The recruitment maze: Adding objectivity to reduce risk to identify top talent

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Many of us can agree that recruitment is a risky business. Finding perfect candidates for all roles in your business who will meet the job requirements and excel within your company’s culture is akin to solving a complex puzzle. A recruitment maze. According to industry statistics, only 25% of the selected individuals are top performers. The question is, why does this happen?

How do you reduce risk to identify top talent to join your organisation?

The main challenge in identifying top talent is the need for more objective data available when making hiring decisions. Using more objective data for candidates on an individual basis and applying a human approach in the recruitment maze is discussed in this article.

Without a crystal ball, hiring managers often rely on a limited information set: resumes, reference checks, and gut feeling. While these elements are paramount, they provide only a fraction of the information required to make a well-informed decision.

A solid argument to reduce risk to identify top talent

John and Ronda Hunter’s research in “Validity & Utility of Alternative Predictors of Job Performance”, points out that interviews and background checks provide just 26% of the information required to make a successful hiring decision.

Recruitment maze

This stage is where most selection processes typically end.

How can we gather more valuable objective data to simply the recruitment maze?

The answer lies in measuring cognitive ability, behaviours, occupational interests, and overall “fit”. By incorporating these aspects into the hiring process, you can gather a powerful additional 49% of valuable objective data for candidates at an individual level. In essence, this approach slashes your recruitment risk by almost 50% and enables a greater tapping into the potential of candidates for longer employee engagement.

Making selections for our personal purchases

Think about the last important purchase you made: a new car, a smart TV, or a laptop. Chances are, you didn’t base your decision solely on how it looked. You likely considered various aspects such as performance, features, and how well it suited your needs and wants.

A need to improve the recruitment process

So why do we rely on just 26% of the available information with interviews and background checks when it comes to hiring?

Unsurprisingly, we get it right 25% of the time. It’s like betting on the roulette table or the slot machines. But there’s a better way.

A range of available assessments to help with the recruitment maze

With the advent of next-gen evaluations, you can substantially improve your hiring process. We’ve seen significant results working with clients.

Assessments are available off the shelf for a range of roles, including:

  • Managers
  • Salespeople
  • Customer service representatives
  • Blue collar workers

Moreover, you have the flexibility to choose specific dimensions critical to your business. Dimensions could relate to strategy, managing generations, or promoting a culture of respect, for example.

What’s more, these assessments are easy to use, cost-effective and validated. There’s no need for expensive certification courses. The GR8PI next-gen technology handles interpretation and provides reports in plain language that are easy to understand.

So why not give an assessment a try and see for yourself?

It’s time to break free from the old, ineffective methods and embrace a more data-driven, reliable and informed approach to hiring tomorrow’s talent.

As Einstein famously said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

It’s time to change and significantly reduce your recruitment risk while identifying top talent essential for your organisation to thrive. Trial an assessment for free today.

Isn’t it more important to prioritise job fit over white vs blue collar?

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Historically, blue collar vs white collar jobs referred to manual labour jobs that involved physical work. In the 1940s, this classification was not only based on the job itself but also on social class. Examples of such occupations include those in the construction, trades, and manufacturing sectors.

 

Fast forward to today, and collar colours

Today, blue collar jobs form an integral part of the workforce for many organisations, regardless of the industry sector. These individuals serve as the backbone of a company, frequently working in physically demanding environments and can face heightened risk.

Although businesses must prioritise customer satisfaction, ensuring all employees are content and well-suited for their respective roles and company are equally important.

 

What are the advantages of fit for white v blue collar and all employees?

There are numerous advantages, even in collar colour roles such as blue collar vs white collar jobs. Let’s look at some benefits here.

Any improvement in productivity translates to increased profits regardless of collar colour

A contented team of workers can greatly enhance their own productivity levels. A cheerful workforce creates a favourable work atmosphere that inspires employees to put in extra effort, resulting in improved organisational productivity. As most business people know, any productivity boost translates directly to increased profits.

Keep your top people

Happy employees, regardless of blue collar vs white collar or another collar colour, can also help reduce employee turnover. A high employee turnover rate can cost businesses severely.

 

According to AHRI, employee turnover costs 1.5 times the employee’s salary. 

 

Better mental health across all collar colours for jobs

Today, mental health has become a top priority in all workplaces. Employees well-suited to their job roles tend to experience higher satisfaction levels and are more likely to maintain good mental health. These aspects ultimately result in a more secure work setting.

 

When employees are happy in their jobs, they tend to be more alert and have greater attention to detail. And so, the likelihood of workplace accidents or injuries is reduced. Providing a safe work environment is always a must for organisations.

