Up until now, whilst almost every employer we talk to would like to offer their redundant people this service to get them back into employment as swiftly and painlessly as possible, the barrier has always been finding funds for the service when they are already financially squeezed enough to be letting people go.

However, our 80% success rate has been recognised by WINZ who are keen to use us in keeping newly redundant people off the dole queue by offering funds to employers who engage us to deliver outplacement services to their displaced staff.

Our standard 4-stage program of self evaluation, CV compilation, interview skills workshop and job search techniques can be 100% subsidised.   Longer programs aimed at senior staff can be substantially subsidised too.

As well as the obvious benefits to affected staff, businesses that engage in supporting displaced staff reap substantial benefits in minimising legal risk and cost, maintaining a positive public image, maintain or increasing productivity among remaining staff and reducing stress and workloads of people responsible for making colleagues redundant.  A fuller picture of these benefits can be seen here.

Our mission now is to get the message out to all employers in the region faced with the dilemma of making people in the region redundant as a way of sweetening a very bitter pill with real prospects of giving displaced people a viable future in the region.  You can demonstrate your support for the region too by spreading the word to business owners and line managers in your network of this services availability.

Give Steve Evans a call on 06 833 6465 to offer this service to your staff or people you know who are affected by redundancy.

The same can be said for or using individual exercises designed to tease out essential competencies in roles critical to the success of the organisation, despite the presence of both ‘off the shelf’ exercises and expertise of those able to build bespoke assessment exercises.

So, what seems to be holding us back in utilising a process that ticks plenty of boxes in predicting whether a candidate is likely to perform in a role, or whether existing staff have latent talent to compliment succession plans?  Having spent the past six years persuading kiwi businesses to adopt this approach, I have a few suggestions:

•  I need to work on my persuasion skills
• The HR profession and hiring managers either don’t know of the existence of the assessment/development centre approach, or where to find relevant exercises in New Zealand.  I trawled around the August HRINZ expo and didn’t find any exhibitors promoting assessment exercises; even those who I know offer the service.
• The perception that the assessment centre approach has to involve multiple exercises, a cast of assessors and considerable time to deliver, when in reality picking a singular exercise that covers essential competencies reaches the same objective with the same time and people involvement as an interview.
• The approach suffers from the ‘where do I start?’ dilemma in sourcing providers of valid, reliable exercises, matching them against internal competency frameworks and gaining the buy-in from internal recruiters, especially if they need to be trained as assessors to become involved in the process.  In short, it all looks too hard.
• The most visible sellers of assessment exercises concentrate on impersonal on-line and often US-centric solutions at a point in the selection process when a much more personal and face to face approach seems more appropriate to both candidate and hiring manager.
• A kiwi anomaly born of a country where everyone knows everyone, that assessment centres involve candidates meeting each other, and that plenty of employers and candidates insist on avoiding these meetings at almost any cost.  This of course needn’t be the case in practice.
• Debates in academia on whether assessment exercises were measuring artificially observed or actual behaviour, even though the predictive properties of the approach raise the likelihood of the candidate performing in the job.
• Faced with the ‘where do I start’ dilemma and unknown cost of acquiring assessment tools, the HR function decide to make their own assessment exercises.  Without the required validity and reliability testing to ensure these exercises measure what they claim to measure and do so with an acceptable degree of accuracy, these attempts tend to be as successful as making your own i-phone or Toyota.

This is a substantial series of obstacles for any hiring manager and their HR team to overcome, but as most are centred around not knowing where to start and mythical misinformation, the potential rewards of minimising the risks of poor selection decisions and identifying potential among staff make the approach well worth the effort.

Three recent case studies of bringing assessment exercises into the selection process of roles critical to success in kiwi organisations illustrate the point with ease:

HR Manager Selection Dilemma

A critical ‘Head of HR’ appointment process into a multi site, multi union manufacturing and service organisation yielded two seemingly strong final stage candidates according to their CV’s, interviews, reference checks and personality profiles.

Questions however remained on how effective they would be in managing complex and voluminous HR issues, partnering effectively with line managers and effectively managing union relationships; all of which were critical to effective performance in the role and capable of making or breaking the effectiveness of the organisation.

