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]

 

What attributes do top salespeople have in common?

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Better sales staff equals more sales. It sounds simple, doesn’t it? Increasing the productivity of your salespeople, however, is a complex task fraught with misunderstanding.

Finding high performing staff involves a specific hiring approach which targets those with precisely the right attributes for the job in 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 analysed by Herb Greenberg, Harold Weinstein and Patrick Sweeney in their book How to Hire and Develop Your Next Top Performer, around 50% of those working in sales lack the fundamental traits necessary in effective salespeople. A further 25% are selling the wrong thing, for the wrong managers, in the wrong place.

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

So one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to 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 quota.
  • 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.
  • Around 40% of salespeople don’t understand their customer’s ‘pain’, addressing problems they don’t even have.
  • Revenue can be up to 25% greater at companies where sales and marketing are well integrated.
  • High performers are 57% more likely to come from companies where sales and marketing work in harmony.

Measuring 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 poor and fair performers?

The answer is using the advanced science from the next generation of smart assessment tools. Our award-winning Great People Inside assessments will help you identify those essential success attributes for each sales role, enabling you to match it with the right employee.

Great People Inside’s dimensions assessment 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

 

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

Applied correctly, Great People Inside tools can  make your recruitment of future high performers up to three times more successful and also significantly reduce sales department turnover by more than 27%.

These results should be music to any employer’s ear when considering the statistics.

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 a full 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 in common, which help drive their peak performance for the longer term.

Using our validated and reliable customised sales assessments, we work with you and scientifically evaluate 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.

What to look for in sales job candidates today

There are plenty of things to consider when hiring, but it’s vital that new employees are a good fit with company culture and embrace their new work environment.

They must be able to cope with challenges, build strong relationships with work colleagues – especially in the marketing department – and understand the needs of your customers.

As if hiring salespeople wasn’t challenging enough already, in this new world we live in, where face to face selling may not always be the accepted way, how do you know if the candidates have what it takes to sell remotely. Interestingly, psychologists tell us the many attributes for in-person sales success don’t work effectively when remote selling!

So what attributes do star sales performers typically have? Behavioural science tells us that they commonly possess the following traits:

  • Agreeableness: Tendency to be friendly, approachable, and easy to get along with.
  • Conscientiousness: Tendency to strive for perfection, sometimes at all costs.
  • Stability: Degree to which one reacts positively to negative or stressful situations.
  • Openness: Willingness to try new ways of doing things.
  • Tenacity: Tendency to be determined and persevere.
  • Control: Tendency to take charge of people and situations. Leads more than follows.
  • Entrepreneurial Approach: The tendency to quickly seize and tenaciously pursue new opportunities for the organisation, taking calculated risks at a high level of autonomy. The right recruitment tools help you weed out unsuitable candidates and identify the cream of the crop.

Other benefits of hiring star sales performers

Revenue benefits are not the only advantages of building a high performing sales team.

By adopting a more scientific approach to recruitment, you remove much of your operational downside costs; costs that don’t always show up on your P&L:

  • Frequent employee turnover – even from good people
  • Time spent recruiting and training of replacements
  • Lost sales through an empty seat during recruitment and induction training
  • Wasted investment in salary and training for someone that doesn’t make it.
  • Inability to close deals when not face to face.

Try us for FREE

You probably wouldn’t make a significant purchase without doing your research and acquiring objective data about your future potential investment. Then why would you hire a new salesperson costing more than $100K per annum using nothing more than your “gut feel” and highly subjective references?

At the end of the day if you’re happy with your current sales team’s success rate don’t change anything.

However, if you want to significantly increase your business performance talk to Great People Inside about our sales assessments – we’ll even let you try us risk-free and fee-free. Just click HERE, and we will be in touch.

Great People Inside recognised as a top technology innovator in the HR space by The People Space

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Great People Inside (GPI) has been featured on The People Space website in their Tech Hub as one of the top technology innovators in the HR space.

It includes a video interview with Martin Goodwill , CEO of GPI UK and valuable content relating to remote working, the leadership challenge in this VUCA world we live in, and redundancy challenges.