 

How to hire the right candidate for blue collar jobs?

Modern psychometric assessments can predict role success with high levels of accuracy. But they are rarely used for wage-based or less-skilled roles due to perceived cost constraints in many instances.

 

Great People Inside has a solution to this issue for successful business outcomes. Our highly precise psychometric evaluations are unbiased and efficient in assessing candidates for all job levels. From entry-level to executive positions, from the machine room to the boardroom.

 

The GR8PI platform can design cost-effective assessments to precisely measure fit and what’s essential to each specific role. The result for people in companies is improved productivity, reduced employee turnover, and better mental health.

Are you aware of other collar colours?

In addition to the well-known blue collar and white collar jobs, several other types of jobs are distinguished by collar colour. Each is explained in an article written by Kelly Campbell.

  • Gold collar – Signifies white collar workers with higher skills and are in higher demand. These include doctors, engineers, lawyers, and pilots.
  • Red collar – Refers to workers that work in the government whose salaries come from the red ink budget. This category may also include farmers.
  • Pink collar – An outdated term used to describe sectors historically dominated by women, including nursing and secretarial work.
  • Grey collar – These jobs are often associated with the gig economy or freelance work. Examples of grey collar jobs include graphic design, web development, and writing.
  • Green collar – This is one of the newest additions which refers to jobs in the environment.

We’ve seen the effects. We encourage you to try GPI for blue collar and other roles to make a real difference to your company.

The need to hire smarter with a novel approach in talent acquisition

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Impacting talent acquisition, the October NAB Forward View report cheerily tells us that:

“The labour market is expected to stay exceptionally tight in the near term, with unemployment bottoming out at 3.5% before drifting up to 4.3% over the next two years.”

It looks like spotting superstars for job vacancies will continue to be tough. That is assuming you continue approaching your talent acquisition the same way as you always did!

Rejecting applications

According to Indeed, “when hiring managers review resumes, they often skim to find the most relevant information.” In Australia, the result of this approach is that only 16% of resumes get an interview. Most would agree that statistically, among the 84% discarded, there must be the talent that can do the job. But they are rejected because of various issues with their application. The reasons for rejection range from:

  • unsuitable qualifications
  • not enough experience
  • too much experience
  • a poor cover letter
  • spelling mistakes.

Bias in talent acquisition

Unfortunately, how we humans make decisions to move people forward in the hiring process is also flawed. Science tells us that unconscious bias plays a key role in all our decisions. Our minds make decisions intuitively, even before we are aware of them. In his book “Hire with your Head” Lou Adler puts it quite bluntly:

“Intuition and gut feel don’t predict on-the-job success. All they predict is the likelihood the company will make a wrong decision.”

Another roadblock to successful hiring is that a staggering 5 in 6 applicants – or about 83% – report inflating their resume in some way.

Let’s reflect on this for a moment:

  1. When we review resumes, we are reading a document that is not accurate.
  2. As we read it, we are making decisions based on how we “feel” about what we have read.
  3. The result is three out of four people we hire do not fit.

Imagine a process in your business that delivered the right result – in this case, a top performer – only 25% of the time. Without a doubt, the process would be thrown out and a new one introduced.

Predicting success in a role in recruitment

Recruitment is all about trying to predict if a person you do not know will be a top performer in the job in your organisation. It doesn’t matter whether you work in a trade, as a teacher, salesperson, or CEO. Many psychologists agree that the biggest predictor of job success is cognitive ability. In recent years “soft skills” are also considered significant predictors of top performance in a job.

Soft skills used to be a “nice to have,” but today, emotional intelligence- “the ability to identify and manage your own emotions and the emotions of others”- is recognised as a better predictor of success than exam grades or certifications. Both studies by Accenture and Virginia Commonwealth University support this claim.

Use science to screen applicants as part of talent acquisition

NAB tells us spotting superstars for job vacancies will continue to be tough. On top of this, the current approach to screening applicants may get hijacked by our bias and dodgy resumes. What other approach might be useful to add to our talent acquisition armour? The answer is objective data.

With most significant personal investment decisions, such as buying a car or new HD TV, we support our human decision-making process with data. We research the specs for options to understand the performance of new investments to best meet our criteria.

Unfortunately, human beings do not come with a specifications list. To replicate our investment decision-making process when screening job applications, we need a simple economic tool that will provide us with objective data before we reach the stage of rejecting applications. Traditional fixed validated assessments just don’t offer the flexibility that is needed for this task.

The advancements made by the award-winning Great People Inside (GR8PI) platform allow companies of all sizes from all sectors to screen applicants cost-effectively.

