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 strategy for now and the future – how to close gaps

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Planning for a best People Strategy is essential. Your business strategy amounts to no more than words on a page if you don’t have “the right people in the rights seats on the bus”.

All elements of your employee life cycle must be linked: 

  • from attraction through to talent management, 
  • leadership development, and 
  • ongoing performance management. 

There is a great reward too in doing this. Studies tell us that organisations that prioritise their employee experience are four times more profitable than those who do not.

People Strategy v HR Strategy – what’s the difference?

HR Strategy tends to focus more on the planning side of people such as structures for hiring, onboarding, developing, and retaining. 

People Strategy is more about helping employees to grow, by creating an environment that nurtures and enables high performance. People Strategy usually focuses on: 

  • values, 
  • fostering diversity, 
  • inclusion and employee wellbeing, and 
  • predicting and reacting to workforce needs. 

In essence, creating a culture where employees share equal billing with shareholders and business goals.

According to the world-renowned Boston Consulting Group, the three pillars for developing a people strategy are leadership and culture, talent and skills, and HR. 

 

“In these challenging times, organisations must elevate the most important asset they have: their people. By focusing on the fundamentals of people strategy—leadership, culture, talent, reskilling, and HR—companies can emerge stronger, more agile, more innovative, and better able to respond to an ever-changing environment.”

 

I’d like to explore two of these pillars.

Leadership Culture and Strategy

There are many levers at a leader’s disposal to drive their organisations success and effectiveness.  Strategy and Culture are the most important. 

Strategy provides clarity of the company’s goals and helps to align people around them. Culture tends to express goals through organisational values and beliefs. Culture also guides tactics, activity, and implementation.

One thing is sure and that is culture and leadership are linked. Poor leadership and resultant toxic culture usually determine the fate of a business. Studies tell us up to 30% of employees say they left because of poor leadership. These findings highlight the need for every organisation to address this factor.

Culture in more detail

Culture is a more puzzling lever to activate. The reason for this is mainly because Culture can be ambiguous and embedded in unspoken behaviours, people’s mindsets, and social expectations.

Many leaders don’t always appreciate the power of culture. 

 

A recent Gartner Survey revealed that 75% of leadership believe that they run a culture of flexibility. Unfortunately, only 57% of employees agreed. 

 

This lack of appreciation can cause many leaders to either let culture go unmanaged or delegate it to HR, where it can slip to a secondary focus for the business. 

Successful leaders embrace the ambiguity of culture. In my experience many leaders I have met avail of the valuable culture diagnostic tools to understand where their orgnaisations culture is right now. These tools help them to answer questions such as: 

  • Is it more of a creative culture or a reactive culture? 
  • How do the culture snapshot of the board and senior leadership vary from the operational managers’ perspectives? 
  • How “real” is the conversation in the business?

Gaining clarity around culture can be as confronting as it is enlightening – but well worth the investment of time and focus. We partner with many specialists in this area, so reach out if you’d like to explore further.

Talent and skills

Sixty-four per cent of the world’s most admired companies say they have a good understanding of workforce needs two or more years into the future compared to 54% of their peers. 

 

That same recent Gartner Survey I referred to earlier also revealed the same 75% of leadership also felt that they did a good job incorporating employee voice in decision making. Unfortunately, in this case only 47% of employees agreed. 

 

The forced extreme disruption, which was the last two years, has meant that most businesses naturally thought more about survival than future talent and skills needs. Now is the time to think about your future talent and skills requirements. Some steps to take include:

  • Ensure Employee Pulse Surveys acknowledge and act on the feedback provided
  • Use customised psychometric assessments to identify traits and skills gaps
  • Incorporate customised 360° surveys as part of your development programs
  • Facilitate regular check-ins between individuals’ teams and managers

Lastly, lockdown work from home is different from long-term working remotely. Most organisation psychologists accept that loneliness, communication, and isolation can trigger depression. 

So, if there is a disconnect in your business between HR policies, the leadership strategies propelling them, and employee sentiment on the ground, greater emphasis must be placed on the needs this new work approach demands. 

For example, consider what capabilities and skills (soft and hard) are essential to be future-ready? Do all employees possess the discipline, conscientiousness, and results orientation to deliver in a hybrid environment? What might this mean for remote work and the flexibility we can offer? 

Through our business offering, we have many people analytics resources and tools to assist with both these pillars. Reach out if you’d like to discuss how we can help with the future of your people.

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.

 

Retention, revenue and return: Why it’s important to identify and hire top Customer Success talent

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Over the last ten years or so, cultural trends and customer expectations have combined, resulting in more and more businesses prioritising customer success.

Recent research reports that there has been an increase in the total number of open Customer Success jobs for the first time since February. In June, there were 6,515 available Customer Success jobs posted. This number was nearly 500 more than in May.

