Not what you needed a few years ago. Not what the last job ad you posted says. Going forward, what are the must-haves, not the nice-to-haves.

If the honest answer is not really, you are not alone.

Australian research tells us that 16% of employees are currently not proficient in their roles. Not underperforming in a general sense. Specifically, not meeting the competency standards their role requires. In a team of 20, that is three people operating below where they need to be. In an NFP or SME, that gap is felt immediately.

And here is the part that should make every leader sit up.

Gartner research tells us that only 8% of organisations have reliable skills data. That means 92% are making decisions about their people based on information they cannot fully trust.

As a result, they promote people based on performance in a role without understanding what the new role needs. They hire based on experience without mapping whether that experience translates precisely to the competencies needed. They adopt a one-size-fits-all training approach and invest without knowing which skills need developing and in whom.

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 is spot on. Skills gaps are now the single biggest barrier to business transformation, cited by 63% of employers globally. And 39% of existing skill sets will be transformed or become outdated between 2025 and 2030. But knowing that at a macro level is very different from understanding what it means for your team in your business in your industry.

A competency gap analysis closes that distance.

It starts with defining clearly what top performance looks like in each role. Not a generic framework borrowed from a template. A precise, context-specific picture of the behaviours, motivators, and capabilities that currently drive success in your organisation.

Then it measures where your people are against that picture. Objectively. Without the bias that comes from familiarity or how well someone presents in a performance conversation.

The gap between those two things is your roadmap. It tells you who needs what kind of development. It tells you whether you have the right people in the right roles. It tells you where your succession risks are. And it tells you what to prioritise in your next hiring round.

For SMEs and NFPs this is not a luxury exercise. It is one of the most practical and commercially useful things you can do with your people data.

Because you cannot close a gap you have not measured. And you cannot measure a gap you have never looked for.Is your organisation flying blind on this? You might be surprised by what a closer look reveals.

The post Mind the Gap: What Gets Measured Gets Managed appeared first on Directions Unlimited.

AI tools can do the work faster, cheaper, and without a learning curve. And they do not take annual leave.

Why hire a graduate to process data, draft reports, or handle routine analysis when a well-prompted model could do it in minutes?

The numbers tell an interesting story.

Australian graduate job postings fell almost 15% in 2025 and were down 35% from their peak in 2023. At the height of the pullback, just 9% of Australian SMEs were actively hiring graduates, down from 19% only two months earlier. Globally, entry-level hiring fell an estimated 29% since January 2024. And in big tech, the proportion of Gen Z employees at large public firms was cut in half between 2023 and 2025.

It is not all doom and gloom, though. Graduate demand has stabilised in early 2026, with Australian postings rising 6.4% in the March quarter. The sky is not falling.

But stabilisation does not fix the three years of reduced intake that preceded it.

Because the senior person you need in 2028 is the graduate you should have hired in 2025. The team leader you will need in 2030 is the person who is not getting their entry-level role today. Short-term budget pressure is producing long-term consequences that will not become visible for years. And by the time they do, it will be too late to do much about them.

When you close the front door, you do not just lose the graduate.

You eventually lose the pipeline.

The World Economic Forum is direct on this point. Without deliberate entry points into the workforce, organisations risk slower AI adoption, weakened succession plans, stalled knowledge transfer, and cultures that struggle to renew themselves.

In plain language, the leaders you will need in 2030 and 2035 are the graduates you are not hiring today.

For SMEs and NFPs, this matters enormously. You don’t have the luxury of a global talent pool or an executive search budget when a leadership gap opens up. Your bench strength depends almost entirely on the people you have developed from within.

So what do you do about it?

Start by understanding who in your current team has the potential to step up. Not just who is performing well today, but who has the natural qualities, the curiosity, the resilience, the capacity to influence and lead, that will matter most in the years ahead.

That conversation will not only drive retention. It will build the bench strength your business depends on.

The data to guide those decisions exists. The question is whether you are using it before the gap appears or scrambling to find it after.Now more than ever, the decisions you make today in this era of uncertainty will shape your business future. And your legacy.

The post You Stopped Hiring Graduates. Did Anyone Tell Your Succession Plan? appeared first on Directions Unlimited.

The one who nails the interview is not always the one who nails the job.

I learned this early in my own leadership career, with a hire I was convinced was going to be a superstar.