In one short, inexpensive psychometric assessment, you can assess candidates as part of your application process for Emotional Intelligence and Cognitive Ability. And the output is a ranking of applicants matched to your specific criteria, which guides you as to which candidates you need to talk to. Speed is of the essence in a tight market, and using this approach gives you objective insights that you can act upon quickly.

If you’d like to learn more, reach out to us.

 

Five ways of reducing the risk of dropping employee retention

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Rate of Employee Retention

Employee retention is no doubt a key challenge. A recent study by Gartner states that the rate of employee turnover is likely to be up to 75% higher. And in addition, it takes 18% longer to fill any available jobs than pre-pandemic. Not to mention the annoying “quiet quitting” phenomenon, which is white-anting businesses too!

And the reasons why staff retention is affected?

The main reasons employees are leaving and affecting employee retention are:

  • inadequate salary,
  • deficient perks and benefits,
  • overworked,
  • lack of support,
  • career progression,
  • better work-life balance,
  • absence of recognition, and
  • unhappiness with management.

What can you do?

Whether we are trying to shift a few covid kilos or improve our qualifications doesn’t matter. There is never a single magic bullet. It’s usually a series of conscious actions and the discipline to implement them that results in the outcome we seek.

 

If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.

– Lao Tzu

 

Let’s start from the very beginning

Getting back to the basics by reviewing your people processes is a perfect place to begin to improve staff retention in your organisation. Here are a few thought starters.

#1 Realistic Position previews

The talent competition is fierce and at an all-time high, so your recruitment process needs to be engaging, timely and professional. How you or your team handle the recruitment process can strongly influence the desire for a new player to choose to join your company or not.

Research shows that providing applicants with a realistic job preview during the recruitment process positively affects the retention of those new hires. Selling the job or the business as Utopia is not a good idea.

#2 Professional interviews to increase employee retention

When it comes to interview questions, “where do you see yourself in 5 years?” or “sell me that pen” are way past their use-by date. The objective of the initial interview is to confirm that skills and abilities align.

The goal of the second or final interview is to confirm fit. Is the applicant a good fit for the job? Equally important is for the candidate to verify if the job is a good fit for them.

It’s a lot less costly to retain people than hire new staff, and with retention as key focus, you need objective information to de-risk the selection process. Tools like our customisable psychometric GR8PI assessments will give you these critical candidate insights— insights that are impossible to glean at an interview.

#3 Socialise and onboard for retention

Early failure is often high among new employees, and hybrid work has added further complexity.

Onboarding aims to help your new team member understand how to be successful in their new job. First impressions count: you have one chance to make a great first impression when an employee starts with your company.

So, it’s best to ensure you have strategic onboarding and assimilation processes that can quickly help new people become embedded in your business and the role. And therefore, more likely to stay. Possible approaches here include:

  • shared and individualised learning experiences,
  • formal and informal activities that help people get to know one another, and
  • assigning experienced employees as role models or mentors for new staff.

#4 Managers are key to minimise staff turnover

Those first few weeks and months in a new employee’s job are critical, especially in the new hybrid world. A first-rate manager-employee relationship is vital in delivering the employee experience and connection to the business for retention.

Compounding the challenge, many managers have never received any formal people management training. Frequently, a person has made it to manager due to tenure, success in their previous role, or the desire to retain a person.

While these may be valid, today, managers need access to new tools to lead and manage their employees. Such tools help them foster career aspirations, well-being, and connection to the organisational culture.

#5 Training and development to improve employee retention

CFO to CEO: “What will we do if we train them and they leave?”

CEO to CFO: “What if we don’t and they stay?”

This conversation rings true today more than ever.

But not just any old training works. Sending your people to a one size fits all training course is just wasting money. Everyone learns differently, and unless you fully understand what training is appropriate for each employee, you will not achieve the outcomes.

A gap analysis can clearly highlight the specific deficiencies. Our customisable GR8PI suite of dimensions helps you identify gaps. By enabling you to benchmark and compare your staff at a glance, you can customise the thorough training needed across the various groups.

 

Elon Musk says, “Some people don’t like change, but you need to embrace change if the alternative is disaster”.

 

If you’d like some help in this area, please reach out or book a call to learn more.

How an HR management tool can predict sales people performance

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Better sales staff equals more sales revenue. It sounds simple. However, an HR management tool can help significantly to increase your salespeople’s productivity.  A complex task fraught with misunderstanding.

Finding high-performing staff involves a specific hiring approach that targets those with precisely the right attributes for the job at hand.

Once you have the right players, it doesn’t stop there. It’s a question of matching them to the right sales roles, managing them and developing the sales team in an ongoing way to ensure maximum efficiency and results.

