheet but not very useful for anyone else on the team. Precious time is spent deciphering spreadsheets that aren’t at all user friendly. With Progression, there are no complexities and everyone can follow what’s happening. Whatever data you decide to collect and record, Progression helps you present it in a simple, intuitive way so even team members who aren’t familiar with the structures can follow.
• Time Saving: Setting up spreadsheets can be complex, even for those who are spreadsheet pros. Often HR managers end up spending their time organising data on spreadsheets, when data and figures were never meant to be the focal point of their role. To make the process as time efficient as possible, Progression has quick-start frameworks to get the ball rolling straight away. There’s also tons of research and examples from other frameworks you can use as inspiration and customise to fit your own organisation.
• Easy to grow: Once a spreadsheet has been made, it can often end up being treated as the final solution, rather than a platform that grows and mutates over time. As teams grow, extra parts may be hastily tacked on or treated as an afterthought, leaving your database cluttered and cumbersome. Suddenly what was once an organised spreadsheet has endless rows of new data with no room to grow. Progression makes it easy to keep things streamlined and clear. 

Top tips for migrating from spreadsheets to Progression

So you’ve decided to take the plunge and ditch the dusty old spreadsheet for Progression. Here’s some handy tips for making the switch.

• Don’t work in secret: Where making a spreadsheet may have involved toiling away in secret, migrating to Progression means sharing the process out in the open. You should be letting your team know what you’re working on and explain the decision to move on from spreadsheets. This means everyone will be on the same page in the transition process.
• Get feedback: As Progression puts a huge emphasis on collaboration, your team should be able to give feedback every step of the way. Not only will this help create a good relationship between the team and management, but will increase efficiency. You’ll know straight away which parts of your framework are successful and which parts need improvement. Progression has check-in tools to make this process as easy and efficient as possible.
• Adjust: Once you have completed the migration from spreadsheets to the Progression platform, you can test to see if everything is working well. Unlike complex spreadsheets, Progression makes adjustments simple and user friendly, so you won’t disrupt a complicated spreadsheet adding or removing sections. It’s useful to see your Progression framework as an ongoing project that will continue to evolve.

If you prioritise people and care about your team’s individual career pathways, you need to ditch that complicated spreadsheet. Progression promotes collaboration, is adaptable, time-saving and easy to grow and expand. Your frameworks should be an ongoing project that can evolve according to the needs and wants of your team. Forget everything you know about old-fashioned spreadsheets and make the switch.