"Obstacles
are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off
your goal. " ~ Henry Ford
AT
THE FEET OF THE APPRENTICE
Read
this exciting recently published article by the Company President...
Donald
Trump’s smash reality TV show may have been a hyperbolic
rendering of the hiring process, but it teaches the world—as
well as hiring managers—a lot about the HR challenge. [Full
Article]
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STOP
LOSING YOUR “MEMORY”
Have
you fully considered what happens when you lose an employee, particularly
one who has been with you an extended period of time?
A
chunk of your business leaves with the ex-employee. Let me explain.
The
ex-employee has knowledge about how things are done, where items
are stored, little facts and figures, and other information that
perhaps no one else in the company knows. Your business has, in
effect, lost some of its memory.
For
example, there is a mountain of data on the computers your employees
use. You may assume that because vital information is on computers,
you can find it when needed. But because of the intricate system
of layered folders, maybe only the person who organized the files
on a particular computer knows where to find the data you seek…
and that person walked out your door six months ago.
A
recent study reports eighty percent of a company’s digital
data is generally inaccessible because it is stored as personal
files on personal computers. That’s like saying a business
could lose eighty percent of its memory due to employee turnover.
A scary thought.
While
there is some turnover you can’t prevent, it is generally
believed that eighty percent of employee turnover is avoidable.
It makes sense for us as business leaders to examine the conditions
in our companies that cause people to leave.
Unwanted
turnover is prevented in two ways: first, by not hiring people
who are poor risks for long-term employment; second, by providing
the people you hire with better leadership and management.
If
your turnover is more than only a few employees during their first
six months, examine your hiring process and find where improvements
are required. Bad hires are preventable. Avoiding this mistake
saves considerable time and expense.
Other
unwanted turnover suggests your managers’ performance needs
evaluation and improvement. A 360° feedback program followed
by a program of management skills development may be needed. An
analysis of your unwanted turnover during the past year might
pinpoint specific problem areas. Did the lion’s share of
the turnover take place in a particular department? Were most
of the people who left supervised by the same manager?
Get
a handle on turnover. You can’t afford to lose your memory.
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CREDIT
UNIONS - MAKING SALES AN ORGANIZATIONAL PRIORITY
As credit unions and other financial
institutions struggle to remain profitable, integrating a sales
system into daily business practice becomes more important. Despite
the industry push for institutions to create a “sales culture,”
few credit unions have become effective at sales. Most financial
institutions manage sales as a series of “events,”
not as an integrated sales environment. As a result, sales and
quality service never become organizational priorities; it becomes
increasingly difficult for many credit unions to generate enough
assets to support high levels of member service.
Today’s
changing marketplace, typified by reduced member loyalty and similarity
of services among competition, creates opportunities for organizations
who can build a sustainable and distinctive value for clients.
To capitalize on this opportunity credit unions need to become
organizationally competent at sales.
Effective
credit unions must recruit the right people for sales, train them,
and build a sales culture that provides focus and accountability
for the selling effort. A successful sales culture must have the
ability to sustain momentum for the process. Once a financial
institution has made a commitment to becoming a sales-oriented
organization, the next step is to put into place the people, the
systems, and the resources necessary to support the sales effort
over time.
Recruiting
& Selection of Sales Performers
Not everyone can be a high performing seller. A person’s
personality and experience may not fit the type of selling that
he/she is being asked to do. Credit union staff members must possess
superior customer service skills and the aptitude for recognizing
and maximizing sales opportunities.
Good
hiring decisions minimize the company’s investment in training
and coaching and produce higher productivity. It takes more than
well-written recruitment ads and good networking to find and hire
individuals who will become top sales performers. Having the ability
to assess applicants’ sales aptitude is the key to putting
the right person in the right job.
The
Profiles Sales Indicator™ is an excellent tool for identifying
individuals with the capacity for successfully recognizing and
capitalizing on sales opportunities. It measures five key qualities
of successful salespeople and predicts performance in seven critical
sales behaviors.
For
managers, this tool will also help you pinpoint those individuals
for whom sales training will make a difference in performance
and success.
Psychological
research of thousands of salespeople has demonstrated that the
one factor that consistently correlates with high sales productivity
is a person’s personality “fit” with what he/she
is actually expected to do in selling. Age, gender, sales or banking
experience, and other factors commonly emphasized in financial
industry recruiting have little to do with success in selling.
Managers
should define and communicate the sales behavior they expect from
staff members in sales positions. Next, they should identify peak
performers in those sales roles and develop selection criteria
based upon the profile of peak performers.
While
many credit unions have taken steps to build a more productive
sales culture, few have established a preferred way of selling
that is consistent in reinforcing their business strategy. Too
often, sales is viewed as a short-term initiative. Sales culture
development is really about defining, teaching and sustaining
desired employee behaviors. Your sales development efforts should
result in employees doing and saying the right things that support
your business strategy.
The
goal is to foster an attitude that members come first and that
selling is an important part of the service your institution offers.
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IS
THERE A FLAW IN YOUR HIRING PROCESS?
If your business has hired several people who disappointed
you by failing to live up to your expectations, you may have doubts
about your hiring process. You are not alone. Many executives
wonder the same thing. There is probably nothing wrong with your
process other than it is incomplete.
Most
businesses are very conscientious when considering who they hire.
They check the references, experience, education, and other qualifications
of their job candidates. They may also conduct drug tests and
background checks followed by a round of interviews involving
several executives that may bring a hiring decision. Even though
this thorough and conscientious effort has been put into the selection
process, too many people are hired who turn out to be hiring mistakes.
Noted
business guru Peter Drucker says, “Chances are good that
up to sixty-six percent of your company’s hiring decisions
will prove to be mistakes in the first 12 months.” Given
this statistic, it would be easy to surrender to the mystery and
unpredictability of people. Don’t do it!