Remember the old maxim ‘If you can sell, you can sell anything’?

Well, times have changed. Not all sales positions – or reps – are created equal.

According to studies by Herb Greenberg, Harold Weinstein and Patrick Sweeney in their book How to Hire and Develop Your Next Top Performer:

around 50% of sales employees lack the fundamental traits necessary for effective salespeople, and

a further 25% are selling the wrong thing, for the wrong managers, in the wrong place.

That leaves just 25% of salespeople operating to total capacity and producing great results.

So one size doesn’t fit all when finding the right salesperson to sell your product or services.

Financial benefits of hiring the best salespeople

Having a sales team composed of star performers can make a significant difference to your bottom line.

In a study of 100 businesses, Sales Force of Top Producers – A Manager’s (and Owner’s) Dream, reported in Employer’s Advantage, the company’s top performer outsold the bottom performer by a whopping average of 5.7 to 1 – with a range of 3:1 to 9:1.

Just imagine what kind of results you’d get if your entire team worked at the lower margin of 3:1, not to mention 5:1 or higher.

Salesforce Work.com and the TAS Group drew some more shocking statistics from their research. These include:

  • Two-thirds of salespeople miss their sales target.
  • More than half of all salespeople close less than 40% of potential deals.
  • Top-performing sales reps are 250% better at qualifying leads.
  • High performers are 2.5 times more likely to be effective qualifiers than the general population.
  • Revenue can be up to 25% greater at companies where sales and marketing integrate well.

Talent Management – how do you measure an individual salesperson’s productivity?

All this begs the question, just how productive is your own sales team? Can you measure individual productivity? And once you’ve measured it, how do you replace or improve average or poor performers?

The answer is using the advanced science from the next generation of smart psychometric assessment tools. Our award-winning Great People Inside psychometric testing platform will help you identify those essential success attributes for each sales role. As a result, you can match each position with the right employee.

Great People Inside’s psychometric analysis will tell you:

  • what makes your top performers so great
  • why your average performers are less effective
  • how to improve your least successful performers

How to hire the best people with an hr management tool

The right psychometric assessment tools can help you find the right people for your sales roles.

Applied correctly, the Great People Inside HR management tool can make your recruitment of future high performers up to three times more successful and also significantly reduce sales team turnover. When considering the statistics, these results should be music to any employer’s ear.

Figures reported in Employer’s Advantage show that three out of four new sales employees don’t last the distance. They have, in fact, only a 25% chance of staying with the company for an entire year.

Of those that do stick, only one in 10 go on to become a genuine top performer within three years.

So what is the essential DNA of these star performers?

Many have fundamental traits and attributes that help drive their peak performance for the longer term. Using our validated and reliable customised sales assessments, we work with you and scientifically study your current top-performing salespeople.

These measures enable us to create a customised job profile benchmark specific to your company based on your company’s top performers, not a random benchmark based on a collection of external organisations. A company customised standard means you can clearly see what sets your top performers apart from the rest.

This benchmark can also be used to significant effect when recruiting new sales staff, ensuring that candidates fit these rigorous criteria and carry the ‘work genes’ critical to success in their roles. You don’t take risks when buying a personal asset such as a car, so why risk it when hiring your most crucial business asset.

Try us! Just click HERE and we will be in touch.

Remote Work – What are seen effects of further shifts in this competitive market?

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After two years of disruption further shifts in remote work and our lives have emerged. There’s been:

  • the rise of individualism and independence bringing out new confidence to show up as themselves at work. (Fjord Trends 2022)
  • hybrid employment arrangements placing more emphasis on staff being able to work remotely and maintain productivity and service delivery
  • continued challenges to organisations due to Omicron leading to staff shortages resulting in increased costs of hiring more or temporary staff
  • increased pressures on both existing and new staff in the present climate

Moving forward, employers need to relook at balancing the flexibility they offer to individuals with the needs of the team and the greater good of the organisation. (Fjord Trends 2022)

Obtaining the right information for remote hires

How can you increase your success rate and hire the right people the first time for roles in the current labour market? And what about remote work? How can you more easily identify those who will thrive and be productive in a work from home environment?

The traditional recruitment process leaves a lot up to chance. You’ll sift through a stack of resumes and cover letters trying to narrow down the people with the right experience and qualifications and get a sense of other relevant aspects.

You’ll then perform a round of interviews to gauge which candidate sounds and acts right for the role.

You might ask yourself:

  •  “does this person have the right skills to perform the job?..
  • the right credentials?..
  • enough experience?..
  • will they fit in with the workplace culture?..
  • can they bring anything to the table to benefit the business?”

