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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

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