One candidate stood out head and shoulders above the rest. Relaxed. Confident. Sharp as a tack in the room. His CV was “sound as a bell,” with a strong sales history and no job hopping. He had never worked in our industry, but with a track record like his, we weren’t worried.

We gave him every chance to succeed.

Four months later, after a couple of shocking quarters and activity levels that told their own story, it was obvious. He was a bit of a chancer. Brilliant in the room. Could not execute in the field. We had to part ways.

That one stung, because I liked him. And that’s exactly the problem.

When we’re drawn to one trait in a candidate, charm, confidence, a good story, we tend to assume competence everywhere else. Psychologists call it the Halo Effect.

We also gravitate toward people who remind us of ourselves, which feels comfortable right up until it becomes a liability.

Every wrong call comes with a price tag too. A failed sales hire in Australia costs between $115K and $300K, once you count salary, lost pipeline, training, and management time. Most businesses don’t spot it until month four or five. By then, the damage is done.

A CV tells you what someone has done. It doesn’t tell you how they think under pressure, whether they’ll front up again on Wednesday after a brutal Tuesday, or whether they’re a hunter or a farmer. Mine was a fantastic farmer we’d hired to hunt.

This is more of a measurement problem than a talent problem.

The businesses that get this right measure core selling competencies before the interview, not after. Tenacity, resilience, mindset, the actual skills, not just the pitch, the hardwiring underneath it.

So next time you catch yourself thinking, “I really like this applicant,” pause. That feeling is data. But it is not enough data.

I still think about that chancer sometimes. Sharp as they come. Just not built for the job we needed done.

The next great sales hire won’t be found by instinct alone. Measure what matters, hire with confidence, and build a sales team that performs long after the interview ends.

The post The Difference Between Your Best and Worst Sales Hire Was Decided Before the Interview Began. appeared first on Directions Unlimited.

Employee retention is no doubt a key challenge. A recent study by Gartner states that the rate of employee turnover is likely to be up to 75% higher. And in addition, it takes 18% longer to fill any available jobs than pre-pandemic. Not to mention the annoying “quiet quitting” phenomenon, which is white-anting businesses too!

Robert Half’s 2022 Salary Guide states that 78 per cent of employees are prepared to walk out the door if their pay rise request is not accepted. No wonder 31% of employers say their biggest challenge this year will be retaining top performers.

And the reasons why staff retention is affected?

The main reasons employees are leaving and affecting employee retention are:

Inadequate salary, deficient perks and benefits, overworked, lack of support, career progression, better work-life balance, absence of recognition, and unhappiness with management.

What can you do?

Whether we are trying to shift a few covid kilos or improve our qualifications doesn’t matter. There is never a single magic bullet. It’s usually a series of conscious actions and the discipline to implement them that results in the outcome we seek.

If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.

– Lao Tzu

Let’s start from the very beginning

Getting back to the basics by reviewing your people processes is a perfect place to begin to improve staff retention in your organisation. Here are a few thought starters.

#1 Realistic Position previews

The talent competition is fierce, and at an all-time high, so your recruitment process needs to be engaging, timely and professional. How you or your team handle the recruitment process can strongly influence the desire for a new player to choose to join your company or not.

Research shows that providing applicants with a realistic job preview during the recruitment process positively affects the retention of those new hires. Selling the job or the business as Utopia is not a good idea.

#2 Professional interviews to increase employee retention

When it comes to interview questions, “where do you see yourself in 5 years?” or “sell me that pen” are way past their use-by date. The objective of the initial interview is to confirm that skills and abilities align.

The goal of the second or final interview is to confirm fit. Is the applicant a good fit for the job? Equally important is for the candidate to verify if the job is a good fit for them.

It’s a lot less costly to retain people than hire new staff, and with retention as key focus, you need objective information to de-risk the selection process. Tools like our customisable psychometric GR8PI assessments will give you these critical candidate insights— insights that are impossible to glean at an interview.

#3 Socialise and onboard for retention

Early failure is often high among new employees, and hybrid work has added further complexity.

Onboarding aims to help your new team member understand how to be successful in their new job. First impressions count: you have one chance to make a great first impression when an employee starts with your company.

