IN THIS ISSUE...

• Is Your 2007 Plan Ready?
• 3M Trainer Finds Solutions with Profile Tools
• Get Inside the Minds of Your Employees
• To Reduce Overhead, Know What Causes It
• The Last Staw...
• Profile Sales Indicator™ at a Midwest Staffing Agency

IS YOUR 2007 PLAN READY?
Tips, Tricks and Traps on Monitoring the Plan

As year-end for most businesses is rapidly approaching, we typically don’t focus on taking the time to ensure that next year’s business plan is in place, realistic, and cascaded to all members of the organization. Instead, we’re frantically trying to make sure we meet (or hopefully, exceed), our year-end numbers.

Preparing an effective yearly strategic business plan is critical to both your short and long-term success. Many plans are poorly written – they do not include enough meaningful information and data to instill confidence. Instead most are written to impress management and shareholders where the thickness of the binder is more important than the content.

In order for a business to be successful, there needs to be a roadmap for success. A strategic plan helps to provide direction and focus for all employees. It points to specific results that are to be achieved and establishes a course of action for achieving them. A strategic plan also helps the various work units within an organization to align themselves with common goals.

Building a strategic plan is not difficult. It will take some thought and some feedback from customers and others, but businesses should be routinely garnering feedback from appropriate constituent groups on an ongoing basis. The process of developing a strategic plan should be rewarding for all involved and if carried out correctly it should have a significant impact on the future success of the organization.

Happy Holidays and Good Planning.
Cathy Caserza-Light

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3M TRAINER FINDS SOLUTIONS WITH PROFILE TOOLS
A bid for help from managers who wanted to coach their sales representatives more effectively led Gene Nichols, a 3M trainer in St. Paul, Minn, to take a closer look at the Profiles tools his company was using. He found assessments that could give managers specific information and that could be changed to fit his company's needs.

Nichols, a sales veteran with varied experience, is the education and development manager for the medical division of 3M, a diversified technology company with a worldwide presence. When he took over in his current role four years ago, the previous manager was already using Profiles assessment tools.

"We'd been using Profiles for seven or eight years, and my job was to develop training programs and training managers," he said. "Our managers were asking for a way to give tools to our field managers to coach salespeople. They asked me, 'How do I continue to coach? What input can you give me?'"

Nichols examined the Profiles tools with the goal of developing coaching skills for managers to use for hiring people and for changing their sales roles. "We needed to have measures to look at how successful representatives were doing it, and how we could coach our people along those same skills sets," he said. Nichols uses two testing processes - one to ensure his division is hiring the right people, and another to measure and benchmark sales representatives to make sure the company is developing them. He uses ProfileXT™ measurement of thinking styles, behavior traits and occupational interests. He also uses the Sales Indicator™ tool.

"Both are very important for us," Nichols said. "Our sales representatives must be able to speak well and do calculations and contracts. So we look at all of those - the learning index, verbal skills, verbal reasoning, numeric ability and numeric reasoning. We look at whether they have an enterprising nature and how interested they are in servicing others. We look at their financial/administrative skills, technical ability, mechanical skill and creativity. Those are our interest scales."

Managers also look at ProfileXT's™ behavior scales. "Very important are energy level, assertiveness, sociability, manageability, attitude, decisiveness, level of accommodation and independence." All sales representatives and sales managers go through the process, and the company uses benchmarks for each. "If we are looking at a representative who is becoming a manager, our leadership team sees how closely they match other managers and what coaching they need," Nichols said. "We make sure the managers we bring in look and feel like the managers who are doing a superb job."

The company has benchmarked its sales representatives across the country. "When we first started this, upper management and regional leaders asked our sales managers to name the sales representatives they felt excelled in the job they were asked to do," Nichols said.

"At first we benchmarked all representatives; then their roles changed," Nichols said. "...we have representatives who are now required to be specialists. They are required to sell everything in the bag. I think these are different traits, even to know whether we have the right people in the right jobs."

He now has three key groups of people and rebalances the benchmarks against those groups.

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GET IN THE MINDS OF YOUR EMPLOYEES
[Herman Trend Alerts, "Maintenance SOX?", 11/22/2006]

In the past decade there has been a dramatic increase in corporate accountability. High profile accounting debacles have brought management practices under close scrutiny. To answer calls for justice from shareholders, employees and the public, courts are holding governing boards and the executives they hire to task.

One attempt to add safeguards against shareholder fraud result is the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (‘SOX’). While established with good intentions, the financial burden on corporations and federal regulators is significant. A recent survey found that companies with average revenues above $5 billion report an average cost of compliance of $4.36 million. Expense areas include more stringent audit procedures, upgraded accounting system technology to enable compliance, and the addition of accounting and controllership staff.

Many people are cautiously optimistic that accounting problems of this scale are behind us. The question now is “how might a skittish administration adapt and apply the SOX ‘solution’ to other areas of big business?”

Some see equipment and facilities maintenance as an emerging area of concern. Like personal property, corporate assets wear out and need maintenance and replacement. At some point it’s only good business to make these investments. But what prevents a company from putting off these important expenditures--if no one is watching?

This situation has already begun to come to the surface in the petroleum products distribution industry. In early 2006 petroleum giant BP reported two pipeline ruptures at its Prudhoe Bay oilfield; one of which totaled some 200,000 gallons of oil. One BP employee admits, “We are at the point where there is so much damage to the lines from corrosion, we don't know where another leak will occur.”

Once again, furious shareholders, Alaska residents, and concerned environmentalists are calling for remedy. Consequently, BP is currently under criminal investigation for its pipeline management practices.

