Lockdown is not the real world – managing long-term homeworking

/in /by

Effective Homeworking after the pandemic

The current pandemic has brought homeworking kicking and screaming to the top of many organisations’ agendas – whether they wanted it to or not.

But whether future homeworking in your organisation is a by-product of the pandemic or the culmination of a long considered plan, there are many things you need to take into consideration before you take the plunge.

The sudden nature of lockdown meant hunderds of thousands of people started working from home, overnight. Normal rules and regulations about working from home were suspended/waived in the face of a national emergency.

But that was then, and this is now…..

Working from home under lockdown was different

As a first consideration, any decisions you make, based on the world of work since March 23rd, need to take into account the fact that Lockdown is not the real world

As lockdown is slowly released, organisations are already considering extensive, ongoing home-working for a variety of reasons:

  1. The potential to save on the huge fixed costs of office space.
  2. The impact of social distancing meaning that they can no longer accommodate the number of people they had before in the space available – but can’t/don’t want to reduce headcount.
  3. The realisation that the old ‘way we work around here’ can be just as effective with employees working from home most of the time (knowing they actually do work!)

The first thing to consider is the legal framework for working from home which is somewhat different than during lockdown. The Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS) has a 43 page document (click here) outlining an employer’s obligations and suggested action they might take.

When you realise it covers topics such as…

  • Whether current contracts of employment cover homeworking (and whether employees can refuse)
  • What the financial implications are for the employee (additional heating and lighting costs, paying business rates, whether the terms of their mortgage and home insurance allow them to work from home full-time)
  • Employers’ responsibility for Health and Safety at Work even when work is done at home (including questions like whether the employee has a readily available fire extinguisher!!)

..you begin to realise that setting this up for a sizeable workforce isn’t as easy as giving someone a laptop and phone and telling them not to come into the office any more.

But, even if you manage to scale this mountain, get everything in place in compliance with the law, there may be one fundamental thing you’ve forgotten.

Are the people you’ve designated to work from home willing/able to do it long-term?

Buffer.com publishes 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.

Many employees struggle with homeworking

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.

As the ACAS guide says, the personal qualities required are likely to include:

  • Self-motivation and discipline.
  • Ability to work without direct supervision.
  • Ability to complete work to a deadline.

And it’s possible/likely that you won’t know this from the lockdown experience.

Compulsory homeworking during lockdown, while coping with the fear of job loss, fear of the virus and  family issues, means that, while recent months give you an indication of what a long term policy might look like, you shouldn’t take it as proof of concept.

A London School of Economics study of more than 500 staff and managers[1] on attitudes towards flexible working found that many of the positive effects waned over time.

Employees no longer viewed working from home as a privilege and began behaving no differently to office-based staff, producing similar results. Supporting this research, major corporations such as IBM and Yahoo have both reversed remote-working policies, having seen a dip in productivity[2].

Part of the issue with working from home is that it doesn’t fundamentally change human psychology. If you are an unproductive person in the office, then it’s unlikely to change when you work from home – where there are plenty of other distractions. You still need tactics and strategies in place to help you work effectively.

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

Most employees (and employers), 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 homeworking. There are certain factors that will help employers understand if, and where, their people will need help.

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

As an assessment business, Great People Inside is used to 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.

Give your employees a homeworking ‘health check’

These assessments will allow you not only to undertake a ‘health check’ of all your people, but to respond to what it tells you. With our Partners, we offer individualised online development, provided by subject experts, to help your people cope with a situation that is far from their ‘old normal’.

Our new assessments are:

Great People Inside’s Remote Employee assessment helps you discover if your current employees have the skills needed to be productive and motivated when working remotely.

Great People Inside’s Remote Manager assessment provides key information on the efficiency of managers leading a remote team, assesses their ability to manage different work styles and create vision, motivation and momentum in a remote team.

Great People Inside’s Remote Team Member assessment provides important information regarding the efficiency of a team when working remotely. It shows the way members interact with one another and, at the same time, presents the optimal conditions in which that team can reach the highest level of productivity.

Remote Working assessments help you understand staff development needs

If you are planning to introduce long-term homeworking in your organisation, do you know if your people can cope with the isolation? Would you like to know? And if you’re recruiting additional people directly into homeworking, wouldn’t it be good to be able to measure them against your existing successful homeworkers.

Contact Great People Inside on [email protected] or call us on 01494 573572 and let us help you develop and introduce the most effective (and cost-effective) Homeworking Policy possible to ensure you get it right first time.

