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.

This statement below I came across recently brought a smile to my face as it reminded me of this.

Can you perform under pressure? asked the recruiter. 

No, said the candidate, but I do a mean Bohemian Rhapsody!

Some more standard features you might see employers looking for in hiring an ideal candidate are:  

• Ambitious
• Resilient 
• Bubbly personality or Can-do attitude
• Clear thinker and have a Strong work ethic 
• Share our passion
• Accuracy and Attention to detail
• a Team player, a Strong Leader, and yes, Perform Under Pressure!

As an illustration, the typical wish list for the “perfect employee” often reads something like this:

“We are looking for someone ambitious who will demonstrate initiative and resilience has the maturity always to remain calm and professional. You will have an excellent work ethic and have outstanding communication skills. 

You are respectful and enjoy working in a team in a fast-paced environment in which you will be able to prioritise and handle multiple tasks while meeting deadlines”.

Job advertisements will also include what the work involves, and the qualifications and experience needed to be a successful applicant.

Consider the total recruitment cost of hiring a non-ideal candidate

Despite rigorous selection processes, many studies tell us that up to 50% of new hires fail within 18 months.

For Australian businesses, the cost of these failures is indeed high. Recent research discovered the direct recruitment costs to hire ONE employee are on average a staggering $19,000! 

Add to that another 30% to 50% of the annual salary with the total cost of induction, orientation, training, maintenance, termination, and lost opportunity.

There would be “skin and hair flying” in many management meetings if all these costs showed up on a Profit and Loss Statement line.

Your choice

So, what gets in the way of more consistent selection outcomes when it comes to hiring an ideal candidate based on a wish list? Most would agree that even the most basic selection process can get it right with the required qualifications and experience for a role. 

However, when it comes to attributes similar to the examples below, the ability to precisely assess if the person sitting in front of us possesses these is close to impossible:

• Tenacious 
• Ambitious
• Resilient 
• possesses Initiative
• will Remain calm and professional, and
• has an Excellent work ethic.

People tell us what they think we want to hear; after all, they are looking for a job!

Consequently, many of us make our hiring decisions based on our “gut feel” and what we “liked” about the candidate during the interview. In essence, we hire people we like. 

Given that research tells us that more than 40% of Australians think it’s okay to lie during an interview, this stacks the odds against us. We need to add some objective data to our “gut feel” to help us get it right more consistently.

The way forward for hiring more ideal candidates

The next generation award-winning Great People Inside (GPI) customisable assessment platform now available in Australia allows you to choose those specific attributes on your recruitment wish list. 

Therefore, if you want to assess certain attributes, these can readily be selected. For example, attributes like: 

• Resilience
• Tenacity
• Ambition
• Discipline
• Customer Focus
• Closing sales.

Over 60 validated psychometric dimensions are available to precisely evaluate the crucial traits for both your business and the specific role. And if we don’t have what you need, we will build it for you.  We call this full customisation.

With this in mind, no longer are you restricted to relying on your gut feel and hiring people you “like”. You can easily create GPI assessments as short or as long as you wish.

By adopting this approach, specific objective data can be added to your selection process and increase your success rate by up to 300%.

Don’t take our word for it!

We were delighted to recently receive the following feedback from one of our clients who has been using with great success the GPI platform for more than 18 months. This client uses the GPI platform to assess alignment to the company values of both internal employees and new recruits.

They tell us, “We are observing through using the GPI profiling tool to test for values fit, we are naturally defining critical success factors to base our hiring decisions on.

The more we benchmark our top performers and see success in our new recruits, the more we learn about what are the critical behaviours and interests that make a person a successful cultural fit in our business.

Whilst we would like to think we were good at picking this up before, GPI provides us with an evidence-based, tangible tool to confirm this and has been a real value add to our hiring decisions”. 

If you’d like to learn more, we’d be happy to let you try us for free. Click HERE, and we’ll be in touch straight away. 

The post Your ideal candidate when hiring – what’s on your wish list? appeared first on Directions Unlimited.