A singular In-Basket exercise appropriately pitched at HR Manager’s in similar multi-site complex organisations and containing interrelated items of varied importance was put into the last stage of the selection process, with the opportunity for participants to present their findings and recommendations to the selection panel.  The entire process, from administration to delivery of feedback was completed in half a day and set the candidates apart in terms of their competency levels in relation to the job, making the selection decision crystal clear.

Contracts Manager Selection

Where the ability to effectively negotiate complex contracts had severe risks to profitability, project management and the organisations brand image in a highly competitive and visible market, hiring managers wanted to be certain that the new Contracts Manager had the capability to negotiate at the appropriate level.

A need for candidates to clearly demonstrate their negotiation skills rather than just talk about them at interview was paramount, and addressed through the selection of a high-level contracts negotiation role play and a seasoned negotiator with the capability to require candidates to put their money where their mouth was.  This approach also afforded the luxury of key stakeholders in the business able to observe and assess candidates performance.

Again, candidates whose interview performance, referees and personality profiles suggested very similar level of capability proved to be poles apart when assessed in the role play, and a confident appointment made with instant positive impact on the organisations negotiated outcomes in contracts.

Spotting Supervisory Potential among Shop-Floor Staff    

A process manufacturing plant looking to sharpen up the way shop-floor staff were promoted into supervisory positions and gain a clear assessment of the competencies of the existing supervisory team leaders designed a development centre to measure competencies  essential to success in the role.  This took the form of more traditional ‘multi-exercise’ assessments to ensure both people and process behaviours and skills were covered, and included a scheduling exercise to cover skills in managing resources and meeting production deadlines, a staff performance role-play to cover people management, group problem solving exercise to cover quality circle style team meetings and an industrial proficiency ability test battery.

Run over a day, the development centre handled twenty people, identified those suitable for immediate promotion, a clear development plan for those falling short of promotion and remedial action to bring existing supervisors up to the desired performance level.  The intervention is now run annually to maintain commitment to promotion from within, with full support from the union.

So, to return to the question, what is holding your HR department back from bringing similar interventions into your own selection and development processes?  If it’s no more than the subject residing in the ‘too hard basket’ through not knowing where to start, given the positive impact of selecting high performers and identifying talent in the workplace, it would be well worth taking a closer look in 2012.

Find out more about Assessment & Development Centres here, then call us on 0508 736 753 to see where this approach can work for your organisation.

Transform People International’s research and experience with some of the world’s largest corporations across 60 countries has led them to see 5 pillars that are core to high performance. Of course it helps to select people with the right skill set and capabilities for the jobs and roles. And diversity in influencing style, gender, ethnicity and experience makes sense to consider but irrespective of all of that we find we keep coming back to these 5 pillars as being ultra-important.

The 5 pillars of building high performing teams are captured in the Collaborative Health Check™ tool that Transform People uses to get a reality check on team performance. Establishing reality and the status quo of how a team is working today is needed.

The 5 pillars are:
1. Commitment to a common goal

2. Unity of purpose as to how to address the goal

3. Motivation for the team beyond silos or specialisms

4. Strong healthy relationships

5. Great Communication
Collaboration mind-sets and behaviours are the key to moving to high performance and the 5 pillars provide a framework for getting any team on the same page and providing a basis for establishing a vision for any team that seeks renewal and higher performance.

It really helps if a team has a good unified sense of its identity – what it is all about, how it wants to be seen by the stakeholders inside and outside the business. The beliefs and values that are shared by a team need to be aligned around its very identity and sense of purpose. All “singing from the same hymn sheet” and being seen as “one team” is vital. Examining how the team performs against the pillars enables conversations that help teams discuss identity and the beliefs and values that underpin that. This provides a compass for their journey to higher performance.

Commitment to a common goal and the unity of purpose to agree what that is, and how to work to achieving that goal, is core.

If you see a team under-performing first of all ask them the simple question – are you a team?

An answer in the negative more often than not often indicates that while they may on paper be a team they recognise that different goals or interpretation of the common goal leads to a lack of unity of purpose. This is the first thing to fix. Of course the overall business goals are often understood and there may be commitment to these but what great teams have is a “teamness” goal – a goal for their team and how they want to be seen by the world. Signing up to a vision for the team is core to sorting out what needs fixing to achieve that goal individually, and as a team etc. So what is the goal, or short series of goals that act as the vision for increased teamness which in turn will lead to the business goals being achieved?

