PRODUCT FOCUS
Paving the Way for a Happy Marriage

In many ways, a work-to-worker relationship resembles a marriage. The organization is attracted to the worker and/or vice versa. The two connect, commit with an engagement, and decide to unite. With good planning, hard work and a bit of luck, the relationship will be a healthy one that grows and flourishes.

Just like a marriage, the work relationship will experience bumps along the way and the “couple” may need professional help. Profiles International’s family of products can help this union stick together instead of growing apart, starting at the very beginning. So, from the getting-to-know-you stage, or courtship, here goes:

STEP ONE SURVEY II™ The employee wants to be wooed, and the organization wants to make sure its potential mate is truly what he or she says and appears to be. Profiles’ Step One Survey II™ focuses on the trust issues essential to a healthy work relationship: integrity, substance abuse, reliability and work ethic. SOS II™ is scientifically designed to evaluate applicants and avoid unpleasant surprises later in the relationship.  The process is structured to do three things: objectively obtain better information, identify the best candidates, and conduct better interviews. SOS II’s™ easy-to-understand report tells the employer-partner everything he or she needs to know, and promotes positive behaviors on the job, including good attitudes about work in general, as well as promptness, confidentiality, dependability and loyalty. This sets the tone for the employee.

Everyone wants to feel understood, and this is just as important on the job as it is in a household. The Profiles Performance Indicator™ measures the behavior factors that help a leader understand, motivate and manage his employees, helping to reduce conflicts that could become obstacles to solving problems.

In a detailed report, the manager learns how best to motivate the employee, and whether he is internally or externally motivated; his behavioral tendencies in key competencies; and how he responds to stress, frustration and conflict. A second report for the worker provides ideas about professional growth and communication skills.

PROFILEXT™ The versatility of ProfileXT™ means that we can use it at almost every stage of the employee lifecycle. Let’s say we are trying to fill an important job from within the company and wonder how several key employees would fit there. Job Match Patterns provided by ProfileXT™ are effective because they compare the qualities of our job candidates to the attributes of the most productive employees already in the job. The patterns tell us whether candidates are similar or different from our top performers. Job Match more accurately predicts job success than any of the commonly accepted factors, such as education, experience, or job training, according to a study by the Harvard Business Review. And when people fit their work, the result is like a good marriage: they are more satisfied and productive, with less stress, tension, conflict, miscommunication, and costly divorce, or employee turnover.

Organizations are using ProfileXT™ for placement, promotion, self-improvement, coaching, succession planning, and job description development, and clients say it is three to five times more effective than any other assessment they have tried.

Healthy feedback is crucial to any relationship, and Profiles’ Checkpoint 360™ Competency Feedback System gives a manager the opportunity to receive an evaluation of his or her job performance from all around -- bosses, peers, and direct reports.  Checkpoint 360™ can fortify an employee’s perceptions about his strengths if they are accurate, and offer insight into other areas where he may need to improve. It examines a manager in the crucial areas of communication, leadership, adaptability, task management and development of others. The feedback allows for comparison of the opinions of others with a manager’s own perceptions for an easy and accurate look at strength and weaknesses.With less than one-third of employees truly engaged in their work, there’s ample room for improvement in the job climate. Profiles’ assessments are a proven method of helping an organization unite with the right employee in the first place, and keep the marriage on track throughout its lifetime.  Need counseling? Call us at (254) 751-1644.

STRATEGIES FOR WINNING
How to Become an Employer of Choice*— Attracting and Retaining the Very Best People

While many employers complain about the difficulty of attracting and retaining quality people, other employers seem never to have this problem. What’s their secret?

It’s not really a secret. Employers of Choice simply know what’s important to their employees.

Before you can consider the challenge of attracting and retaining people, you must look at the dark side. What drives people from their jobs? Profiles International recently completed a survey to explore this. Here are the five main reasons people change jobs:

Were you surprised with the rankings? Most employers are. The message is simple – if you want to attract and retain top people, these are the key items for consideration.