So, it’s best to ensure you have strategic onboarding and assimilation processes that can quickly help new people become embedded in your business and the role. And therefore, more likely to stay. Possible approaches here include:

shared and individualised learning experiences, formal and informal activities that help people get to know one another and assigning experienced employees as role models or mentors for new staff.

#4 Managers are key to minimise staff turnover

Those first few weeks and months in a new employee’s job are critical, especially in the new hybrid world. A first-rate manager-employee relationship is vital in delivering the employee experience and connection to the business for retention.

Compounding the challenge, many managers have never received any formal people management training. Frequently, a person has made it to manager due to tenure, success in their previous role, or the desire to retain a person.

While these may be valid, today, managers need access to new tools to lead and manage their employees. Such tools help them foster career aspirations, well-being, and connection to the organisational culture.

#5 Training and development to improve employee retention

CFO to CEO: “What will we do if we train them and they leave?”

CEO to CFO “What if we don’t and they stay?”

This conversation rings true today more than ever.

But not just any old training works. Sending your people to a one size fits all training course is just wasting money. Everyone learns differently, and unless you fully understand what training is appropriate for each employee, you will not achieve the outcomes.

A gap analysis can clearly highlight the specific deficiencies. Our customisable GR8PI suite of dimensions helps you identify gaps. By enabling you to benchmark and compare your staff at a glance, you can customise the thorough training needed across the various groups.

Elon Musk says, “Some people don’t like change, but you need to embrace change if the alternative is disaster.”

If you’d like some help in this area, please reach out or book a call to learn more.

The post Five ways of reducing the risk of dropping employee retention appeared first on Directions Unlimited.

• the rise of individualism and independence bringing out new confidence to show up as themselves at work. (Fjord Trends 2022)
• hybrid employment arrangements placing more emphasis on staff being able to work remotely and maintain productivity and service delivery
• continued challenges to organisations due to Omicron leading to staff shortages resulting in increased costs of hiring more or temporary staff
• Increased pressures on both existing and new staff in the present climate

Moving forward, employers need to relook at balancing the flexibility they offer to individuals with the needs of the team and the greater good of the organisation. (Fjord Trends 2022)

Obtaining the right information for remote hires

How can you increase your success rate and hire the right people the first time for roles in the current labour market? And what about remote work? How can you more easily identify those who will thrive and be productive in a work from home environment?

The traditional recruitment process leaves a lot up to chance. You’ll sift through a stack of resumes and cover letters trying to narrow down the people with the right experience and qualifications and get a sense of other relevant aspects. 

You’ll then perform a round of interviews to gauge which candidate sounds and acts right for the role.

You might ask yourself: 

• “does this person have the right skills to perform the job?.. 

• the right credentials?.. 

• enough experience?.. 

• will they fit in with the workplace culture?.. 

• can they bring anything to the table to benefit the business?” 

While some of these questions can easily be answered with a CV and interview, others are trickier. 

And let’s face it most employees, when asked if they would like to work from home, will answer ‘yes’. This is simply 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.

Some key questions are difficult to answer through the traditional hiring process such as 

• “Will this person be engaged in their work and great in this role?” 

• “Is this person likely to be capable and productive in this remote work role?”

• In the long term will this person be able to handle hybrid working?

Engagement is critical for remote work

Great managers and business owners know that higher employee engagement levels in the workplace translate to higher productivity and better company performance. So especially in this current environment, how can hiring managers improve the likelihood of selecting highly engaged remote work top performers?

It all starts with thinking about how potential employees will “fit”, rather than experience and qualifications. Or even age and gender. Studies have shown that ‘fit’ is what counts if you want a high performer.

‘Fit’ refers to how well a person is suited to their job role, the environment, and the workplace culture. Whether or not a person ‘fits’ in a particular position depends on a few factors, for example:

• their attitude,

• personality, and

• enthusiasm for the work at hand. 

To find out which candidate is the right fit for the job and culture, hiring managers must check their biases at the door and use objective information to make their decision. Making this type of decision can be trickier than it sounds, but it is possible.

How does it work?

Hire someone who is objectively the right fit

Choosing the right person for a role can influence how long they stay in the job and how engaged they are with their role working remotely or onsite. 

According to Gallup, employee engagement is defined as “the involvement and enthusiasm of employees in their work and workplace”.

 According to studies they conducted, businesses are 21% more profitable with engaged employees; I am sure most CEO’s would take this profit increase as a Christmas present!