Motivation beyond the specialism or silo is key for great team performance. You can have highly motivated individuals or specialists within a bigger team but a heads down and a mind-set that says ”we’ll be OK as long as our piece of the business performs well” is a guarantee of disruptive non-collaborative behaviours that benefit nobody. Great teams eradicate silo thinking and behaviours while still delivering the performance that is required from any specialism. Time and attention is given up to other people functions and activities beyond any immediate group focus.

Strong healthy relationships matter. Mutual trust, mutual respect and mutual concern are all at the heart of teams that work well. It’s a no-brainer and teams that take time to have honest conversations of what works well and what doesn’t in these areas will face up to individual differences in style and how they engage with others. This can lead to remarkable changes if addressed effectively. Is there real trust in the team between individuals and sub-teams? Can people really rely on each other and other functions for the big and the little things that matter in a truly collaborative team? Can people sensibly and honestly face up to challenging colleagues about selfish or other behaviours that get in the way of high performance? Often they might not even know about the negative effect they have until they are sensitively raised in group discussion.

Great communication, the 5^th pillar is another must have condition. Not more communication for the sake of more. Not leadership or management by email but considered quality regular communication that is truly collaborative, being other-centric rather than self-centred and fit for purpose. Inevitably this takes you into the territory of differences of influencing styles. The leader and others can consider the impact of their personal approach and what processes there are in their daily communication and formal meetings etc. and how these can best be improved.

Finally, teams need effective leaders. The leader is the guardian of the 5 pillar thinking and what it means for how he or she leads and how this is a regular area for tracking behaviour and performance. Experience shows that a leader that openly engages the team in dialogue around these 5 areas can harness a powerful performance that more than compensates for any skill or capability weaknesses. And one who is able to select the best of the best is challenged even more to harness the power of the whole team to avoid the challenges provided by individual star performers who may fall into the trap of thinking they are more important individually than the team.

Team Development is top of mind for many of People Central’s clients, with an ever growing fan base of our personality based Team Development Programs.  Call us today on 0508 736 753 to find out how we can support you in developing your team to reach its potential

Acknowledgements:

• Personnelzone
• Ronnie Strong, Transform People International

PASAT is the most extensive sales-focused personality questionnaire available in this country, and having it available online makes it readily available nation-wide.

People Central are the sole distributors of PASAT in New Zealand.  We developed the NZ norm group ourselves and can answer any technical queries.

Click here for an overview of the questionnaire and sample reports, and here for a more in depth look at the sales traits measured by PASAT and some ‘freebie’ interview questions on how to explore them.

Then give us a call on 06 833 6465

Gill Daniels, Director at Human-Concepts, outlines the top five human capital metrics that organisations should follow to address the challenges of economic downturns and growth cycles.

Rapid organisational change has created enormous challenges for CEOs tasked with keeping the business afloat during tough economic times and then ramping it up quickly again when new opportunities arise. Most companies have been managed by change, caught up in a maelstrom of chaos every time they are faced with growth, rightsizing and reorganisation. Many companies have been unable to access the right information quickly enough to tackle these issues head on and those with the information at their fingertips, simply don’t know how to use it, applying a scattergun or blanket approach to every problem.

Recent research ‘Top Five Metrics for Workforce Analytics’, a white paper by Human Capital Management Institute and Human-Concepts, 2011 has revealed that organisations should adopt five key human capital metrics to keep ahead of the game: total cost of workforce, management span of control, high-performer turnover rate, career path ratio, and talent management index. These metrics provide visibility to understand and analyse the workforce and enable data driven decision-making. In an economic crisis, organisations who use these metrics would be much better prepared to handle changes, move rapidly with agility, make precise surgical cuts rather than taking an ineffective ‘cut across the board’ approach and so transition the workforce to its optimal state.

Furthermore, these metrics are designed to help organisations avoid cutting muscle along with the fat – or inadvertently cutting skills that might be critical to future success. With a defined human capital strategy, and advanced metrics to measure success, organisations are able to build a lean and highly productive workforce, and be prepared to quickly outperform competitors when opportunities arise.