Follow these six steps and you are likely to become an Employer of Choice:

1. Evaluate Your Managers
People leave people, not jobs. Look at the results – 30 percent of people didn’t leave their jobs; they left their managers. Poor managers can cancel out all of the other good things you do to attract and retain the right people. Your human resources people sweat blood to bring in a sufficient number of the right people and, in 30 percent of cases, poor managers shred them and send them away before you’ve even recovered the cost of hiring them. 

So what do you do? First, start measuring your staff turnover by manager. It will frighten but enlighten you. Until you know which managers are losing their people, you can’t do anything about it.

After you identify the managers who need help, help them! Review all of your managers in terms of their leadership and management skills. That’s how you will discover what these managers are doing to drive away good people. Profiles International’s Checkpoint 360°™ gives managers, their superiors, their direct reports and their fellow managers an opportunity to provide feedback about what they are doing well and what they could do better. Provide training, coaching and support to struggling managers in a way that encourages productivity and retention. Good management is key to good retention. 2. Create a Recognition Culture Insufficient recognition for their contributions is why 25 percent of all people leave their jobs. Fix this or learn to live with the attrition. Give managers the responsibility for seeking out the ways in which their people perform above and beyond. Have them consciously seek out opportunities for positive recognition. Create awards for exemplary performance and give everyone an opportunity to bask in the glow of positive recognition for a job well done. But be aware that a recognition culture cannot be created from nothing. It requires a healthy working environment to thrive.

3. Create a Healthy Work Environment
To encourage development of a genuine recognition culture, you’ll need to create a healthy work environment, one where providing recognition for exemplary performance seems normal. There are several key elements to achieving this.

First: Open Communications. In the old economy, scarcity was the driving force – information was power, and those with information hoarded it. That way, they amassed power, privilege and wealth. The world has changed dramatically. Our modern economy is based on abundance. Those who prosper share information. Any environment where the workforce has not tapped into all that’s going on in their organization is toxic. Suspicion, mistrust and resentment grow – and key people go.

Let all of your people know where the organization is going, how it plans to get there, how their jobs play a part, and why they are key to your success. Give your people an I’m on the inside! feeling. It’s hard to leave something when you’re an insider.

Next, Develop an Attitude of Cooperation. Be prepared to consider anything that makes it easier and more practical to work for you than for anyone else. Look at flexible hours, compassionate leave, sabbaticals, teleworking, child care facilities – anything you can afford to do to meet your people halfway (or more) in balancing their work/personal life commitments.

Finally, Develop an Atmosphere of Trust. If you want people to trust you, then you have to trust them. Create an atmosphere where management automatically expects the best . Give people a good reputation to live up to. No one is more flattered than when they are trusted implicitly.

4. Create an Atmosphere of Continual Self-Improvement
Of the people who leave their jobs, 20 percent do so because they feel that they’re not getting sufficient advancement. Not surprising, really. Flat-structured organizations don’t have the dizzying promotional heights that previous generations of workers could aspire to. So, there’s really nothing we can do unless we still have an old-fashioned multi-layer hierarchical organization, right?

No! That thinking is about as wrong as you can get.  Today’s job-seekers want the opportunity to develop themselves to be all that they can be, so that their potential market value continually rises. And if they can do this without the uncertainty of job-hopping, then so much the better. You don’t necessarily have to have multiple promotional opportunities to meet this demand. What you need is a clear, ongoing development path, a way that each and every one of your people can advance their skills and value so that they become all that they can be. This means heavy investment in training and development.

Create an atmosphere of continual self-development. Give everyone access to any training that will enhance their skills, their value, and their self-esteem. Don’t be boxed in to limiting the training available to those skills specific to an individual’s current job. Remember that you are not simply training for job-effectiveness but are also offering your people the development opportunities that make them feel good enough about the pace of their personal advancement that they don’t feel the need to seek greener grass elsewhere. Engage them in their own ongoing, longer-term development. Show them how they can get all of this development from within your organization. This creates truly compelling and self-serving reasons to stay.

5. Put Your Best Foot Forward
What about the 15 percent who leave for more money? Will more recognition, better management, and opportunities for continual self-development retain them? In many cases, yes. But you still have to pay the market rate or better to stay in the game. However, it’s critical that you know when and how you pay this level.