Use your top performers as a benchmark for new talent

When a top performer walks out the door, it often feels like you’re back at square one; scrambling to build your team from the ground up again. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Companies, teams and hiring managers can make the process of replacing top performers easier while improving their hiring process each time.

Not all candidates are suited to remote work

Buffer.com published 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:

• collaboration and communication
• loneliness, and
• not being able to unplug.

This survey suggests that many individuals will either need help to overcome these problems or even that remote work is not a long-term viable option for some people.

To learn more about the Great People Inside assessments specifically designed for work from home employees and teams contact us 

The post Remote Work – What are seen effects of further shifts in this competitive market? appeared first on Directions Unlimited.

All elements of your employee life cycle must be linked:

• from attraction through to talent management,
• leadership development, and
• ongoing performance management.

There is a great reward too in doing this. Studies tell us that organisations that prioritise their employee experience are four times more profitable than those that do not.

People Strategy v HR Strategy – what’s the difference?

HR Strategy tends to focus more on the planning side of people such as structures for hiring, onboarding, developing, and retaining.

People Strategy is more about helping employees grow by creating an environment that nurtures and enables high performance. People Strategy usually focuses on:

• values,
• fostering diversity,
• inclusion and employee wellbeing, and
• predicting and reacting to workforce needs.

In essence, creating a culture where employees share equal billing with shareholders and business goals.

According to the world-renowned Boston Consulting Group, the three pillars for developing a people strategy are leadership and culture, talent and skills, and HR.

“In these challenging times, organisations must elevate the most important asset they have: their people. By focusing on the fundamentals of people strategy—leadership, culture, talent, reskilling, and HR—companies can emerge stronger, more agile, more innovative, and better able to respond to an ever-changing environment.”

I’d like to explore two of these pillars.

1        Leadership Culture and Strategy

There are many levers at a leader’s disposal to drive their organisations success and effectiveness.  Strategy and Culture are the most important.

Strategy provides clarity of the company’s goals and helps to align people around them. Culture tends to express goals through organisational values and beliefs. Culture also guides tactics, activity, and implementation.

One thing is sure and that is culture and leadership are linked. Poor leadership and resultant toxic culture usually determine the fate of a business. Studies tell us up to 30% of employees say they left because of poor leadership. These findings highlight the need for every organisation to address this factor.

Culture in more detail

Culture is a more puzzling lever to activate. The reason for this is mainly because Culture can be ambiguous and embedded in unspoken behaviours, people’s mindsets, and social expectations.

Many leaders don’t always appreciate the power of culture.

A recent Gartner Survey revealed that 75% of leadership believe that they run a culture of flexibility. Unfortunately, only 57% of employees agreed.

This lack of appreciation can cause many leaders to either let culture go unmanaged or delegate it to HR, where it can slip to a secondary focus for the business.

Successful leaders embrace the ambiguity of culture. In my experience many leaders I have met avail of the valuable culture diagnostic tools to understand where their organisation’s culture is right now. These tools help them to answer questions such as:

• Is it more of a creative culture or a reactive culture?
• How do the culture snapshot of the board and senior leadership vary from the operational managers’ perspectives?
• How “real” is the conversation in the business?

Gaining clarity around culture can be as confronting as it is it enlightening – but well worth the investment of time and focus. We partner with many specialists in this area, so reach out if you’d like to explore further.

2        Talent and skills

Sixty-four per cent of the world’s most admired companies say they have a good understanding of workforce needs two or more years into the future compared to 54% of their peers.

That same recent Gartner Survey I referred to earlier also revealed the same 75% of leadership also felt that they did a good job incorporating employee voice in decision making. Unfortunately, in this case only 47% of employees agreed.

The forced extreme disruption, which was the last two years, has meant that most businesses naturally thought more about survival than future talent and skills needs. Now is the time to think about your future talent and skills requirements. Some steps to take include:

• Ensure Employee Pulse Surveys acknowledge and act on the feedback provided
• Use customised psychometric assessments to identify traits and skills gaps
• Incorporate customised 360° surveys as part of your development programs
• Facilitate regular check-ins between individuals’ teams and Mangers

Lastly, lockdown work from home is different from long-term working remotely. Most organisation psychologists accept that loneliness, communication, and isolation can trigger depression.