While some of these questions can easily be answered with a CV and interview, others are trickier.

And let’s face it most employees, when asked if they would like to work from home, will answer ‘yes’. This is simply because they are only looking at the positive aspects of doing so.

But this is the homeworking equivalent of asking someone ‘How are you?’. And accepting the answer ‘Fine.’ As confirmation that all is well.

Some key questions are difficult to answer through the traditional hiring process such as:

  • “Will this person be engaged in their work and great in this role?”
  • “Is this person likely to be capable and productive in this remote work role?”
  • “In the long term, will this person be able to handle hybrid working?”

Engagement is critical

Great managers and business owners know that higher employee engagement levels in the workplace translate to higher productivity and better company performance. So especially in this current environment, how can hiring managers improve the likelihood of selecting highly engaged remote work top performers?

It all starts with thinking about how potential employees will “fit”, rather than experience and qualifications. Or even age and gender. Studies have shown that ‘fit’ is what counts if you want a high performer.

‘Fit’ refers to how well a person is suited to their job role, the environment, and the workplace culture. Whether or not a person ‘fits’ in a particular position depends on a few factors, for example,

  • their attitude,
  • personality, and
  • enthusiasm for the work at hand.

To find out which candidate is the right fit for the job and culture, hiring managers must check their biases at the door and use objective information to make their decision. Making this type of decision can be trickier than it sounds, but it is possible.

How does it work?

Hire someone who is objectively the right fit

Choosing the right person for a role can influence how long they stay in the job and how engaged they are with their role working remotely or onsite.

According to Gallup, employee engagement is defined as “the involvement and enthusiasm of employees in their work and workplace”.

According to studies they conducted, businesses are 21% more profitable with engaged employees; I am sure most CEO’s would take this profit increase as a Christmas present!

Instead of solely relying on opinions or a hunch, validated benchmarkable assessments provide you with tools using objective data to determine whether your candidate is right for the role. Recent shifts have meant employee preferences don’t necessarily match what’s best for a business.

 Use your top performers as a benchmark for new talent

When a top performer walks out the door, it often feels like you’re back at square one; scrambling to build your team from the ground up again. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Companies, teams and hiring managers can make the process of replacing top performers easier while improving their hiring process each time.

Not all candidates are suited to homeworking

Buffer.com published an annual global survey on homeworking and discovered in 2020 (like in previous years) that the top 3 difficulties people experience with homeworking, worldwide, are not necessarily related to the pandemic and lockdown:

  • collaboration and communication,
  • loneliness, and
  • not being able to unplug.

This survey suggests that many individuals will either need help to overcome these problems or even that remote work is not a long-term viable option for some people.

 

Remote working

 

To learn more about the Great People Inside assessments specifically designed for work from home employees and teams contact us

 

People Development – how to handle an employee who thinks they are better than they are

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People development is key to a successful people strategy in all organisations.

Many managers out there have likely experienced the unsavoury situation of managing someone who believes their performance is terrific when it’s just mediocre at best. Recent studies in performance management have identified that the “underperformer” is a frequent and draining problem.

But what contributes to the perception an individual has about their performance? 

There are several reasons forming the perception of an individual employee at work. It may be that the: 

  • crystal-clear feedback they need to develop and improve is lacking, 
  • manager is choosing not to address the issues for fear of some type of conflict, or 
  • employee is doing ”a good enough job” and flying below the radar. 

In some cases, the individual may be unable to recognise that they’re struggling. 

But whatever the reason, if managers fail to address the situation, there is one thing for sure and that is that it will fester. Not only will the substandard employee’s work not improve, but also the organisation will experience: 

  • hidden costs, 
  • poor productivity, and 
  • the value of a team member who would likely thrive if given the appropriate support and feedback. 

These five approaches will help you correct the problem behaviours. Or at least gain clarity as to whether it’s even possible.

  • Clear definition of work

It doesn’t matter whether we are delegating or providing feedback, we need to be clear and unambiguous about what needs to be done. There are lots of great feedback models out there. 

My go-to has been the STAR/AR feedback model. The STAR/AR model provides a great framework and helps the receiver understand exactly why what they did worked. And if they made a mistake, working through the model, they’ll learn what steps to take to improve. 

  • Provide support for people development

Most managers would agree that employees need ongoing support. Significantly, how we approach providing that support is important. Moreover, the build-up of frustration in these situations can lead to exasperation which can undermine our approach. 

 The late Sir John Whitmore, a pioneer of the executive coaching industry and creator of the GROW model wrote “whether we coach, advise, counsel, facilitate, or mentor, the effectiveness of what we do depends in large measure on our beliefs about human potential”.