When it comes to remuneration, put your best foot forward immediately. Pay your people as much salary, give them as many benefits, as you can afford. Do it from day one. Abandon the “What can I get her for?” thinking in favor of “How much is this position worth to me, and what can I afford to pay?” Then pay it. Let your people know that this is what you’re doing, and that you need their support and effort to help you to maintain a situation where you can continue to do this in the long term – that you need them to engage with you in making the organization successful. Put your best foot forward, and let everyone know that you are paying as much as you can and that, to continue to do so, everyone will have to pull together as a team to generate the productivity necessary for the organization’s success. We all respond to fair treatment.

Now, don’t misunderstand the advice. Pay as much as you can, not more than you can. Our advice: Know what each job is worth, and pay it early.

6. Match People to Jobs
Having followed 360,000 people through their careers during a period of 20 years, a major study published by Harvard Business Review demonstrated that a key ingredient in retaining people is ensuring that they are matched to their jobs in terms of their abilities, interests, and personalities. The study found that when you put people in jobs where the demands of the job matched their own abilities, where the stimulation offered by the job matched their particular interests, and where the cultural demands of the position matched their personalities, staff turnover decreased dramatically, and productivity increased dramatically.

Use psychometric tools to determine the requirements of each of your positions in terms of abilities, interests and personality, and then use this information to match your jobs to people who will excel in them. Gut feeling cannot do this assessment for you. It needs to be undertaken using properly validated tools designed for this purpose. (The ProfileXT™ is a business tool designed to make job matching easy.)

Sadly, there is no quick, easy and expensive “silver bullet” to help you win the war for quality people. But apply these six sensible steps and you can eliminate more than 95 percent of the reasons people defect, putting yourself well on track to be one of that envied class, the Employer of Choice.

*From the book 40 STRATEGIES FOR WINNING IN BUSINESS by Bud Haney and Jim Sirbasku. © S&H Publishing Co., 5205 Lake Shore Drive, Waco, Texas 76710-1732. All rights reserved. Contact S&H Publishing Co., (254) 751-1644, for reprint permission.

SUCCESS STORY
Engaging Workers at Alternative Risk Services

EDITOR’S NOTE: Mary Ellen Price, office manager and director of human resources for Alternative Risk Services, a risk management and third-party administrator for worker’s compensation claims, uses Workforce Analysis Profile™ as well as other assessments to help ensure employee engagement.

Q. Why did Alternative Risk Services begin using Profiles assessments?
A. Lanny Cowell, president and CEO, is working on a succession plan to ensure that he has the right people in the right place as he retires. He wants to feel comfortable knowing the people he has in place can run the company by making smart decisions. He had the management team take the ProfileXT™, which shed light on our strengths and areas that we needed to improve.

Q. Which Profiles assessments has your organization used?
A. We have used the ProfileXT™, Customer Service Profile™, Step One Survey II™ and Workforce Analysis Profile™.

Q. What benefits have you derived from the Workforce Analysis Profile™?
A. Since this is a confidential survey, it gave the associates a chance to tell us their feelings about the company. It helps us see the areas that we need to focus on to make the work atmosphere more  enjoyable, and ask ourselves what we can do as managers to make the office a more pleasant place to come each day. The Workforce Analysis Profile™ showed us that we had a small number of associates who were not engaged. Now we can focus on this area to find out why they feel this way, and help turn them around and be more focused on their work so they enjoy what they are doing on a daily basis.

Q. What specific things have you done for employees?
A. We have put in place a monthly raffle for the associates. So far we have raffled off Royals baseball tickets, an MP3 player, a cooler and lunch set and movie videos. This year we had the annual company picnic at Lanny’s ranch. It featured pony rides and a large water slide. We are gearing up for our annual Christmas holiday luncheon at a local country club, giving associates a chance to mingle with each other in a non-work setting.

Q. What is the major benefit your company gets from the assessments?

A. Profiles assessments have helped us hire new associates for our administrative unit. The assessments give us more clarity on whether candidates will fit that specific job. The assessments are also helping us grow the company. For the most part, employee retention is not a problem. But as we look to hire more people, assessments will be a big part of our hiring decisions. We want to hire the right person for the job and we feel that by using Profiles, we can get this accomplished.