I highly recommend this material to all HR leaders.

http://hrtech.thepeoplespace.com/greatpeopleinside

David Leahy, Director, Great People Inside Australia

HOW TO GET THE RIGHT (REMOTE) PERSON FIRST TIME WHEN HIRING

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Thanks to https://unsplash.com/@wildlittlethingsphoto for the great photo

During the past nine months in Australia, many people’s businesses have been hit hard by the pandemic. Here at GPI, our thoughts are with the more than 900 families who lost loved ones during this crisis and for those whose livelihoods have been negatively impacted.

Recently though, some green shoots of hope have begun to sprout with domestic flying making a return, vaccines becoming available, and borders reopening in time for Christmas, it appears business conditions will significantly improve in 2021.

With increased demand will come the need to hire additional people, but how can you increase your success rate and hire the right people the first time? And what about the new way of working from home? How will you 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 might sift through a stack of resumes and possibly 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. Some key questions are difficult to answer through the traditional hiring process such as “Will this person be engaged in their work and a great in this role?” “Will this person be capable and productive working remotely?”

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 top performers?

It all starts with thinking about how potential employees will “fit”, rather than experience, qualifications, and even age and gender. Studies have shown that these factors are not statistical indicators of future top performance in a job, but that ‘fit’ is what counts if you want a high performer.

Following a recruit being let go during probation many of us have heard comments such as “we had to let them go – they just didn’t fit” but what does this actually mean?

‘Fit’ refers to how well a person is suited to their job role and the surrounding 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.

Assessment tools that allow you to develop a customised profile or model for the role you are hiring for bring objectivity into the hiring process. They validate data on existing performance, job tasks and results so that you hire individuals who are indisputably right for the role.

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 work. According to Willis Towers Watson, employee engagement is defined as “employees’ willingness and ability to contribute to company success”. According to studies they conducted, businesses can expect a 13.7% rise in net income with engaged employees; I am sure most CEO’s would take this net income increase as a Christmas present!

While this knowledge is widespread with business owners and managers, the wrong people still get hired for roles time and time again. Why? Hiring someone using the traditional interview process and reference checks alone can be a bit of a guessing game. Someone might be highly proficient at talking their way through the interview process, but their skills at talking the talk mightn’t translate to walking the walk in the job.

Validated benchmarkable assessments take the guesswork out of the hiring process. They evaluate information about a person that cannot be determined by a traditional job interview. Instead of solely relying on opinions or a hunch, the assessments we recommend provide you with tools which use objective data to determine whether your candidate is right for the role.

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.

The Great People Inside customisable assessment tools we recommend not only provide you with a menu of dimensions you can choose from to measure those key attributes important for your business, but they can also significantly increase your success rate of identifying future superstars. These tools extract information on your best talents’ abilities, personality traits, behaviours, and preferred learning styles. Using this information creates a customised profile for hiring new people who can successfully fill the shoes of your existing and past top performers.

So how do you find out who is best suited to homeworking?

Buffer.com published an annual global survey (FIG 1) 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.

It suggests that many individuals will either need help to overcome these problems or even that, for some people, Working from Home is not a viable option.

Figure 1

Most employees, when asked if they would like to work from home, will answer yes – 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.

You need a much more scientific approach if you are embarking on an enterprise-wide plan to introduce home working. Certain factors will help employers understand if, and where, their people will need help.

But what are those factors? And how do you measure them?

The Great People Inside difference

 

 

As an assessment business, Great People Inside specialises in creating assessments for the development of employees and teams. Although the size of the homeworking challenge is unprecedented, the essential work of analysing and developing your WFH team hasn’t changed – it’s what we do, all day, every day.

And because we customise assessments for specific purposes, we’ve developed a series of new assessments, informed by extensive, independent research, into the characteristics required for people to work, successfully, from home. These validated assessments will allow you not only to undertake a ‘health check’ of all your existing people, but also to identify whether that potential new hire has the capability and attributes required to be a star performer even when they are remote. Most importantly, these assessments will also enable you to respond to what they tell you. With our Partners, we offer individualised online development, provided by subject matter experts, to help your people cope with a new way of working.