So, if there is a disconnect in your business between HR policies, or the leadership strategies propelling them, and employee sentiment on the ground, greater emphasis must be placed on the needs this new work approach demands.

For example, consider what capabilities and skills (soft and hard) are essential to be future-ready? Do all employees possess the discipline, conscientiousness, and results orientation to deliver in a hybrid environment? What might this mean for remote work and the flexibility we can offer?

Through our business offering, we have many people analytics resources and tools to assist with both these pillars. Reach out if you’d like to discuss how we can help with the future of your people.

The post People Strategy for now and the future – how to close gaps appeared first on Directions Unlimited.

Many managers out there have likely experienced the unsavoury situation of managing someone who believes their performance is terrific when it’s just mediocre at best. Recent studies in performance management have identified that the “underperformer” is a frequent and draining problem.

But what contributes to the perception an individual has about their performance? 

There are several reasons forming the perception of an individual employee at work. It may be that the: 

• crystal-clear feedback they need to develop and improve is lacking, 
• manager is choosing not to address the issues for fear of some type of conflict, or 
• employee is doing ”a good enough job” and flying below the radar. 

In some cases, the individual may be unable to recognise that they’re struggling. 

But whatever the reason, if managers fail to address the situation, there is one thing for sure and that is that it will fester. Not only will the substandard employee’s work not improve, but also the organisation will experience: 

• hidden costs, 
• poor productivity, and 
• the value of a team member who would likely thrive if given the appropriate support and feedback. 

These five approaches will help you correct the problem behaviours. Or at least gain clarity as to whether it’s even possible.

Clear definition of work

It doesn’t matter whether we are delegating or providing feedback, we need to be clear and unambiguous about what needs to be done. There are lots of great feedback models out there. 

My go-to has been the STAR/AR feedback model. The STAR/AR model provides a great framework and helps the receiver understand exactly why what they did worked. And if they made a mistake, working through the model, they’ll learn what steps to take to improve. 

Provide support for people development

Most managers would agree that employees need ongoing support. Significantly, how we approach providing that support is important. Moreover, the build-up of frustration in these situations can lead to exasperation which can undermine our approach. 

 The late Sir John Whitmore, a pioneer of the executive coaching industry and creator of the GROW model wrote “whether we coach, advise, counsel, facilitate, or mentor, the effectiveness of what we do depends in large measure on our beliefs about human potential”.

The expressions “to get the best out of someone” and “your hidden potential” imply that more lies within the person waiting to be released”. 

Coaching your people supports performers across all levels, not just underperformers, to achieve their full potential. The result will be higher levels of employee engagement and profitability. 

Check your Relationship of Competence

There is no one size fits all or “sheep dip” approach to developing your people that works. Everyone learns differently, has unique development needs and motivations. It’s important to point out performing an objective data-driven gap analysis first to ensure the people you are looking to develop have the ability, motivation, and desire to grow. 

Caution: a little self-promotion here. As a coach myself, I find that the unique flexibility of our Great People Inside platform is outstanding. Both an assessment with dimensions (EG Strategy, Leadership, Creativity etc.) that measures precisely what you want to understand, and a customised performance model or benchmark against which you can compare results is created. The outcome is a one-pager graph that allows you to identify any gaps. This provides clarity before you invest in people development on the areas that need focus for each individual. And also highlights those who may not have what it takes to succeed.

Determine “Coachability” for people development

Not everyone is coachable. In contrast to imposter syndrome, many ultra-confident employees fall victim to the Dunning-Krueger effect, a cognitive bias in which “people wrongly overestimate their knowledge or ability in a specific area”. Many employers will have encountered an employee that resented the suggestion that their skills needed to improve and ignored the coaching support that was offered to them. 

If left unchecked, this usually results in the employee blaming others, setting up their colleagues to fail, undercutting them, and misrepresenting their contributions and concerns. The outcome is a total train wreck. 

Praise with care

When an employee with an inflated sense of their own performance delivers a piece of high-quality work or conducts an interaction well, it’s important to praise them. But letting the praise stand-alone can reinforce for them that they’re genius! That everything they do is outstanding. 

Connect your positive comments to other things you want them to address. For example, you could say, “Now that you’ve done so well with the presentation to Client X, for the next one, I’d like you to also {insert the next thing they need to improve}. 

