How’s that warm body strategy working for you?

What's your hiring criteria?

Many companies that are suffering from high turnover strive to fill the open positions as quickly as possible. If the hiring process is truly optimized, that’s all fine and well. If the speed is achieved simply by picking the first candidate who meets the minimum requirements, it’s called the ‘warm body strategy’.  Although it may bring short term relief, it can also amplify the original problem. The new hires who don’t fit the company culture and are not necessarily high performers are likely to quit or frustrate their coworkers. The vicious cycle continues.

To break the cycle, hiring managers must turn their attention to the quality of hire. It is easier said than done, when the team is working overtime, or an important deadline is looming around the corner. Some key elements to increase the quality of hire are being specific about what you want, assessments, skilled interviewers and good follow-through.

Culture fit is the highest determinant for long term success for the candidate. You must be clear on what types of behaviors it takes to thrive in your organization. Add specific functional competencies, and your recruiter can source much better matches to start with.

The interviewers’ time is valuable. The best practice is to narrow down your candidate pool by assessing the candidates before interviews. This way, you only interview good matches. There are multitude of assessments to choose from, depending on the position you are hiring for, ranging from cognitive and psychomotor tests to skill and personality tests. Make sure that the tests are valid and reliable, to avoid inadvertently discriminating against any candidates.

Hiring an employee is an important investment for your company. It is surprising how often those who interview candidates do not take this investment decision with the appropriate seriousness. The interviewers should also keep in mind that they are creating the first impression of their organization. All who interview should coordinate their questions ahead of time and reconvene or submit comments afterwards. HR or recruiting often takes the lead in coordinating this process. The interviewers should be trained in behavioral and situational interview techniques. One of the most in-depth interviewing techniques is topgrading.

When you have done all this work to identify a truly excellent fit to the company and the position, don’t drop the ball on day one. The highest turnover takes place in the first 90 days. Focus on the onboarding process and ensure that the new employee feels welcome, gets clear direction and the tools to get productive fast. Now you have much more than a warm body working for you.

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Are you after excellence or mediocrity?

I just finished listening to a webinar on Strength-Focused Performance by Marcus Buckingham, who wrote First, Break All The Rules and many other bestselling books. Marcus shared the latest Gallup numbers on where organizations focus their development efforts in 2010. In USA, 45% of efforts are focused on developing strengths and 55% on fixing weaknesses. Interestingly, there is a great gender difference; women peak at 73% focusing on their weaknesses. Millenials also seem to be more focused on their weaknesses at 69%. While other western countries aren’t that different from U.S. companies, the Chinese have totally changed their focus in 10 years. In 2000, only 23% focused on strengths. In 2010 the trend has reversed: 73% of Chinese companies polled are focusing on strengths. The rise of entrepreneurial optimism sees that in order to gain competitive advantage, strengths are the only way to win.

When we talk about strength-focused development, it doesn’t mean that you ignore weaknesses. It’s all about allocation of resources. The return on investment on strengths is 5 to 10 times higher than on weaknesses. Strengths are areas of unlimited opportunity. Weaknesses aren’t. You only want to make a minimal investment in improving weaknesses, enough that they don’t hold your employee back. There may also be other ways to deal with the weaknesses, such as automation, delegating or minimizing the tasks that require involving the employee’s weakness. If the job requires a large amount of time using the weakness, a job match discussion may be required.

On the other hand, developing strengths is time and money well spent. Not only will the performance improve in leaps, but so will employee engagement. People love to work using their strengths. As they continue pushing the limit of their skill and learning to master the next level of challenge, they are more likely to enter Flow, the highest level of human happiness. In 2009, only 14% of employees got to play to their strengths most of the day. When organizations don’t use the talents of their employees, they are underutilizing their human capital and disengaging their strongest players.

The best managers discover the strengths and weaknesses of their team members through observation and dialogue. They appreciate the unique talents and contributions of each individual and put them to full use. They continuously challenge their employees to learn new skills and knowledge, especially in the areas of their strength. They are developing experts.