The range of fully customisable Great People Inside assessment tools we recommend will enhance your selection process so that you can choose candidates that will help drive team and company performance and answer the question you had when starting the hiring process – “will this person be outstanding in this role even when working from home?” Which, after all, is what recruitment is all about!

If you would like to learn more about the Great People Inside assessments specifically designed for work from home employees and teams please click here to contact us or email [email protected]

 

 

www.greatpeopleinside.com/australia

Five key tips to encourage new growth in your HR business

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

 

By David Leahy, Director, Great People Inside Australia

In my recent conversations with HR consultants, encouraging new revenue growth, scaling their business and managing business downturn between Melbourne Cup and Australia Day are the challenges that loom large for 2021. However, especially in this uncertain world we live in, there are some unique challenges and barriers for consultants which can stop growth in its tracks.

As an Irish migrant in the 90’s, I was always fascinated when business owners and salespeople told me that “not much” happens business-wise in Australia between Melbourne Cup and Australia Day. When I socialised this generalisation at BBQs, contributing factors such as school holidays, time with family, and great weather were mentioned, nevertheless many heads nodded in agreement.

Forewarned is forearmed, they say, and each year I paid close attention to this period in my planning and introduced various strategies to overcome this decline in “normal” business activity.

A genuine business or a consultancy?

When you take a step back and look at your HR business, is it a consultancy or a genuine business?

In a consultancy, you are paid for your expertise and your time. You may work alone, or you may employ one or two people. Even when you have a constant stream of clients, profitability is a constant struggle. Why? Because there are only so many hours in a day that you and your team can work. There will always be a cap on what you can earn.

There are also diminishing returns. As your workload expands and you employ people, you earn less per hour than just doing the work yourself. It’s a catch 22. You’re either doing too much work yourself to remain profitable or earning a lower margin on your team’s work.

A genuine and sustainable business, on the other hand, is different. Your revenue isn’t limited by your time. There may be multiple income streams that cushion the business from the ups and downs of winning and losing business. It’s possible to grow without chipping away at profitability. Best of all, as a business owner, you can work less while earning more.

If your business is still a consultancy, you’re not alone. Many HR businesses will never evolve beyond that. But if your aspirations are to own a genuine business, it is possible to evolve.

So how can you evolve your consultancy into a sustainable and thriving business in 2021?

Scrutinise your costs

Managing your costs effectively will help you claw back profitability. That may include negotiating a reduction in your rent, sourcing more competitive suppliers, or outsourcing lower-level work to a more junior rather than a senior staff member.

Become more time-efficient

Consultants need to understand how their time is spent and reduce that time where possible. If you or your team are spending too much time on a job, it can blow out costs and make that job unprofitable. Consider ways to bring the time down: improving your systems, processes, and technology are good places to start. Look at whether there are any tasks you can automate or outsource at a lower cost to help you focus more on your clients improving their customer experience with your business.

Price strategically

I’ve written before about how trading time for money is a trap.  Consultants often find their earning potential is limited because they are paid for their time, and there are only so many hours in a day.

The answer is to price based on value or outcome instead of time. Create service packages at a fixed cost, which you know will be profitable. This also makes it easier to raise your prices. Don’t get stuck in a race to the bottom on price. By charging what you’re worth, you can earn more while working less and attract a better client.

Target the right clients

Do you know which clients are your most profitable clients and a good fit for your business? By better understanding this, you can focus your energy on those clients, upsell or cross-sell to them, and seek other potential clients with similar profiles. Having fewer more profitable clients is worth more to your business than having more clients who are less profitable.

Diversify your offering

Diversifying what you offer is an excellent way to grow both your top and bottom line. Are there additional revenue streams that fit well with your existing offering? A great option is to offer a product in addition to your usual services, such as an assessment, survey, or report. These offerings require less of your time, can be sold at a higher volume and with a more reliable profit margin.

There are many online tools out there. You may even have a product already in your portfolio but is it a “me too”? Does it differentiate you from your competitors? Is it the latest technology? How does it support your ability to earn revenue without constant active involvement by you?

Are you looking for ways to differentiate your business?