Articulating both the required new behaviour and why it’s needed as part of satisfactory job performance will ensure you improve your chances of getting the critical behaviours you need.

You may be finding it a little tougher in the current climate to find the right people for the jobs combined with the best fit for your organisation over the longer term. Our technology and solutions will do the work for you to inform your people development approach and recruitment decisions.

If you’d like an easier method of handling people development and recruitment, contact us

The post People Development – how to handle an employee who thinks they are better than they are appeared first on Directions Unlimited.

Recent research reports that there has been an increase in the total number of open Customer Success jobs for the first time since February. In June, there were 6,515 available Customer Success jobs posted. This number was nearly 500 more than in May.

Regardless of the organisation’s size, gone are the days of Sales and Marketing departments only delivering the business goals. Today it’s critical to have the customer success department straddling sales and marketing to achieve your deliverables.

Customer Success versus Customer Service

Most customer support roles tend to be reactive as they respond to inbound customer requests, complaints and issues. The opposite tends to be the case when it comes to Customer Success roles.

These roles are focused on working proactively in partnership with customers post-sale to ensure maximisation of the product or service value delivered to the client and head off any issues before they fester. It’s critical that Customer Success delivers a positive customer experience and creates a close professional relationship.

If done correctly, Customer Success’s broader and essential role leads to business success. It’s also a vital contributor to customer loyalty. When you help your customers succeed, they become promoters and advocates of your business. Customer Success is connected to your bottom line as it: 

• minimises customer churn rates, 
• improves renewal and satisfaction, 
• and in turn, boosts revenue.

Murphy’s law

Edward Murphy Jr. was an American aerospace engineer who worked on safety-critical systems and was born in 1918 in the Panama Canal Zone.

He is best known for his namesake Murphy’s law, stating, “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong”.

While Customer Success done well offers a significant commercial advantage to a business, if done poorly and with Murphy’s law at times coming in to play significantly affects business factors.  

But what can possibly go wrong with Customer Success?

For starters, to maximise productivity, organisations may allocate too many client accounts to one team or representative to look after. Or weight incentives are heavily towards revenue generation. Or worse still, wrong people are assigned to the role.

Spend any time with a sales organisation, and you are likely to hear a similar story—a story about a consistently top-performing sales rep who failed to make the transition to sales manager.

And the reason? The skills and attributes required as a successful salesperson are vastly different to those needed to be a top manager. The same is true applies to Customer Success Managers.

The abilities and traits required to be a successful Customer Success Manager are many and varied, and selecting the right people for this role certainly presents risk elements.

What makes a great Customer Success Manager (CSM)?

Firstly, there is no one size fits all. Industry type and service or product offering contribute to answering this question. CSM’s usually possess broad business experience. It’s not uncommon for people with backgrounds in sales, support, presales, project management, and even marketing roles to have made successful CSMs.

When we ask managers what makes a great CSM, they usually tell us their best people are proactive and tend to have similar traits such as:

• Great at managing stress
• Resilient
• Empathetic
• Customer-focused
• Sincere
• Keeps promises
• Positive attitude
• Calm in a crisis
• Self-assured
• Socially relaxed
• Strong reasoning and analytical ability
• Great communicators

It’s quite the laundry list. The complex nature of backgrounds combined with the challenge of pinpointing the varied attributes that align with your business and service offering is where many organisations fail.

In fact, studies tell us that failing to get the right person that fits your organisation will result in a decrease in productivity, higher levels of staff turnover and high levels of job-related stress.

Determine the requirements and spot the people

The challenge for organisations today, especially in the current tight market, is identifying the best potential CSM’s. Typically, in our work, we observe many organisations that rely on the job description, resumes and reference checks when making hiring or redeployment decisions. And this then results in a high level of three out of four recruits who just aren’t the right fit.

It’s a case of “rubbish in = rubbish out”. If we don’t have the right information,

how can we possibly make the right decision?

We have worked with many clients using our next-gen tools and helped them profile the critical success attributes that establish fit for a role. Using our 4-step robust process, our clients in the main enjoy a 3-fold increase in pinpointing top people that excel, 47% reduction in team turnover and a significant increase in productivity.

The war for talent is in play right now in Australia. You owe it to you and your business to remove the higher risk of getting it wrong.