 

The expressions “to get the best out of someone” and “your hidden potential” imply that more lies within the person waiting to be released”. 

Coaching your people supports performers across all levels, not just underperformers, to achieve their full potential. The result will be higher levels of employee engagement and profitability. 

  • Check your Relationship of Competence

There is no one size fits all or “sheep dip” approach to developing your people that works. Everyone learns differently, has unique development needs and motivations. It’s important to point out performing an objective data-driven gap analysis first to ensure the people you are looking to develop have the ability, motivation, and desire to grow. 

Caution: a little self-promotion here. As a coach myself, I find that the unique flexibility of our Great People Inside platform is outstanding. Both an assessment with dimensions (EG Strategy, Leadership, Creativity etc.) that measures precisely what you want to understand, and a customised performance model or benchmark against which you can compare results is created. The outcome is a one-pager graph that allows you to identify any gaps. This provides clarity before you invest in people development on the areas that need focus for each individual. And also highlights those who may not have what it takes to succeed.

  • Determine “Coachability”

Not everyone is coachable. In contrast to imposter syndrome, many ultra-confident employees fall victim to the Dunning-Krueger effect, a cognitive bias in which “people wrongly overestimate their knowledge or ability in a specific area”. Many employers will have encountered an employee that resented the suggestion that their skills needed to improve and ignored the coaching support that was offered to them. 

If left unchecked, this usually results in the employee blaming others, setting up their colleagues to fail, undercutting them, and misrepresenting their contributions and concerns. The outcome is a total train wreck. 

  • Praise with care

When an employee with an inflated sense of their own performance delivers a piece of high-quality work or conducts an interaction well, it’s important to praise them. But letting the praise stand-alone can reinforce for them that they’re genius! That everything they do is outstanding. 

Connect your positive comments to other things you want them to address. For example, you could say, “Now that you’ve done so well with the presentation to Client X, for the next one, I’d like you to also {insert the next thing they need to improve}. 

Articulating both the required new behaviour and why it’s needed as part of satisfactory job performance will ensure you improve your chances of getting the critical behaviours you need.

You may be finding it a little tougher in the current climate to find the right people for the jobs combined with the best fit for your organisation over the longer term. Our technology and solutions will do the work for you to inform your people development approach and recruitment decisions.

If you’d like an easier method of handling people development and recruitment, contact Great People Inside.

 

A Coaching Culture – how does this Protect Productivity and Profit?

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You need to attract and retain the best talent for your organisation and adopt a coaching culture to ensure you win. 

However, as the vaccine rollout in Australia gains momentum and the economy continues to rebound, research tells us the labour market will get tighter. For this reason, this situation will result in the war for talent becoming more likely to happen.

Hybrid work arrangements and work from anywhere policies are now the norm in most organisations. Then, to win this talent war, it’s now mission-critical:

  • to have your dispersed team highly engaged 
  • led by outstanding remote managers 
  • supported by a strong organisational culture. 
Productivity

Markedly, more than 70% of employees state they are more productive working from home, and businesses report 47% productivity increases during COVID. 

Most business leaders agree that increasing employee engagement increases productivity significantly and improves bottom-line profit. 

The fact is, it’s never been more important to focus on the productivity of your remote teams for the long term. And equally, ensure your managers feel equipped with the skills and tools they need to meet and exceed company goals.

Managers hold the key

If you have been fortunate to work for a great manager, I’d like to invite you to reflect for a moment. What was great about them? How do you remember them? Certainly, the fact is that managers can make or break a team. 

  

The Oxford English dictionary defines a manager as “a person responsible for controlling or administering an organisation or group of staff”. 

 

This is one definition; rather, my personal definition of a manager in 2021 and beyond is a “person that leads, supports, and develops a team of people to deliver the organisational goals.”  

 

By and large, the way we work has shifted forever. Being a manager has always been a tough gig, but in the hybrid environment, it sucks!

So how can you ensure your managers are ready for the hybrid normal?

Future-ready culture with a coaching culture

A culture of coaching is an approach in which leaders, managers and staff members work together to increase individual, team and company organisational performance.

The future hybrid workplace with a strong culture will be one where workers feel empowered to work towards their own goals independently. Managers who foster this type of working environment will positively impact employee engagement and organisational productivity. 

Gallup research has shown that managers are a massive influence on engagement rates. It was found managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units. And with high engagement rates comes better company results.

So how can you transform your managers into coaches to create a culture of coaching in your workplace?

Teach coaching skills

The first steps are knowing:

  • who you are as a leader, and 
  • whom you have on your team. 