1. Total cost of workforce
In most organisations, CEOs and top line management continually ask, “How do we know we have the right staff?” or “Do we have the right number of people to achieve our objectives?” Regardless of economic circumstances, such questions are critical in linking workforce (which covers both full-time and contract or temporary staff) to business strategy. Measuring the Total Cost of Workforce, the first metric, allows organisations to get a true picture of their workforce spend and enable them to effectively manage the size and shape of the workforce. The total cost of workforce is the sum of all workforce related costs, including compensation, benefits and other employee costs for a given period of time. The ability to act strategically to organisational change, based on scientific evidence, facilitates risk management and identifies opportunities for cost savings.

2. Management span of control
The second metric, Management Span of Control, is the best tool to address cost and structure of management staff and is calculated by dividing the total staff (including management) by the total management population. This gives an effective ratio which, tracked over time, can give organisations a definitive insight into workforce trends and mix, for example if the workforce is top heavy or if management is stretched too thin.

3. High-performer turnover rate
The third metric is High-Performer Turnover Rate. Unlike conventional wisdom which assumes that all turnover is detrimental to the business, Human-Concepts believe that if an organisation is conducting a reorganisation or restructuring, for instance, high turnover might actually be good for the business. The real key, in good times and bad, is how many high-performing employees are leaving the company. This can be calculated by dividing the total number of high-performing employees terminated in a given period by the average high-performer population at the organisation over the same period. Turnover alone only tells you how many employees you have lost whereas the high-performer turnover rate indicates the value of that loss. For example, the high performer that has just left might have done the equivalent of two or three equal-ranking jobs which increases costs over time. It also means the organisation should have done everything they could to keep the one high-performing person rather than hire another two or three average-performing staff to replace him or her.

4. Career path ratio
The fourth metric is Career Path Ratio which shows the rate of upward movement versus lateral movement in an organisation. Many leading companies have developed a spiral staircase with more lateral movement than upward movement but why is this important? Giving staff the ability to transfer between one department to another not only enhances employee morale by giving workers new jobs that stretch and challenge them, but it is a low cost way to enhance and build a multi-faceted, experienced workforce. It is calculated by dividing total promotions by total movement at the organisation.

5. Talent Management Index
The final metric is Talent Management Index, a combination of metrics that work together holistically across the entire employee lifecycle. It allows organisations to evaluate and analyse talent management practices for recruiting, mobility, performance management, training and development, turnover and retention. Use of the Talent Management Index metric shifts the paradigm from managers simply being evaluated on business results to being held accountable for human capital through objectives around talent retention, productivity, employee development and efficiency that ultimately have a tangible impact on business outcomes.

Conclusion
The potential of these top five metrics is significant, and the greatest value can be achieved when they are linked to financial metrics, such as revenue or profit for FTEs. Targeting critical workforce metrics that link workforce strategy to business results will finally give HR a seat at the table, giving them the credibility to add real value to the business. Organisations that encourage data driven decision-making will not only outperform their competitors but also return higher value to shareholders and better meet workforce and business demands in the future.

How Can People Central Assist?

Staff recruitment and development practices lie at the heart of metrics 3, 4 and 5.  Introducing assessment and development centres into the selection and succession process allow businesses to hire and promote on the basis of potential as well as past performance.  If making these changes into measuring metrics in the same language that your CEO and executive team use is important to your HR function, give us a call on 06 833 6465.

Acknowledgements:

• Human Capital Management Institute and HumanConcepts, 2011
• Personnelzone

Some 83% of the 1200 CEOs surveyed globally plan to change their firm’s talent management strategy over the next 12 months and for 31% these changes will be major. The next priorities are risk management and investment, with 77% and 76% of CEOs respectively anticipating changes in these areas. Last year risk management was the number one priority for 84% of CEOs, followed by investment (81%), and talent third (79%).

Globally the picture varies from region to region. In Asia-Pacific and the Middle-East, 92% and 89% of CEOs respectively plan to make changes to their people strategy, whereas in North America the figure drops to 78%.

Michael Rendell, Global Human Resource Services practice leader at PwC, says:

“As we move out of the downturn, CEOs are putting the focus firmly on their people. Competition for talent is intensifying as recruitment activity picks up in some sectors and there are increasing difficulties finding staff with the right skills. CEOs often speak of the importance of talent, but there’s not enough evidence of action being taken. The survey findings are encouraging, suggesting talent will be reflected more in company strategy. HR professionals need to help CEOs see what can and should be done.”