[1] http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/3349/

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolkinseygoman/2017/10/12/why-ibm-brought-remote-workers-back-to-the-office-and-why-your-company-might-be-next/#6350779316da

Outplacement Assessment & Coaching from Great People Inside

/in /by

If redundancies look inevitable, give loyal employees a soft landing and maintain your employer brand…

Redundancy has been a fact of business life for decades. When financial crises, individual company issues or business restructuring create the need to preserve organisations, individual employees often bear the brunt of circumstances outside their control.

Never was this more true than during the current Coronavirus crisis.

Government financial measures, like the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS), have, so far, limited the impact of the virus on employment. But, many businesses, when support from these schemes tapers and they have to fund the difference themselves, will have no option but to reduce their workforce through redundancy.

Few organisations will hit 100% of their former activity quickly. The length of the ‘ramp up’, to anything approaching 100%, will determine how they respond, with workforce reductions one of the few options available to restore profitability.

The length of the business ramp-up post Covid19 will be significant

However, the nature of the crisis – and the time that the CJRS has afforded them – means that they have more time to plan for how they react when the inevitable happens.

Organisations have spent huge amounts of money developing their employer brand and yet, how they respond to the current situation could enhance or severely damage that brand at a stroke.

Historically, the only possible responses to redundancies have been:

  1. Do nothing
  2. Offer traditional Outplacement for departing employees

At this unprecedented time, many want to do SOMETHING – but simply don’t have the finances to afford hugely expensive Outplacement Services. So, is there a middle ground?

Great People Inside has developed a valid and reliable psychometric Outplacement Assessment – available at a fraction of the cost of traditional Outplacement services – offering extensive career guidance for those employees who want to convert their misfortune into a life-changing career switch.

Some people will want to make a life-changing career switch

The Outplacement Assessment measures 14 different Dimensions and compares the results with the 500 most-searched career options in a top-rated European Careers database.

The Assessment measures:

  • 5 x Personality Traits – Elements that make a person unique – influencing values and interests, the perception of the outside world, the approach to learning and continuous development.
  • 3 x Cognitive Traits – the capacity to perform the mental processes of reasoning, remembering, understanding and problem solving.
  • 6 x Occupational Interests- identifying factors that motivate, and appeal to, an individual.

When combined, these generate 2 reports from each candidate’s results:

  • Personality Report – listing the careers to which an individual’s personality is best suited
  • Interests Report – listing the careers that best suit the individual’s personal preferences

These reports give a ranked list of careers that each individual can consider and informs the respondent about the level of training and education required for each role, should they wish to pursue them.

When combined with a 1-2-1 coaching consultation with a GPI Accredited consultant, the Great People Inside Outplacement Assessment provides exceptional career guidance for a fraction of the cost of traditional Outsourcing services.

If your organisation finds itself needing to make loyal staff redundant, and want to give them the softest possible landing without breaking the bank, contact Great People Inside at [email protected] or call us on 01494 573572.

Developing your High Performance Salesforce

/in /by

Developing your High-Performance Salesforce

If you were starting from scratch, would you design the salesforce you’ve got today? Probably not but then few of us start with the luxury of a clean slate.

Instead, the group you have is an amalgam of the people you inherited and the people you’ve recruited since you took over the team. But, all too often, performances within the team vary greatly.

A typical salesforce will look like this:

Only 16% of a salesforce are typically considered as successful workers

But where did the Poor and Average performers come from – and what can you do about it?

What can you do?

You could sack all the Poor and Average Performers and then recruit only Top Performers. But unless you’ve dramatically changed your recruitment process (a topic for a different blog), that didn’t work out too well last time, did it? You risk ending up with the same graph but with different names attached to the tags ‘Poor’ and ‘Average’ Performers.

Sacking poor and average performers won’t solve the problem

What’s the alternative?

Develop your own High-Performance Salesforce, based on people you already know and employ. But it helps to know what’s achievable.

Poor performers are unlikely to rise to the performance level of your best people. But you can improve their performance if you identify where the performance gaps are. Any improvement will contribute to your target.

Average performers may well be Top Performers-in-waiting – IF you can remove the obstacles that currently prevent it happening. If you know where the gaps/obstacles are and provide them with targeted Learning and Development, it will bring them closer to, even alongside, the best people you employ.

How do you do this?

Your sales numbers tell you who’s performing well – but they don’t tell you why?

