A research based measurement tool
IN TODAY'S intensely competitive market place, businesses must be concerned not just with the price, product and positioning, but also with people who are crucial to the success of their organisation.
That was what Gallup India Pvt Ltd emphasised in a workshop on HR Strategies for Sustainable Growth organised recently by the National Network, Cochin Chapter at Erunakulam. The workshop was centered on talent based hiring, Human Sigma (which is the trademark of Gallup) and managing differences.
The resource persons for the workshop were Dr Rajesh Srinivasan and Ms Sita Vasudevan. Dr Rajesh Srinivasan is the Director Research & Consulting and Ms Sita Vasudevan, a Consultant on work place practices. Mr S R Nair, President of Kerala Management Association, inaugurated the workshop.
Hiring talent
Attracting the best people is hardly a novel idea. The greatest generals, coaches and sales managers seem to instinctively understand the importance of attracting the best possible recruits.
But for many organisations, hiring the best people seems easier said than done. No company or manager deliberately sets out to hire people who will perform poorly. Yet, in many of the companies one finds that one - third of their sales representatives are under performing.
According to Gallup, managers essentially evaluate candidates based on their résumés. They look carefully at each candidate's previous experience, their track record, their educational background, and each candidate's "chemistry". Gallup has evaluated hundreds of thousands of sales candidates, and they have found that though these factors should be considered in the hiring process, they have little value in predicting whether a sales candidate will succeed.
Instead Gallup carefully evaluated the best performers within an existing sales force and culled a series of highly predictable questions - questions that the most productive representatives answer differently than the least productive members of the sales force.
Then the new candidate's answers to these very same questions are evaluated. Based on how closely a candidate's answers match the answers from the best performing reps, one can predict a candidate's success rate and provide this information to the hiring manager to assist in hiring decisions.
What are the implications of these results? Although most managers recognise that hiring the best people is important, they do not have tools available to help them make effective choices. Instead, they rely on traditional criteria that have little predictive value. Information collected during a traditional hiring process has little relevance to success on the job. Bad hiring managers make decisions based on bad or irrelevant information.
Engaged employees
Create an environment that is dynamic, even driven, yet congenial enough so that the employee feels cared for as an individual. He may even find a best friend at work! If you do this you could foster what the Gallup Organisation calls an "engaged" employee.
It is obvious that an engaged employee can be more productive than their disengaged counterparts. But as a manager, you have to ask how much more productive are these employees.
Unless you can compare the bottom line contributions of engaged and disengaged workers you cannot know whether building engagement is worth the managerial effort.
One company instituted Q 12, a process pioneered by Gallup to measure employee engagement and more importantly, to generate result oriented dialogue between employees and managers about specific areas of high and low engagement.
Q12 is so named because the process starts with a 12 - question survey. The result of the Q12 survey carried out in an organisation shows that every organisation has "actively disengaged" workers, who are physically present on the job but are psychologically absent.
Such employees produce 28% less revenue than their colleagues who were engaged, while those defined as "not engaged", that is productive but not psychologically committed to their jobs, generated 23% less revenue than their engaged counterparts.
There is enough data to show that engagement doesn't merely correlate to better bottom line results- it actually drives them. Q12 survey is not an end but is an on going process.
The biggest improvement in engagement and productivity comes from moving from great to exceptional, not from average to good. The strength-based approach has begun to find takers in most organisations. StrengthFinder, an online assessment tool that measures the presence of talent within 34 themes lists some of the top themes of talents viz.
Achiever, Developer, Empathy and Strategic. By understanding their talents, employees naturally gravitate to tasks that enable them to constantly battle their shortcomings. StrengthFinder has proven to be the best starting point for becoming a strength - based organisation.
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