Its commonly accepted that not everyone has the required traits to work remotely long term. And business WHS responsibility for their employees does not change just because they are not working at the office. The solution we recommend is using established science to predict how your managers and team members will perform in a long term remote/hybrid environment.

I’ve used many people assessment tools over my 20+ years as a coach and a people leader. With this in mind, I find the bespoke next-gen people assessment tools from Great People Inside are easy to use. And, their predictive capability and insights are second to none for this exercise. They are outstanding, too, when you’re hiring a new remote employee. They truly de-risk the recruitment process and increase your success rate by 300%!

Not all managers have a coaching mindset, but all great managers do. Certainly prioritising coaching in your workplace training is the best way to create a coaching culture. This type of training is essential for employees transitioning into leadership roles or those coming to grips with managing people remotely.

Rank employee engagement as a top priority

Tying together talent and employee engagement to achieve important business objectives is what coaching is all about. 

To nurture employees’ professional development to keep them engaged, a good step is discussing with each employee their professional goals from their point of view. Then communicating clearly and precisely how the organisation can support them to achieve their goals.

In this way, the employee owns their own development and their careers. 

A coaching culture fosters an environment of trust.

Trust influences everything. A work environment in which managers coach and trust their employees and employees trust their managers is one where productivity can thrive. Creating trust is challenging. Again this is where a coaching mindset can play a huge role.

 

Professor Ralph Stacey, a renowned organisational theorist and Professor of Management at University of Hertfordshire, in the UK., says it best – “the quality of the system is determined by the quality of the relationships which is determined by the quality of the conversation.” 

 

When individuals have accountability over their work, they are more likely to achieve important business outcomes independently. Autonomous workers also understand how their everyday work contributes to the overall success of the company. Having this connection to the purpose helps to empower individuals to reach their highest potential.

Contact us today to find out more about incorporating a coaching mindset for your leaders and our Great People Inside assessment tools.

How do people management skills improve your business success?

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People management skills are one of the essential soft leadership skills a leader should possess.

While working from home in some form is accepted will remain after COVID, managing teams remotely has, for the contemporary leader, added the need to develop new skills.

Now may be an opportunity for your business to increase focus on this area with employees recognising the value of these skills.

These skills help overcome challenges in the workplace and build your team and business for several reasons:

  • handling interpersonal conflicts
  • leading employee training
  • managing deadlines
  • communicating and distributing information between employees working remotely and onsite
  • building a solid company culture, and
  • developing your employees’ maximum capability.

Leaders who adopt people management skills provide constructive feedback and mentor employees to grow and succeed in their positions. Goals will also be able to be established and achieved.  And overall, this results in a positive influence on the work environment.

A leader who has an in-depth understanding of their employees can evaluate:

  • the strength and weaknesses of their team
  • the resources required, and
  • set realistic deadlines.

This approach encourages the employees to strive for success and not set them up for failure.

In addition, leaders are able to build rapport, ask the team for constructive feedback, and take actionable steps to make positive changes in the work culture. As a result, this benefits everyone.

Below are four critical people management areas to help you understand your team and individuals at all levels. From onboarding, developing new skills, preparing them for other roles, to working on specialised projects.

  1. Understand Human Behaviour And Acknowledging Diversity

It is crucial to understand one simple concept – we are all different. Each individual will react and behave differently in any given situation.

A leader needs to realise that family, environmental and cultural influences have shaped some beliefs and behaviours. Understanding and learning some behavioural types and conditioning will allow leaders and managers to treat their employees with respect. In return, the business will be rewarded with best work practices, a motivated team, and valued ideas and opinions.

  1. The Individual’s Purpose

It is also imperative to understand how the individual team member sees their own purpose in their role and how they can contribute to the business. This can lead to improvements at both the individual employee and business levels.

A continued effort in understanding their sense of purpose, whether they are in the office or working from home, ensures the individual and business goals stay aligned.

  1. Transparent Communication

When there is open and transparent communication, it creates an atmosphere of trust. In effect, by employing people management skills, this communication works both ways, i.e., you tell, and they listen, and you have to do the same – listen to your employees.

This area is more critical than ever for businesses undergoing managing teams remotely. Video-based onboarding and mentoring and a remote communication strategy are essential for employee skill development and project delivery.

  1. We Own This Together

While leading with example is great, it also benefits when you entrust team members with specific tasks which best fit their skill sets. It shows that you are acknowledging their skillset and allowing them to demonstrate their capabilities. As a result, the team is closer and creates an environment of ownership and positive experiences.

In a remote setting, delegate tasks through shared online platforms that allow for the employee’s autonomy while still maintaining a sense of community in the workplace.