One
often overlooked factor is how job candidates fit your corporate
culture and match the position for which they have been selected.
It is likely that you have almost always picked people who have
all of the qualifications for success – somewhere –
but maybe not in the job you seek to fill.
An
extensive study conducted years ago concluded that fit with a
job is more important that any other factor in predicting an employee’s
success. Yet, job match is seldom included in a business’s
hiring system. Companies hire good, talented people, but put them
in jobs they do not fit. Think of it this way. Imagine a corporation
inviting Tiger Woods to their annual golf tournament and asking
him to conduct a seminar on diving at the country club’s
swimming pool. Though this is a ridiculous example, it is no more
nonsensical than what some businesses have done with people they’ve
hired.
Job
match can be determined with assessment instruments that measure
factors such as thinking style, motivational interests, and job
related behavioral traits. These instruments are valuable in establishing
benchmarks for positions. The benchmarks are used to determine
the job match of job candidates. It is not a perfect system, but
it can significantly diminish the sixty-six percent failure rate
that Dr. Drucker estimates.
In
conclusion, your hiring process is probably terrific, but it may
be missing the job match factor. If you are not consistently getting
the results you expect from your new hires, you may want to start
using job match in your system.
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PLUG
THE BIGGEST HIDDEN FINANCIAL DRAIN IN YOUR BUSINESS!
Your
company will profit vastly when you plug the dollar “drip,
drip, drip” that employee turnover steals from
your bottom line.
Too
often, executives look the other way and accept employee turnover
as a nuisance, but necessary fact of business life. The cost of
employee turnover does not show up on a P&L statement making
it easy to overlook when analyzing expenses. However, if your
business has a revolving door in the HR department, you could
increase profits by thirty percent just by better implementing
hiring practices and by reassigning employees to jobs for which
they are better suited.
Stop
hiring the wrong people
One place to plug the leak is to stop hiring the wrong people.
Some HR professionals expect to hire two to four people in order
to find one who stays six months or more. Anticipating new employee
failure, companies have adopted 90-day probationary periods. In
short, they have surrendered rather than taking a proactive stance
toward turnover.
Turnover
– four-step process
As an example of how turnover affects a business, let’s
consider a company of 1,000 employees with fifteen percent turnover.
In a year’s time, 150 employees will leave and be replaced
by new employees. While new employees are usually highly motivated,
it takes a while for them to become fully productive because they
lack the training and experience that comes with time. Eventually,
they will join the fifty-five percent of a company’s employees
who are motivated, competent, and productive. That means that
in a company of 1,000 employees, only 550 of them are truly productive.
About
thirty percent of the company’s employees are in yet another
category, one that is an anchor on productivity. These are people
who are probably competent, but lack the motivation to become
fully productive. Some employees tend to drift back and forth
between this group and the group that really is productive. People
may be in this category for a number of reasons: they may be distracted
by personal or family problems, they might be potentially good
employees who have been assigned to the wrong tasks, they might
have grievances or be disgruntled about a work issue, etc. Whatever
the cause, one of three things will eventually happen.
In
this example, annual turnover is 150 people, necessitating the
hiring of 150 new employees.
Don’t
surrender to turnover. While some is unavoidable, chances are
excellent you can cut turnover in half, or more, by using assessments
to put good people in the right jobs. You can plug the profit
leak by better hiring and by dealing proactively with the people
who are marginal performers.
By
using tools such as Profiles’ Step One Survey II™
and Profile XT™, employers avoid the mistake of hiring people
who will not meet the needs of their organizations. The Step One
Survey II™ is the premier hiring instrument for weeding
out job candidates who are dishonest, illegal substance users,
unreliable, and/or lazy. Profile XT™ is a battery of assessments
used to evaluate “The Total Person” and accurately
predict success in the company’s specific jobs and positions.
Data from Profile XT™ is useful beyond the hiring process
and is also valuable for training, managing, career path planning,
and other management interests.
Most
companies have effective hiring systems resulting in hiring people
who have worthy attributes, skills, and training. However, the
system breaks down when the qualified person is put into a position
that does not quite fit who they are. Instead of job match, this
results in job mismatch, which causes the job and individual to
suffer, limiting the company’s productivity. Use of Profile
XT™ with customized job benchmarks assures greater compatibility
between employees and the work they perform.
The
importance of job match cannot be overemphasized. Of all the predictors
of job success, none is more important. Yet it is the one ingredient
missing from most placement processes.
Invigorating
marginal employees
In the “marginal employees” group there are two sub-groups
– those who can be resuscitated and those who cannot. The
Profiles Performance Indicator™ is an ideal management tool
to assess these employees and discover those whose potential for
effective productivity is the greatest. The information provided
by the Profiles Performance Indicator™ is used by managers
to communicate with and motivate more effectively the people under
their supervision. It suggests areas in which individuals can
use their strengths and positively affect areas in need of improvement.
There is even a Motivational Energy measurement that helps the
job matching process.
Some
managers may find themselves in the group of marginal employees.
Profiles has help for them, too. The CheckPoint Management &
Development System™ provides managers with detailed 360°
job performance feedback reports. A follow-up program, SkillBuilder™,
offers a series of ideas for improved performance and action steps
for increasing managerial skills and effectiveness. When used
in concert with an overall management development program, the
CheckPoint™ also yields an Organizational Management Analysis™
report to increase a company’s focus on the activities and
projects most important to future growth, productivity, and profitability.
Leaders
who recognize the status quo as a threat to their organizations
are using Profiles’ assessments to decrease turnover and
increase their productivity by reducing the number of employees
who are marginally productive. The results speak for themselves
where it counts most, on the bottom line.
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