Contact Great People Inside to help recruit your next outstanding CSM or top performers for other important roles to benefit your organisation.

The post Retention, revenue, and return: Why it’s important you identify and hire top Customer Success talent appeared first on Directions Unlimited.

However, with the momentum of vaccine rollout in Australia and as the economy continues to rebound, research tells us the labour market will get tighter. For this reason, this situation will result in the war for talent becoming more likely to happen.

Hybrid work arrangements and work from anywhere policies are now the norms in most organisations. Then, to win this talent war, it’s now mission-critical:

• to have your dispersed team highly engaged 
• led by outstanding remote managers 
• supported by a strong organisational culture. 

Productivity

Markedly, more than 70% of employees state they are more productive working from home. And businesses report 47% productivity increases during COVID. 

Most business leaders agree that increasing employee engagement increases productivity significantly and improves bottom-line profit. 

The fact is, it’s never been more important to focus on the productivity of your remote teams for the long term. And equally, ensure your managers feel equipped with the skills and tools they need to meet and exceed company goals.

Managers hold the key

If you have been fortunate to work for a great manager, I’d like to invite you to reflect for a moment on what was great about them and how you remember them?

Certainly, the fact is that managers can make or break a team.   

The Oxford English dictionary defines a manager as –

“a person responsible for controlling or administering an organisation or group of staff”. 

This is one definition; rather, my personal definition of a manager in 2021 and beyond is –

“a person that leads, supports, and develops a team of people to deliver the organisational goals”.  

By and large, the way we work has shifted forever. Being a manager has always been a tough gig, but in the hybrid environment, it sucks!

So how can you ensure your managers are ready for the hybrid normal?

Future-ready culture with a coaching culture

A culture of coaching is an approach in which leaders, managers and staff members work together to:

– increase individual, team and company organisational performance.

The future hybrid workplace with a strong culture will be one where workers feel empowered to work towards their own goals independently. Managers who foster this type of working environment will positively impact employee engagement and organisational productivity. 

Gallup research has shown that managers are a massive influence on engagement rates. It was found managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units. And with high engagement rates comes better company results.

So how can you transform your managers into coaches to create a culture of coaching in your workplace?

Teach coaching skills

The first steps are knowing:

• who you are as a leader, and 
• whom you have on your team. 

Its commonly accepted that not everyone has the required traits to work remotely long term. And business WHS responsibility for their employees does not change just because they are not working at the office. The solution we recommend is using established science to predict how your managers and team members will perform in a long term remote/hybrid environment.

I’ve used many people assessment tools over my 20+ years as a coach and a people leader. With this in mind, I find the bespoke next-gen people assessment tools from Great People Inside are easy to use and their predictive capability and insights are second to none for this exercise. They are outstanding, too, when you’re hiring a new remote employee as they truly de-risk the recruitment process and increase your success rate by 300%!

Not all managers have a coaching mindset, but all great managers do. Certainly prioritising coaching in your workplace training is the best way to create a coaching culture. This type of training is essential for employees transitioning into leadership roles or those coming to grips with managing people remotely.

Rank employee engagement as a top priority

Tying together talent and employee engagement to achieve important business objectives is what coaching is all about. 

To nurture employees’ professional development to keep them engaged, a good step is discussing with each employee their professional goals from their point of view. Then communicating clearly and precisely how the organisation can support them to achieve their goals.

In this way, the employee owns their own development and their careers. 

A coaching culture fosters an environment of trust.

Trust influences everything. A work environment in which managers coach and trust their employees and employees trust their managers is one where productivity can thrive. Creating trust is challenging. Again this is where a coaching mindset can play a huge role.

Professor Ralph Stacey, a renowned organisational theorist and Professor of Management at University of Hertfordshire, in the UK., says it best –

“the quality of the system is determined by the quality of the relationships which is determined by the quality of the conversation.” 

When individuals have accountability over their work, they are more likely to achieve important business outcomes independently. Autonomous workers also understand how their everyday work contributes to the overall success of the company. Having this connection to the purpose helps to empower individuals to reach their highest potential.

Contact us today to find out more about incorporating a coaching mindset for your leaders and our Great People Inside assessment tools.

The post A Coaching Culture – how does this Protect Productivity and Profit? appeared first on Directions Unlimited.