Responsibility and accountability on both ends improve overall morale and reduces people management skills coming across as complicated, unnecessary at times, and time-consuming.

Ongoing people management for development and retention

Just because you have hired a superstar does not mean you don’t have to continue managing and developing them to maximise their potential and business outcomes.

Development should start from day one of an employee’s journey with their new company. The rapport the new employee develops with the company can have long-lasting effects on the business, including the employee retention rate.

Trends have seen employees become more focused on developing their individual skills. Placing importance on their progress can help connect their goals to the more significant objectives of the business. Supporting these goals can be achieved remotely from the onboarding stage and continue through employment by hosting video workshops and online training seminars.

Many reasons cause an employee to leave an organisation, such as:

  • a lack of training
  • development
  • engagement
  • progression opportunities.

Quantify top performance 

Many assessments compare candidate results against generic benchmarks or no benchmark at all. In other words, this leaves the user with either no reference point or, at best, a near enough is good enough benchmark.

At GPI, we believe assessing an individual’s job performance as accurately as possible requires benchmarks built specifically for each role. Assessments can apply to both positions operating onsite or remotely. By identifying the success DNA of your top performers, you can create job benchmarks based on what success looks like in your business. Further development of your existing team members can be implemented where appropriate, including a coaching option.

As the employer, benchmarking flows through promoting and succession planning of your people to measure candidate profiles against the relevant top-performing role profile in your organisation.

Given these points, assessments that treat people as multi-faceted complex individuals we are, open a world of possibilities with both your new and existing people. You will find yourself in the stronger position of identifying your people’s true potential and providing opportunities for laser-focused development.

If you’d like to trial our assessments for consideration as part of your organisation’s people management strategy – contact us.

How people capability in organisations is impacted by assessment types

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Taking a punt on a one size fits all approach to recruitment

Most managers and leaders know hiring a new employee for best people capability is an expensive exercise.

I’ve never actually met anyone who set out to hire a less than ideal employee on purpose. However, it always bothers me that statistics tell us we hire the right person only less than 25% of the time.

Think about that for a moment. Imagine you have a process in your business that only delivers the right outcome with such a low level of consistency. What would you do?

I’m thinking you’d change the process and look for new ways to deliver better outcomes. Good. Then read on.

Roll the dice and take your chances

The goal of recruitment is to hire a new employee that will add value, contribute to the business, and enjoy their work. All this leads to high people capability and engagement.

But it’s not that easy. You gamble $30,000 EVERY time you start the hiring process because humans are complex beings.

For starters, there is the deep-seated unconscious bias that comes with being human. To add to our responsibility, some candidates:

  • lie on their resume,
  • fudge their referees, and
  • turn out to be more of a lone wolf than a team player.

The potential pitfalls are endless! As my mother used to say, “you’d need eyes in the back of your head”!

Typical behavioural assessments for people capability

Many businesses use psychometric assessments to help in predicting the behaviours and ability of candidates.

Assessments are not new. Most have been around since the last century.

However, the issue is that most psychometric assessments are ‘off the shelf’ packages of measures selected by the test provider, not the buyer.  This leaves buyers with no opportunity to vary them in any way.

Consequently, this approach means that buyers measure things they do not need to and fail to measure elements that are critical to their business’s success.

This traditional ‘one size fits all’ solution used across the employee life cycle does not meet the needs of modern organisations. As a result, the ability to attract, assess, select, develop and retain the right people is negatively impacted.

Stack the odds in your favour for your organisation’s people capability

Great People Inside (GPI) appreciates that every organisation both large and small is unique. Organisations spend millions on defining, developing, and implementing for the commercial advantage of their successful business. Some aspects include:

  • those specific leadership competencies,
  • that unique culture,
  • that state-of-the-art customer service,
  • those well-known values and dynamics.

We understand that the uniqueness and greatness of your organisation cannot – and should not – rely on a ‘one size fits all’ approach.

That is the reason GPI invested hundreds of years of collective, international know-how to create technology empowering you to embrace the complete life cycle of employees and executives. From talent acquisition and onboarding, talent growth and development to employee assessment and performance management.

Guided by our easy-to-use platform, the buyer can select from a menu of more than 60 validated and reliable psychometric dimensions.

This same flexibility applies to our 360° surveys, where you can choose from more than 50 managerial skills and competencies. In addition, suggestions for future improvement and development are available.

In effect with GPI, you can easily create totally customised assessments and surveys specific to your needs. From the competencies, values or objectives of any role, department, or organisation – anywhere in the world.

To learn more about the dimensions available suited to modern organisations, or if you’d like to trial our assessments – contact us.