Are you developing your strengths and the strengths of your employees?

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It’s performance evaluation time!

Most agree that the best performers should get the best rewards

The announcements and instructions have not got out yet, but rest assured that HR is already preparing for annual reviews. Many organizations align their performance management process with the calendar year and business planning cycle: Evaluations are done at the end of the year, to enable pay for performance in Q1. While everyone will spend extra hours to create a list of ratings, let’s keep one thing in mind: while performance ratings are an important administrative tool – they do not increase performance.

Performance ratings are an important vehicle for talent management, because they provide more objective data into differentiated rewards planning, investment in training and development as well as succession planning. Without performance ratings, it would be near impossible to have a consistent approach to salary increases and bonuses, unless everyone got exactly the same amount. Based on research, employees do not feel that would be fair. Everyone expects that high performers should get higher rewards than the rest. It also makes sense that the company wants to invest more in developing them and pay special attention to them when looking at the future leadership pool. The only way to identify these individuals in a larger company is with a rating.

The distaste with performance evaluations comes from many directions. First off, there is so much obsession with the actual rating. Managers and employees should keep in mind that it is just an identifier and an administrative tool. What really matters is the on-going dialogue between the employee and the manager. The performance review is not the time to break news about shortcomings in performance – that should be done immediately when issues arise. The review is a great time to step back, look at next year’s goals and have a good developmental discussion on what to learn next. That is the best ROI for the time spent together.

The other issue employees frequently take with performance ratings is the perceived subjectivity. As the rating does have implications on the level of investment in the employee, it is important that both managers and employees are clear about the performance standards. 90% of employees believe they are above average performers. There are workshops to help managers to get calibrated on performance standards before the evaluation process. HR and next level managers can then monitor typical rater bias as necessary.

Research shows that annual reviews don’t really impact performance – informal feedback does. However, your performance dialogue does have an impact on an equally important metric: retention. Take this time to connect with your employees. Talk more about the reasons why they are staying and what you can do help them be more productive.

To schedule a performance standards calibration session and to prep your managers for annual reviews that drive retention, contact liisa@forteconsulting.biz / 512-484 8263

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Coaching: Make it a daily habit

Coaching is a gift

Coaching – what is it really? We have sports coaches, all the way from the little league to the ones who make millions. We have career coaches, business coaches and life coaches. Managers are expected to coach their employees, but a recent study by Leadership IQ shows that two thirds of employees feel they are not even receiving enough attention, let alone coaching. Perhaps if we didn’t make coaching sound like something so formidable, managers would take up on doing it on a regular basis.

There are two main types of coaching: formal and informal. Good coaches use both. Formal coaching is a goal and process oriented approach, while informal coaching is an on-going effort to turn every opportunity into learning, looking for teachable moments.

Formal coaching is a good choice, when there is a specific goal and a specific timeframe to be met. Sometimes, the employee has an aggressive vision of leapfrogging to the next level of skill and expertise. Other times, a performance improvement plan is required to address a productivity or behavioral issue. Professional coaches often use formal coaching plans to help their clients stay focused on their goals, and integrate other resources to provide informal coaching. The formal coaching process typically includes an analysis phase, goal setting, an action plan for improvement, identification of resources and support, setting of milestones, and agreement on the review schedule for monitoring progress.

Informal coaching happens daily. It should happen daily. If you think of sports, formal coaching would be the practices, informal coaching would be the coach’s feedback during the game and the debriefing after the game. Learn as you go. Perhaps you show a handy shortcut key as you walk by. You prep together for an important presentation. You may walk through a complex project plan with your team and give them tips based on your experience. Or, you sit down with your employee after they messed up and discuss together how to prevent it from happening again.

Feedback is an important element of both coaching approaches. Objective and specific feedback, followed by a gentle dialogue of a better way to approach the situation, has the greatest value for the receiver.  When the objective is to learn and not to evaluate, coaching becomes a daily gift, and not an administrative task.

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