Great People Inside services are offered in over 20 countries globally. We recently launched in Australia, and we’re in the process of growing and extending our channel and referral partner network.

The Cloud-based GPI People Intelligence Platform is a next-generation platform that provides you with the ability to provide key strategic HR insights and analytics to your clients. Its flexibility is unique as it’s the only fully-customisable psychometric profiling and 360° feedback platform in the world.

For example, are you interested in helping your clients:

  • Identify people who will be productive in a work from home environment?
  • Analyse employees’ alignment with organisational values?
  • Develop a robust selection, onboarding, and development process?
  • Understand the business impacts their top performers contribute?
  • Manage all the generations effectively?

Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick and Tick the GPI platform can do this and more.

 

These days everyone wants choice, and that is precisely what we deliver with GPI. The unique ability to easily customise assessments means you are not restricted to offering assessment tools that measure or analyse what the test provider wants you to measure….you can help your clients measure precisely what’s important to them.

With GPI, you’re not restricted by the status of the role either. Our assessment dimension range is so vast. Our unique pricing models mean you can develop client-focused valid customised assessments regardless of the role position or status in the business. At GPI, we believe everyone in the organisation should be happy in their job and have the same opportunities to ensure they “fit,” and they love their work.

In fact, our mission is “To develop and offer the future’s talent and assessment solution – the Cloud-based GPI People Intelligence Platform – to anyone working with people: Ready-to-use, customisable to meet every need, and affordable to everyone.”

If you’re interested in implementing a strategy that will drive revenue to your business – regardless of the Melbourne Cup or Australia Day – please click here to contact us or email [email protected]

 

www.greatpeopleinside.com/australia

 

Morph your leadership

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Thanks https://unsplash.com/@davidclode for this amazing image

Practical ways to adapt your approach

By David Leahy, Director, Great People Inside Australia

Many of us can easily recall precisely when key events occurred around the world and in our own lives. It is fair to say that the current pandemic is one of those events and is well and truly etched in our memories for as long as we shall live.

In March 2020 you can probably recall the moment you first heard the word “lockdown”. It likely stopped you in your tracks as you were confronted with the thought, what does this mean for me and my family? Then came the closure of businesses, JobKeeper, Jobseeker and a mountain of eye watering debt, the likes of which we have never seen before in this country.

Except for Victoria, most states have since relaxed the restrictions imposed, however the constant media reminders and escalated infection control procedures practised daily in businesses across the country are a constant reminder of what running a business looks like in the year 2020.

This period marks the greatest challenge to leaders. Many of your peers and employees are likely worried about their future. Now more than ever, your people need the steady hand and re assurance of your leadership.

The problem though, is that leaders are human too and are not immune to the anxiety, stress and sleepless nights caused by the uncertainty we have lived through for the best part of this year.

Right now, as a business owner or leader you have a lot on your plate and sometimes it may even seem too much. This can impact your ability to think clearly or may cause you to lash out (metaphorically) at team members or even become short tempered with your customers.

But how can you morph and adapt your leadership to cope with the current demands? To help, we have outlined five practical approaches you can adopt.

1. Lead self

It was Charles Manz who first used the term ‘Self-leadership’ in 1983; and from this we know that to be a successful leader we must lead ourselves first, before we can lead others. The current situation calls for in-depth personal reflection to truly understand who we are, how we got to where we are today and what our natural tendencies and behaviours are when we are in a crisis and under pressure.

Self-awareness is one of the key elements of emotional intelligence (EI), which Daniel Goleman, a renowned psychologist, refers to as a person’s ability “to identify and manage their emotions and identify and influence others’ emotions”

Self-awareness provides a leader with key personal insights and enables them to self-manage those circumstances when triggered by a situation, an event, or a personal interaction. At the end of the day, we cannot control the occurrence of “stuff” that triggers us, but we do get to choose our reaction. As leaders we are constantly on display, and our people and our clients are making decisions about us and our leadership based on what they observe.

2. Get ‘real’

Many leaders tend to think that showing vulnerability is a weakness- in fact, it is a strength of leadership. When leaders stop wasting energy trying to conceal what they think other people should not see, it allows them to start showing their “real” self. By accepting vulnerability as a strength, leaders can stop worrying about having every answer and realise it is okay to not know. True wisdom comes from stepping away from the fear of not knowing.