You need to understand what it is about your top performers that sets them apart from the rest.

Why are they able to:

  • Quickly identify opportunities?
  • Delight their clients?
  • Close sales quickly?

… and most importantly – why can’t everyone else do it?

Top performers are great at closing sales

Great People Inside’s Dimensions assessment tells you:

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

By working with you, we create an assessment tailored specifically to your organisation. This includes a benchmark created from your top performers (not a random collection of external organisations).

This assessment is then used to measure all of your sales team.

By doing this, you are able to provide the individual development needed to improve your sales figures, in the middle of a recession, with the team you already have.

What’s more, the same benchmark will help you recruit better when you have vacancies to fill.

Use your development budget to Develop your High-Performance Salesforce. It could be the best money you’ve ever spent.

Email me at [email protected] or call 01494 573 572.

The Reality of Working From Home

/in , /by

The Reality of Working From Home

When you imagine working from home, does it look a little like your home? It probably does – after all it may be the only reference point you have.

But how much do you know about the living circumstances of your team? Home is now their place of work, sanctioned by you, and you have a duty of care to every employee to ensure they are coping as well as they can in the ‘new normal’.

If you ask them ‘Are you OK?’, the almost inevitable answer is yes. Equally, if you launch into the Spanish Inquisition, it’s only going to add to the stress for those people already struggling with Working From Home for the first time.

So here’s just a short (and far from exhaustive) list of things you need to consider:

If your employee lives alone:

·      Was the contact they had with people at work the main human contact they usually had?

·      Do they belong to a gym, go to the pub, belong to clubs and societies which is where they usually meet their friends?

·      Even if they’re happy living alone, do they resent the fact that their home has now also become their workplace and there’s no ‘escape’?

If your employee lives with other people, possibly family but maybe not:

·      Is their accommodation big enough to provide a separate space to work in?

·      Are they living with people who are out of work or furloughed so always around, with time on their hands?

·      Are they, or their partner, trying to home school their children?

·      Do they have pets that are likely to participate in zoom calls?

·      Was going to the office a respite from a busy home environment?

 And considering their health:

·      Does your employee have underlying health conditions?

·      Are they fearful for their lives with the almost exclusively bad news about the virus?

·      If they have a propensity towards mental health problems, is this crisis, and their inability to access alternative locations, likely to make the situation worse?

·      Are you, as a business, expecting them to achieve the same results as they would have done in their office environment?

·      Even if goals are reduced, if they can’t achieve them, are they fearful for their jobs and income?

·      Are zoom calls horrendous for them because people can see their ‘private space’?

 Employers can’t change the imperative to work from home. That will only be removed when we have the ‘all clear’ from Government but there are certain factors that could help employers understand if, and where, their people need help without having to rely on them ‘fessing up’.

But what are those factors? And how do you measure them without adding to the anxiety of people who aren’t coping?

As an assessment business, Great People Inside is used to creating assessments for the recruitment of new people and the development of existing employees and teams. Although the size of the 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, over many years, into the characteristics required for people to successfully work from home.

These assessments are hugely relevant to the current global situation and will allow you not only to undertake a ‘health check’ on all of your people (not singling out those you think are struggling), but to respond to what it tells you. With our Partners, we can offer individualised online development, provided by subject experts, to help your people cope with a situation that is far from their ‘old normal’.

Our new assessments are:

The Remote Employee assessment helps you discover if your current employees have the skills needed to be productive and motivated when working remotely. 

The Remote Manager assessment provides key information on the efficiency of managers leading a remote team, assesses their ability to manage different work styles and create vision, motivation and momentum in a remote team.

The Remote Team assessment provides important information regarding the efficiency of a team when working remotely. It shows the way members interact with one another and, at the same time, presents the optimal conditions in which that team can reach the highest level of productivity.

The VUCA Manager assessment identifies leadership potential in a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) environment. By measuring capacity and potential, it highlights an individual’s strengths and development gaps relative to the leadership needs of the organisation.

 Is your team working remotely? Do you know that they’re coping OK with the isolation? Would you like to know?

Contact Great People Inside on [email protected] or call us on 01494 573572 and let us help you maximise the impact you have on your organisation AND your people.

Poor Sales Recruitment

/in /by

Poor sales recruitment? It’s not my fault!

If HR is responsible for recruitment in your organisation – but keeps recruiting poor sales people – it may not be your fault – but it IS your problem.