Regardless of the organisation’s size, gone are the days of Sales and Marketing departments only delivering the business goals. Today it’s critical to have the customer success department straddling sales and marketing to achieve your deliverables.

Customer Success versus Customer Service

Most customer support roles tend to be reactive as they respond to inbound customer requests, complaints and issues. The opposite tends to be the case when it comes to Customer Success roles.

These roles are focused on working proactively in partnership with customers post-sale to ensure maximisation of the product or service value delivered to the client and head off any issues before they fester. It’s key that Customer Success delivers a positive customer experience and creates a close professional relationship.

If done correctly, Customer Success’s broader and essential role leads to business success. It’s also a vital contributor to customer loyalty. When you help your customers succeed, they become promoters and advocates of your business. Customer Success is connected to your bottom line as it:

  • minimises customer churn rates,
  • improves renewal and satisfaction,
  • and in turn, boosts revenue.

Murphy’s law

 

Edward Murphy Jr. was an American aerospace engineer who worked on safety-critical systems and was born in 1918 in the Panama Canal Zone. He is best known for his namesake Murphy’s law, stating, “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong”.

 

While Customer Success done well offers a significant commercial advantage to a business, if done poorly and with Murphy’s law at times coming in to play significantly affects business factors.  

But what can possibly go wrong with Customer Success?

For starters, to maximise productivity, organisations may allocate too many client accounts to one team or representative to look after. Or weight incentives are heavily towards revenue generation. Or worse still, wrong people are assigned to the role.

Spend any time with a sales organisation, and you are likely to hear a similar story—a story about a consistently top-performing sales rep who failed to make the transition to sales manager.

And the reason? The skills and attributes required as a successful salesperson are vastly different to those needed to be a top manager. The same is true applies to Customer Success Managers.

The abilities and traits required to be a successful Customer Success Manager are many and varied, and selecting the right people for this role certainly presents risk elements.

What makes a great Customer Service Manager (CSM)?

Firstly, there is no one size fits all. Industry type and service or product offering contribute to answering this question. CSM’s usually possess broad business experience. It’s not uncommon for people with backgrounds in sales, support, presales, project management, and even marketing roles to have made successful CSMs.

When we ask managers what makes a great CSM, they usually tell us their best people are proactive and tend to have similar traits such as:

  • Great at managing stress
  • Resilient
  • Empathetic
  • Customer-focused
  • Sincere
  • Keeps promises
  • Positive attitude
  • Calm in a crisis
  • Self-assured
  • Socially relaxed
  • Strong reasoning and analytical ability
  • Great communicators

It’s quite the laundry list. The complex nature of backgrounds combined with the challenge of pinpointing the varied attributes that align with your business and service offering is where many organisations fail.

In fact, studies tell us that failing to get the right person that fits your organisation will result in a decrease in productivity, higher levels of staff turnover and high levels of job-related stress.

Determine the requirements and spot the people

The challenge for organisations today, especially in the current tight market, is identifying the best potential CSM’s. Typically, in our work, we observe many organisations that rely on the job description, resumes and reference checks when making hiring or redeployment decisions. And this then results in a high level of three out of four recruits who just aren’t the right fit.

 

It’s a case of ‘rubbish in = rubbish out”. If we don’t have the right information,

how can we possibly make the right decision?

 

We have worked with many clients using our next-gen tools and helped them profile the critical success attributes that establish fit for a role. Using our 4-step robust process, our clients in the main enjoy a 3-fold increase in pinpointing top people that excel, 47% reduction in team turnover and a significant increase in productivity.

The war for talent is in play right now in Australia. You owe it to you and your business to remove the higher risk of getting it wrong.

Contact Great People Inside if we can help recruit your next CSM or top performers for other important roles to benefit your organisation.

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.

VUCA Leadership today: how to identify great VUCA Leaders

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VUCA leadership is paramount, with the world facing an uncertain future today.

The VUCA acronym (Volatile, Uncertain Complex, Ambiguous) has been around since 1987. It was the US Army War College’s response to the collapse of the USSR in the early 1990s.

No one was forecasting Covid-19, even in January 2020.

Without a doubt, it has been the most disruptive event in our lifetimes. It has devastated:

  • countries,
  • economies,
  • businesses,
  • individuals,
  • families, and
  • communities.

But it is likely there may be other disruptions waiting in the wings that, as yet, we know nothing about.

What does VUCA leadership and uncertainty mean for organisations?

The BIG questions for organisations are:

  • which elements will affect you,
  • to what degree, and
  • how will a combination of consecutive catastrophic disruptions alter the change.

Despite the deliberations of many so-called thought leaders and experts, the truthful answer is no one actually knows what’s going to happen in the future!

What you can rely on, though, is that there will be significant change. VUCA leaders in your organisation means the capability of anticipating, responding and reacting to change when it happens in turn, reacting again and again when it changes again (and again).