CEOs anticipate the main change to talent management will be using more non-financial rewards to motivate staff (65%), with CEOs in Latin America the most focused on this issue (80%).

Michael Rendell says:

“Staff are not motivated by pay alone. With labour markets more buoyant, firms need to make sure employees are engaged financially and emotionally. Non-financial rewards can include increased responsibility and developmental opportunities, anything which can help people see how they can reach their full potential. This in turn can help improve workforce skills, another priority for CEOs.”
The other significant changes to HR strategy planned by CEOs will be sending more employees on international assignments (59%) and increased work with government and education systems to improve skills (54%).

Michael Rendell, comments:

“This is good news as secondments can provide a way to develop employees’ skills and keep them motivated, particularly where there is an absence of opportunity at their current location.”
Indeed CEOs believe the main challenge to talent over the next few years will be a limited supply of candidates with the right skills (66%), with CEOs in the Middle East (85%) and Africa (90%) the most concerned. Another major challenge according to the survey will be recruiting and integrating younger employees (54%), although CEOs in Asia Pacific don’t see this as an issue (38%).

Adds Michael Rendell:

“Attracting and integrating younger employees, the so-called ‘millennials’, who have grown up with technology, may help bridge some of the skills gaps. Working with schools and universities to tap into this talent and harness it to business needs is also important.”

Women are another important source of potential talent and while some businesses have taken note, there is still a long way to go. Only 12% of CEOs surveyed say they see poor retention of female leaders as a key business challenge over the next three years and 56% of businesses have no plans to change their policies. And only 11% of CEOs globally are planning to make significant changes to their strategies for attracting and retaining more female employees

At a New Zealand level, if attracting and retaining talent is a priority for your organisation, do give us a call on 06 833 6465.

Acknowledgements:

• PwC Global Survey
• Personnelzone

Smart, Savvy and Successful Hawkes Bay – We can create the future

The HUMAN RESOURCE INSTITUTE OF NEW ZEALAND

In conjunction with

UNISON & THE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE

invite you to be part of a discussion symposium to address the economic prognosis for Hawke’s Bay and identify strategies as to ways to create a future.

This will be an interactive session where we will be looking to answer questions and explore real strategies for a way forward for Hawke’s Bay.  If you are interested in Hawke’s Bay’s future and a healthy social and economic community and environment, then your input will be valuable.  While change requires government and corporate direction, it more importantly requires initiative from the existing community, businesses and institutions.  We look forward to you joining us in what is expected to be a lively, interactive and rewarding evening for all.

When:                                     Tuesday 30^th August 2011

Time:                                      5.30 – 7.30pm

Where:                                   The Shakespeare Room, Opera House, Hastings

Investment:                           $25

RSVP:         Leanne Welsh on 8343071 or register at ww.hrinz.org.nz (click on Branches, Hawkes Bay)

A blend of economic conditions and the ease with which applicants can submit applications through online recruitment sites suggests that HR and recruiting line managers face the prospect of high volumes of applicants for many roles for the foreseeable future.

Creating a credible shortlist, without letting good potential slip through the net is a tedious process, so it seems timely to share the positive points of good practice experienced when screening over five thousand applicants for four hundred graduate jobs in seven capitals across the European Union in just three months:

Quickly Identify the Genuine Candidates from the Masses

When a first cut of the CV pile, typically based on essential selection criteria of minimal educational, training and professional memberships, still leave a high number of applicants in the ‘yes’ pile, then bringing a secondary CV screen based on the competencies essential to the role readily cuts through the rest.

In the graduate campaign outlined above, the first cut halved the applicant pool to two and a half thousand.  The competency based second cut left us with a thousand graduates to run through interviews and assessment centres, which may sound like a lot, but with four hundred roles to fill and an appropriately scaled team of assessors, this became manageable.

So, how could a similar approach improve the effectiveness of candidate screening for you?

Firstly, by making the completion of the competency section of the application mandatory, all of the time wasting applicants who simply attach a generic CV and cover letter to dozens of Seek or Trade-Me advertisement a day and hit ‘send’ are screened out immediately, leaving you the time to give applicants who want to work for your organisation rather than any organisation the attention they deserve.