Now may be an opportunity for your business to increase focus on this area with employees recognising the value of these skills.

These skills help overcome challenges in the workplace and build your team and business for several reasons:

• handling interpersonal conflicts
• leading employee training
• managing deadlines
• communicating and distributing information between employees working remotely and onsite
• building a solid company culture, and
• developing your employees’ maximum capability.

Leaders who adopt people management skills provide constructive feedback and mentor employees to grow and succeed in their positions. Goals will also be able to be established and achieved. And overall, the work environment will be influenced positively.

A leader who has an in-depth understanding of their employees can evaluate:

• the strength and weaknesses of their team
• the resources required, and
• set realistic deadlines.

This approach encourages the employees to strive for success and not set them up for failure.

In addition, leaders are able to build rapport, ask the team for constructive feedback, and take actionable steps to make positive changes in the work culture. As a result, this benefits everyone.

Below are four critical people management areas to help you understand your team and individuals at all levels. From onboarding, developing new skills, preparing them for other roles, to working on specialised projects.

1 Understand Human Behaviour And Acknowledging Diversity

It is crucial to understand one simple concept – we are all different. Each individual will react and behave differently in any given situation.

A leader needs to realise that family, environmental and cultural influences have shaped some beliefs and behaviours. Understanding and learning some of the behavioural types and conditioning will allow leaders and managers to treat their employees with respect. In return, the business will be rewarded with best work practices, a motivated team and promote a culture where ideas and opinions are valued.

2 The Individual’s Purpose

It is also imperative to understand how the individual team member sees their own purpose in their role and how they can contribute to the business. This approach can lead to improvements at both the individual employee and business levels. A continued effort in understanding their sense of purpose, whether they are in the office or working from home, ensures the individual and business goals stay aligned. 

3 Transparent Communication

When there is open and transparent communication, it creates an atmosphere of trust. In effect, by employing people management skills, this communication works both ways, i.e., you tell, and they listen, and you have to do the same – listen to your employees. 

This area is more critical than ever for businesses undergoing managing teams remotely. Video-based onboarding and mentoring and a remote communication strategy are essential for employee skill development and project delivery. 

4 We Own This Together

While leading with example is great, it also benefits when you entrust team members with specific tasks which best fit their skill sets. It shows that you are acknowledging their skillset and allowing them to demonstrate their capabilities. As a result, the team is closer and creates an environment of ownership and positive experiences. 

In a remote setting, delegate tasks through shared online platforms that allow for the employee’s autonomy while still maintaining a sense of community in the workplace.

Responsibility and accountability on both ends improve overall morale and reduces people management skills coming across as complicated, unnecessary at times, and time-consuming.

Ongoing people management for development and retention

Just because you have hired a superstar does not mean you don’t have to continue managing and developing them to maximise their potential and business outcomes.

Development should start from day one of an employee’s journey with their new company. The rapport the new employee develops with the company can have long-lasting effects on the business, including the employee retention rate. 

Trends have seen employees become more focused on developing their individual skills. Placing importance on their progress can help connect their goals to the more significant objectives of the business. Supporting these goals can be achieved remotely from the onboarding stage and continue through employment by hosting video workshops and online training seminars. 

Many reasons cause an employee to leave an organisation, such as:

• a lack of training
• development
• engagement
• progression opportunities.

Quantify top performance 

Many assessments compare candidate results against generic benchmarks or no benchmark at all. In other words, this leaves the user with either no reference point or, at best, a near enough is good enough benchmark.

Great People Inside believes assessing an individual’s job performance as accurately as possible requires benchmarks built specifically for each role. Assessments can apply to both positions operating onsite or remotely. By identifying the success DNA of your top performers, you can create job benchmarks based on what success looks like in your business. Further development of your existing team members can be implemented where appropriate, including a coaching option.

As the employer, benchmarking flows through to promoting and succession planning of your people to measure candidate profiles against the relevant top-performing role profile in your organisation.

Given these points, assessments that treat people as multi-faceted complex individuals we are, open a world of possibilities with both your new and existing people. You will find yourself in the stronger position of identifying your people’s true potential and providing opportunities for laser-focused development.

If you’d like to trial GPI’s assessments for consideration as part of your organisation’s people management strategy – click here.

The post How do people management skills improve your business success? appeared first on Directions Unlimited.