The idea of being “real” was popularised by American management guru Warren Bennis in his 1989 book On Becoming a Leader, and gained further attention through the 2003 publication Authentic Leadership by Bill George, a professor at the Harvard Business School. Such leaders know and accept themselves and present a genuine and empathetic face to their teams.

They communicate truthfully and directly, and lead with the heart, not just the mind. But they are no softies. Truly ‘real” leaders always keep their goal in mind – the good of the organisation they are responsible for and lead. Mission-driven, they can separate out personal feelings from work imperatives.

3. Model the behaviour

Peter Drucker a renowned management consultant once said that “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”.  He did not mean that a great strategy is not important but rather that an empowering culture was a more certain route to organisational success.

Culture can be described “as the way we do things around here”. It includes leadership, communication, people, policies, vision, values, onboarding, and hiring and firing processes. Especially during the current situation, people like to work for and with leaders and managers who make them feel good, and these positive feelings result in improved performance. When leaders and managers do not promote these positive feelings throughout the business, performance decreases and mediocrity increases.

Most of us are familiar with the proverb that “a fish rots from the head”, which means that leadership is the root cause of an organisation’s failure and demise. This is true whether that organisation is a country, a company, or a business unit – toxic leadership can poison the emotional climate of a business quicker than you can say profit and loss! Modelling the type of leadership behaviour that you expect in your business is critical as it sets the tone, creates the environment, and builds your unique culture.

4. Communicate

George Bernard Shaw once said, “the greatest issue in communication is the illusion it has taken place”. As we know, great communication is much more than just getting your message across. It has to do with understanding the emotion and the intentions behind the information contained in the message. Leaders need highly advanced communication skills, not only to clearly convey a message, but to also listen in a way that gains the full meaning of what is being said and makes the other person feel heard and understood.

This is where favouring your right ear is important. While this may seem quite unusual, experts tell us that the left side of the brain is where the primary processing centres for both speech comprehension and emotions happens, and as the left side of the brain is connected to the right side of the body, favouring your right ear can help you better detect the emotional nuances of what someone is saying.

Many of us despite our best efforts to get the message across, on occasions find that the listener has heard differently to what was intended, the message somehow was blown off course and landed on a different landing strip than we intended! Adopting a non-judgemental approach and crafting powerful questions can help a leader explore deeply and increase their success of more effective communication.

5. Get data, get results

Leading others is difficult. Its fair to say you would not purchase a piece of capital equipment for your business without the benefit of objective data, so why would you attempt to lead your highly valued (and costly) team without the edge that scientific objective insights can give you? As a good friend of mine in Dublin used to say, “Are you stupid or what?”

Your team members are made up of vastly different personalities, all with their own unique passions, backgrounds, views, and work styles. With the best will in the world, misunderstandings and differences of opinion can create friction within the group.

Left unchecked, this can put a damper on performance and enthusiasm, leading to conflicts which may be hard to resolve.

This is the last thing you need right now. So, how can you harvest the best each team member has to give, using their attributes to maximum benefit, while managing those behavioural traits with the potential to upset team dynamics?

The answer is behavioural assessments, which give you detailed information about you and each of your employee’s skills, behaviour, and personality traits. These next generation of unique customisable smart tools from Great People Inside that we recommend, provide leaders with heightened self-awareness and valuable pointers about the way their employees can function to optimum capacity at work – both as individuals and within the team.

Your choice

We appreciate that every business is unique, and that in the 21st century, businesses invest in defining, developing and implementing that very specific culture, that state-of-the-art customer service, those distinguished values and dynamics that deliver their business advantage and success. In other words, we understand that a business’s uniqueness and greatness cannot, and should not, rely on a “one size fits all” approach.

The assessments we recommend are unique as they offer a menu of more than 60 validated dimensions from which you choose to measure precisely what is important to your business.

If you’d like to learn more, or if you would like a FREE trial, please click on this LINK and we will get back to you promptly.

 

David Leahy

Great People Inside