 

“THE ONLY CONSTANT IN LIFE IS CHANGE.”  – HERACLITUS (C535BC – C475BC)

 

What makes an effective VUCA leader?

Effective VUCA leadership is demonstrated by those who can give their company more than an abundance of skills and experience. Traits of VUCA leaders are that they can:

  • develop and communicate a clear and motivating vision, based on an understanding of the constantly changing economic environment, and
  • apply it through quick decisions, well-adapted to ever-changing conditions.

In addition to skills learned for a role, experience, and qualifications gained, there is no substitute for the enthusiasm, motivation and vision these great leaders possess. VUCA leaders can mean the difference between an average team and a high performing team in an organisation. They are the leaders every company wants to keep, nurture and develop to their full potential.

VUCA leaders are acutely aware of the strategic goals they are striving for, and what they need to do to get there. They share:

  • company values,
  • strive to be the best at what they do,
  • identify areas for improvement, and
  • actively engage with their own leaders to perfect their craft and leadership method.

Leadership style isn’t a perfect science – but what all great leaders have in common is their ability to be authentic.

Future proof your business through VUCA leadership

Thinking back to the beginning of the Covid crisis, who among your managers disappointed you with their response? Who impressed you? Were any of these a surprise to you (either positive or negative)? Those who responded well are, potentially, your VUCA Leaders. If you manage to retain them they are the people who will guide you through future change events.

Using the Great People Inside customised VUCA leadership assessment, you can identify and quantify which team members and potential candidates possess the required attributes. Gaps that may be obstacles to your organisation’s success can also be uncovered.

Click here for a free trial.

Your ideal candidate when hiring – what’s on your wish list?

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We usually see various words and phrases in job ads that describe an employer’s wish list for hiring an ideal candidate.

This statement below I came across recently brought a smile to my face as it reminded me of this.

 

Can you perform under pressure? asked the recruiter. 

No, said the candidate, but I do a mean Bohemian Rhapsody!

 

Some more standard features you might see employers looking for in hiring an ideal candidate are:

  • Ambitious
  • Resilient
  • Bubbly personality or Can-do attitude
  • Clear thinker and have a Strong work ethic
  • Share our passion
  • Accuracy and Attention to detail
  • a Team player, a Strong Leader, and yes, Perform Under Pressure!

As an illustration, the typical wish list for the “perfect employee” often reads something like this:

“We are looking for someone ambitious who will demonstrate initiative and resilience has the maturity always to remain calm and professional. You will have an excellent work ethic and have outstanding communication skills. 

You are respectful and enjoy working in a team in a fast-paced environment in which you will be able to prioritise and handle multiple tasks while meeting deadlines”.

Job advertisements will also include what the work involves, and the qualifications and experience needed to be a successful applicant.

 

Consider the total recruitment cost of hiring a non-ideal candidate

Despite rigorous selection processes, many studies tell us that up to 50% of new hires fail within 18 months.

For Australian businesses, the cost of these failures is indeed high. Recent research discovered the direct recruitment costs to hire ONE employee are on average a staggering $19,000!

Add to that another 30% to 50% of the annual salary with the total cost of induction, orientation, training, maintenance, termination, and lost opportunity.

There would be “skin and hair flying” in many management meetings if all these costs showed up on a Profit and Loss Statement line.

Your choice

So, what gets in the way of more consistent selection outcomes when it comes to hiring an ideal candidate based on a wish list? Most would agree that even the most basic selection process can get it right with the required qualifications and experience for a role.

However, when it comes to attributes similar to the examples below, the ability to precisely assess if the person sitting in front of us possesses these is close to impossible:

  • Tenacious
  • Ambitious
  • Resilient 
  • possesses Initiative
  • will Remain calm and professional, and
  • has an Excellent work ethic.

People tell us what they think we want to hear; after all, they are looking for a job!

Consequently, many of us make our hiring decisions based on our “gut feel” and what we “liked” about the candidate during the interview. In essence, we hire people we like.

Given that research tells us that more than 40% of Australians think it’s okay to lie during an interview, this stacks the odds against us. We need to add some objective data to our “gut feel” to help us get it right more consistently.

The way forward for hiring more ideal candidates

The next generation award-winning Great People Inside (GPI) customisable assessment platform now available in Australia allows you to choose those specific attributes on your recruitment wish list.

Therefore, if you want to assess certain attributes, these can readily be selected. For example, attributes like:

  • Resilience
  • Tenacity
  • Ambition
  • Discipline
  • Customer Focus
  • Closing sales.

Thanks to https://unsplash.com/@fiteka for this image

Over 60 validated psychometric dimensions are available to precisely evaluate the crucial traits for both your business and the specific role. And if we don’t have what you need, we will build it for you. We call this full customisation.