Secondly, applicants have the opportunity to outline qualitative transferable skills essential to the role that could readily go unnoticed in just a CV and cover letter.  This also provides interviewers with either a base upon which to expand the collection of relevant information at interview, or to tease out the breadth of experience by exploring different examples of the same competency; once at application and again at interview.

Practicalities

To keep the process manageable and fair, successfully building this step into an application process would usually include:

• Identifying three to four core competencies from the ‘essentials’ on the position description
• Phrasing a question to cover those competencies, and limiting the candidate response to 150 to 200 words to ensure short-listers don’t jump out of the frying pan and into the fire in the time spent on this stage of employee screening
• Determining a numbered assessment of the value of each response; a -1 to 3 scale that ranges from negative evidence to exceeding the competency is a typical approach
• Deciding on a ‘cut-off score’ from the competencies that will rule candidates in or out of the process; then sticking to it!
• Ensuring the advertisement makes it explicit that completing the competency assessment is mandatory and incomplete applications will not progress through the selection process
• Providing a quick guide for applicants to follow on how best to describe competencies and pitfalls to avoid, such as generalisations rather than specific experiences
• Adding a simple form to the advertisement for candidates to complete, including the word limit to keep them concise

Taking this approach outside of the high volume graduate recruitment setting and into the wider recruitment marketplace has brought significant benefits where the vacant role has a title that tends to invite applications from a very broad base of applicants.  Office and Administration Managers, for example, attract applications from people with very different depths of experience, and this step quickly sifts out those who won’t cut it, allowing recruiters to concentrate on the most suitable candidates.   It’s like having the 80/20 rule the right way around.

If you are looking to spend more time on quality candidates rather than quantity, give us a call on 06 833 6465

This development came about through a chance meeting in February with a web developer I met at a networking event who was displaced by the Christchurch earthquake, and it occurred to me that other businesses that want their business on google’s page-1 could dramatically increase their visibility online and support Christchurch at the same time.

By running a performance based model whereby subscribers only pay a monthly fee when their website is on the first page of google, Nic Dale seems to have hit on a website design and management model that rewards  website performance and brings assurances to clients that their site is going to be front of mind with the developer every month after it’s launch.

If you are looking for a similarly high performing website, and the thought of supporting Christchurch through inward investment into the city’s businesses appeals to you, I’d heartily recommend you give Nic a call on 03 351 2959

The same dilemma faces HR and line managers wanting to assess staff working off-site.  How do you go about getting a thorough and accurate picture of their abilities, team-fit and potential without the time, expense and inconvenience of travel?

There are three options available through People Central Ltd that will enable you to readily address the issue:

1. Can these people be assessed or tested online?

As most of you know by now, most reputable personality questionnaires can be completed online.  All we need from you is the participant’s name, contact phone number and email address and we do the rest within 24 hours.

Online assessments are not restricted to just personality questionnaires, with most software and IT skills tests also available online, although the employer needs to be sure the person completing the test is the same one they are trying to recruit!

2. Using Skype for Supervised Sessions

Some supervised testing sessions can now be supervised by us via Skype, including our flagship tests of Numerical, Verbal and Abstract Reasoning, Clerical and Industrial Proficiency Tests.

This has brought about huge positive change for our regular clients who can make thorough assessments of candidates before deciding on whether to invest time, money and effort into travel and accommodation when short-listing  or making promotion decisions for existing staff who work off-site.

3. Use our National & International Network of Qualified Professionals

Online testing and assessment isn’t appropriate in every situation.  Where participants are required to complete Ability Tests or Assessment Centre Exercises such as Role Play’s, then the use of appropriately qualified and seasoned assessors is often mandatory.

Fortunately for you, we have put considerable time and effort into building up a network of such people across most of New Zealand’s main centres, recently adding Invercargill and Queenstown to the list.  We also have assessment partners in the major Australian cities, the UK and EU.

In other words, we can get your candidates and off-site staff assessed almost wherever they are, so you can confidently apply the same diligence to the recruitment and selection decision making process no matter where individuals are located.  Give us a call today on 06 833 6465 to see where we can support your recruitment, selection and promotion processes.