And if it’s your problem shouldn’t you have (a lot of) input into getting it resolved? That’s unless it provides a convenient excuse (‘we would be doing better, boss, if HR didn’t keep recruiting these ****** **** Sales Execs.’).

As a Sales leader, you’re responsible for the performance of your team and need to improve your recruitment process so that you can ensure successful salespeople keep coming into your company.

A typical sales force

Often, your sales force will look like this:

Only 16% of a salesforce are typically considered as successful workers

Think about the last time you recruited a top performer. Now, think about the last time you recruited a poor performer.

Did you do anything different in your recruitment process?

Probably not, yet you got very different results.

You need to be able to identify why some salespeople are more successful than others. Your current recruitment process is clearly not doing that so is no longer fit for purpose. If you want better results, you must fix your hiring process.

When your process doesn’t identify who will (and won’t) perform, you waste:

  • Time
  • Energy
  • Money

You can save money immediately by adopting a new selection process.


Improve your chances of success

Flipping a coin gives you a 50/50 chance of success – although, clearly, this also results in failure half of the time.

By improving your recruitment process, you give yourself much better than just a 50/50 chance

But taking a more scientific approach to recruitment, you remove much of your operation’s downside costs.

These include:

  1. Frequent employee turnover – even from good people
  2. Recruiting & training of replacements
  3. Lost sales through an empty seat during recruitment & induction training
  4. Wasted investment in salary & training for someone that doesn’t make it

If you’re happy with the status quo, good luck!

If you want to improve your likelihood of success even further, talk to Great People Inside about our Dimensions assessments. Dimensions has been designed specifically to increase your success rate when recruiting sales people (and it might improve your luck too!).

Get in touch now at [email protected] or call 01494 573 572.

Hiring Freeze

/in /by

Hiring Freeze? Unfreeze your existing sales assets!

When businesses introduce a hiring freeze, 3 things tend to happen:

1. You wish you’d recruited quicker for that vacancy.
2. You rethink whether now’s the right time to get rid of any underperforming members of staff, knowing they won’t be replaced any time soon. 3. Your sales targets are just as high as they were before.

But when you look at your sales team, this is what you’ll usually see:

Only 16% of a salesforce are typically considered as successful workers

Studies have shown that:

  • Poor performers deliver 48% less than average performers
  • Average performers deliver 48% less than top performers
  • Top performers deliver over 100% more than poor performers

Why do I have poor performers?

You planned to recruit excellent performers into your business – and yet you’re stuck with several poor ones. That wasn’t part of the plan!

Your recruit may have a fantastic track record of being a superstar elsewhere – but that isn’t enough. You need your sales recruit to perform successfully in YOUR business.

The problem is, the salesforce you are left with during the hiring freeze still has to hit your targets. So, what do you do?

Most people consider one of three tried, tested (and often failed) things:

  • Crack the whip
  • Focus on getting more from your top performers
  • Bring sales forwards from next year

Instead, you require a different approach.

You need to find out:

  • What makes your top people so successful?
  • Where are there gaps between your top, average and poor performers?
  • What can you do to reduce those gaps?

Let’s be honest: it’s unlikely that your poor performers will ever be top performers. But if you improve their performance by 10 – 20%, it will still make a dent in your targets.

And if you can help some of your average performers become top performers – happy days!

By improving your salespeople’s performances by 10 – 20%, you go a long way to reaching your target

How do you do this?

Your sales numbers tell you who’s performing well – but do they tell you why?

You need to understand what it is about your top performers that sets them apart from the rest.

Why are they able to…

  • Quickly identify opportunities?
  • Delight their clients?
  • Close sales quickly?

… and most importantly: why can’t everyone else do it?

Great People Inside’s Dimensions assessment tells you:

  • What makes your top performers so great
  • Why your average performers are less effective
  • How to improve your least successful performers

By working with you, we create an assessment tailored specifically to your organisation. This includes a benchmark created from your top performers (not a random collection of external organisations).

We then use this assessment to measure all of your sales team.

By doing this, you are able to provide individual (rather than ‘sheep dip’) development to improve your sales figures in the middle of a hiring freeze.

What’s more, the same benchmark will help you recruit better when the freeze is lifted!

Is it free? Unfortunately not, but having zero recruitment budget often doesn’t mean you have zero development budget. Take a look!

If you’re in a hiring freeze, or about to enter one, but still have a training and development budget, why not contact Great People Inside and let us unfreeze your sales assets.

Email me at [email protected] or call 01494 573 572.