With this in mind no longer are you restricted to relying on your gut feel and hiring people you “like”. You can easily create GPI assessments as short or as long as you wish.

By adopting this approach, specific objective data can be added to your selection process and increase your success rate by up to 300%.

Don’t take our word for it!

We were delighted to recently receive the following feedback from one of our clients who has been using with great success the Great people Inside (GPI) platform for more than 18 months. This client uses the GPI platform to assess alignment to the company values of both internal employees and new recruits.

They tell us, “We are observing through using the GPI profiling tool to test for values fit, we are naturally defining critical success factors to base our hiring decisions on.

The more we benchmark our top performers and see success in our new recruits, the more we learn about what are the critical behaviours and interests that make a person a successful cultural fit in our business.

Whilst we would like to think we were good at picking this up before, GPI provides us with an evidence-based, tangible tool to confirm this and has been a real value add to our hiring decisions”. 

If you’d like to learn more, we’d be happy to let you try us for free. Click HERE, and we’ll be in touch straight away.

 

Diversity and culture fit – how to hire for your business

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When recruiting a new team member, I have never met any business owner or manager who set out to deliberately hire a substandard performer. Then, why is it that studies tell us that we get it “right” (i.e., hire a top performer) only 25% of the time? The answer is that traditional recruitment processes, (resumes, interviews, and reference checks) are just not meeting the modern business needs.

In Australia today, we are lucky that we have a highly educated and well-trained workforce, which logically means that most employees in Australia have the skills and competencies to perform their jobs well. But if this is the case, why is the hiring success rate so inconsistent?

Most new employees fail – not because they are incompetent or don’t have the required skills – but because they don’t “fit” with the practice owner, the manager, or their colleagues or due to other factors.

What is fit?

Culture fit (the alignment of values, beliefs, and behaviours between the employee and employer) has become another one of those also overused cliches in business-speak. While it is essential, the issue when hiring is that it means different things to different people. As a result, hiring for culture fit alone can be difficult to measure and is not a reliable predictor of high performance. When we speak of ‘fit” we are talking about much more than culture fit alone. Our definition of “fit” is as follows:

  • Can the person handle the mental demands of this job?
  • Will they enjoy the environment and the people they must work with?
  • Are they highly motivated by this type of work?

Hardwiring

Psychologists tell us that our core traits and beliefs about ourselves and the world are hardwired into our brains by the time we are 10 or 12 years of age. Of course, as people we evolve and develop, however our deep-set inner identity and core beliefs about ourselves, others, and how the world works are intensely cast in our DNA and are hard to change.

As we go about our daily work in the business, many of us will have observed our top-performing employees going about their jobs quite differently. Still, despite different approaches, they consistently deliver top outcomes and results.

Achieving these top outcomes and results is the DNA we refer to, the four or five key qualities most important to your business and that are possessed in abundance by your top performers. These qualities are the heartbeat of your company. We call this success DNA and when it comes to hiring new team members, they are non-negotiable.

The importance of fit

The low hiring success rate clearly demonstrates that if the right potential employees who share these critical success qualities are not found and employed, and you select a person who doesn’t fit, it’s unlikely this person will deliver top performance for your business. In fact, it’s estimated that 46% of newly hired employees won’t survive for a year because they aren’t a good fit for the job. Poor DNA matches are the number one reason why people become disengaged, dislike their managers or colleagues, and eventually fail or leave their jobs.

 

Modify your process by benchmarking your top performers

Unless you understand your top performers’ DNA success attributes, then the traditional selection process will continue to deliver less than 25% of top performers. The science-based Great People Inside customisable profiling tools we recommend will enable you to identify and quantify the success attributes they share greatly contributing to your business. When recruiting, you can measure your potential new recruits against these attributes to ensure they also have the required success DNA fit for your business.

Our easy-to-read plain language reports will also help you take your interviewing approach to new heights. Our Management Coaching and Onboarding reports will make sure your new team member contributes as quickly as possible.

Great People Inside assessments are customisable – so what?

Compared to assessments you may have used or taken yourself previously, Great People Inside assessments are the next generation – think original Nokia phone and iPhone 12!

You may be familiar with assessments that have been around for many years where you measure the dimensions the assessment provider has configured; you have no choice and no control. As a result, you may be measuring (and paying for) what you don’t need. Our customisation feature allows you to design an assessment that measures what you want to measure best suited to your business, which means you are in control, and most importantly, you decide what you want to pay. Even with its unique customisation features, GPI will usually be at the cost of comparable assessments (where they exist).

Don’t just take our word for it

For the second year in a row, the Great People Inside platform has been in the top 10 best rating tools in the world.

It is a huge honour for us to find ourselves among the best yet again this year.  In July 2020 Great People Inside was also ranked #16 assessment tool in the world by AHRI.

If you’d like to find out more please click here to contact us or email [email protected]