There are countless other examples of deteriorating corporate assets that may cause harm or damage. There is no question that the regulatory environment will shift to address maintenance and related issues. What remains to be seen is when and how it will happen. Remediation will be costly and time consuming.

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TO REDUCE TURNOVER, KNOW WHAT CAUSES IT
In most ways, the top boss at a large manufacturing company, Robert, managed his people well. He told his managers what he expected and gave them freedom to do their jobs the way they saw fit. He kept his door open most of the time and willingly discussed issues with his assistants.

His company, however, was not immune to the turnover that plagues so many businesses. Additionally, his company was small, so turnover affected everyone in some way. Staff members had to assume someone else's duties in addition to their own or were moved temporarily to another area, often one they did not know so well. People worked overtime to finish jobs left undone by the missing employee. Stress was often high, and no one kept employees in the loop about the search for new workers.

Seeking a reason for the turnover, Robert blamed it on the pay structure. People simply wanted more money, he reasoned. He took pains to review and revise pay policies, but even when he paid employees more, turnover did not decrease significantly. More puzzling, turnover often was lower in the areas where he expected it to be high and higher in areas where the pay and professionalism were the highest and required stability.

With turnover costs soaring - estimates vary from a low of $10,000 per employee to a high of $50,000 per employee - Robert needed to dig deeper for the answer. If he had done so, he might have found many reasons why people were leaving his company:

• Staff members who saw no way to advance in their jobs
• Workers who did not know or agree with company values
• Employees who left because others did (Turnover often has that domino effect.)

Robert - and all employers - needs to know that there is a more efficient way to hold on to valuable employees. They need to know and understand their workforce and have good information about what their employees want. This would not be the same for each individual, but good employment practices generally allow workers to ask questions, understand company policy and make suggestions about how to get jobs done.

Employers also need to know why good workers are leaving, and for that they need to delve deeper than the common exit interview in which departing employees generally don't want to burn their bridges. What if they had problems with a key manager who appears one way to the people she manages and another way to her bosses? What if the top boss is doing something that repels key workers, and he doesn't even know it?

Assessment tools can help reduce turnover and positively affect other key areas as well. Hunches work in some areas, but when dealing with something as costly in time and human capital as turnover, the facts offer better solutions.

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THE LAST STRAW...
It is the last straw. You finally decided that you have made your last trip to the neighborhood pharmacy - even though it is convenient and the pharmacists are friendly and helpful. So what's the problem?

Thanks to the checkout clerk's careless, unconcerned and often impatient attitude, most visits turn into unpleasant experiences. The clerk is probably a nice person - who is just in the wrong job.

How many people in your company are in the wrong jobs? It is disconcerting to think that the person you have placed at the front desk, the employee your customers see first, might be driving them away! With so much competition in the marketplace, you certainly don't need obstacles impeding customers when they enter your doors.

So how can you find out what kind of service your customers are getting?

Good customer service begins with people who are naturally inclined to serving others. Profiles' Customer Service Profile™ provides the information to help employers identify these people. The Customer Service Profile™ will:

• Give you information to create a plan that fits your customer service needs
• Develop customized patterns for job matching by department
• Establish a comprehensive customer service philosophy that will extend throughout your organization
• Help you build a reputation for excellent customer service

In addition to the general version suitable for any industry, the Customer Service Profile™ is also available in four custom versions - healthcare, hospitality, retail and financial services.

Why let an employee in the wrong job drive your customers away? Instead, check out the Customer Service Profile™ and other assessments at AssessmentLeaders.com.

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PROFILES SALES INDICATOR™ AT A MIDWEST STAFFING AGENCY
Background
Facing low employee productivity, a staffing organization in the Midwest conducted a study using the Profile Sales Indicator™ to see how employee productivity, in the form of sales totals, related to job match.

Participants
Thirteen of the organization's recruiters participated in the study. Using sales dollars, the company classified employees as either top performers (six) or bottom performers (seven). The six top performers generated an average of $107,011 in sales dollars. The seven bottom performers generated an average of $40,977 in sales dollars.

Job Match Pattern
With the Profile Sales Indicator™, we developed a job match pattern for a recruiter position using a concurrent study format. In January 2006, a sample of current recruiters served as the basis to formulate the job match pattern. The company now uses this pattern as the benchmark to predict recruiter performance based on Profile Sales Indicator™ pattern match.

Performance Grouping
Based on the information gathered from the employer, we built a pattern that described the qualities of the existing top performers. The 13 recruiters were then matched to this pattern. After a review of the samples, the top-performing employees were best identified by an overall job match percent of at least 79. This suggested that a top performer should be identified by a match of 79 percent or greater, and this benchmark was set as representing a good match to the job pattern. Of the 13 recruiters, six obtained a job match percent of 79 percent or greater. Five of those six recruiters, or 83 percent, were top performers. Additionally, five of the six were above the 79 percent job match pattern break point.

One of the seven bottom performers, or 14 percent, achieved the same mark.

Details

1. Average sales dollars generated by those who matched the job match pattern at 79 percent - $97,730.
2. Average sales dollars generated by those who did not match the job match pattern at 79 percent - $48,932.14.

Summary
By utilizing the Profile Sales Indicator™ to build and benchmark, this organization has been able to successfully identify 83 percent of the employees who achieved the percent match benchmark as top performers. For this company, the average difference in sales earnings between top and bottom performers is nearly $50,000. By using the Profile Sales Indicator™, this company is better able to select employees who are likely to succeed, earning more now and in the future.

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