IN THIS ISSUE...
BLUE WAVE ULTRASONICS ELIMINATES HIRING ERRORS
A hiring snafu that occurred in the mid-'90s proved to be the turning point for Blue Wave Ultrasonics, Inc. of Davenport, Iowa. Blue Wave Ultrasonics' manager Roger Stoneking was mentally kicking himself over the mistake when he saw a schedule for a nearby seminar about Profiles assessments.
"At the time we had 13 or 14 employees. All of us went through the assessment testing. We used that as a benchmark for all future hiring and it's paid off very well."
Stoneking and Jeff Hancock acquired the company in 1995. With Hancock as director of sales and marketing and Stoneking as general manager, the company operates in Iowa supporting customers around the world, designing and manufacturing part and tool cleaning systems for clients. They work in the United States, Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Malaysia, India, South Korea and Israel. "There are a number of market niches that we support, and most of those are global," Stoneking says. "We design the equipment, in conjunction with customer needs, and build it, ship it and support it."
Blue Wave's equipment works via high-frequency sound waves to remove a variety of contaminants from parts immersed in aqueous media. The parts can be metal, ceramic or glass, for example. They are placed in a tank, and sound waves are driven through a solution of water and detergents, which creates cavitation, or an implosion of microscopic gas bubbles. The process produced by the imploding bubbles creates a high-velocity, high-pressure, high-temperature atmosphere, yet it's gentle enough not to damage the parts being cleaned. The bubbles are small enough to get into the tiniest of places. At the end of the process, the contaminants are suspended in the detergents and easily rinsed from the cleaned object, and the water is recycled.
"It's an extremely environmentally friendly process," Stoneking says. "The objects are eliminating the use of solvents [a health hazard], and reducing process time and labor."
Many of the company's 19 employees are engineers. Others have technical degrees in specialty areas like electronics or CAD design. Some are high school graduates with special training in assembly skills. Stoneking has found it beneficial to use Profiles' Step One Survey II™ for an initial assessment of potential employees. He uses ProfileXT™ to narrow the candidate pool.
Profiles provides a "suite of assessments that can address anything from a part-time seasonal worker to a CEO and everything in between."
- The support Profiles offers is "awesome."
- The product quality is second to none.
- The assessments are priced competitively.
The insight that Blue Wave Ultrasonics obtains from the assessments prevents errors, Stoneking says. "In 11 years, I really can't say we have made a real hiring mistake. We have made mistakes when we deviated from a plan in how we used the information gained." And, because of the assessments, he knew beforehand that several of his key employees would attain the importance they have earned in the company.
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THE 'WHOLE PERSON' APPROACH
Last month, we examined the first Department of Labor guideline on occupational assessment tools. This time we will look at guideline number two, which says that assessment tools must use the "whole-person" approach. This means that the tests employers use should measure more than limited aspects about a potential employee.
They should look at, for example, behavioral traits, occupational interest, and thinking style. Profiles International offers employers the effectiveness and convenience of putting all three of these in one test battery, the ProfileXT™. Using this assessment, an employer can see how a candidate matches what he wants. He knows what he wants because he has identified the company's top performers, those who are working at the highest level. Because his objective is to hire others who will also perform at top levels, he has provided this ranking to Profiles for building a Job Match Pattern.
Now we have the formula for identifying top performers over those challenged by the position. Our objective is to acknowledge several aspects of who the individual is, and we do this by looking at 20 different scales across the three sections.
Did you know that Profiles' Step One Survey II™ tests job candidates for reliability, integrity, substance abuse and work ethic? Using this report gives employers the power to objectively obtain better information, identify top candidates, and conduct better interviews. The Profiles Sales Indicator™ helps select, manage and train salespeople by measuring five key qualities of successful salespeople: competitiveness, self-reliance, persistence, energy and sales drive. It predicts performance in seven critical sales behaviors: prospecting, closing sales, call reluctance, self-starting ability, teamwork, building and maintaining relationships and compensation preference. Profiles can customize the Sales Indicator™ in a number of areas.
Profiles' assessments meet or exceed Department of Labor guidelines, and we work diligently with our clients to help them understand our tools and use them correctly.
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WHAT IS PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT
One well-known company that throws its office doors open to the public every day has found a very public way to recognize employees for good performance: It puts photographs of the employees in its lobby display case. Each photograph is accompanied by a biography of the employee. Less public but just as important, the employee also receives an extra paid day off, a gift certificate to a favorite restaurant, and a convenient reserved parking place for a month.
This reward system is only one of the building blocks of performance managing, and the last one on the list, but it is effective in its combination of recognition and reward and too often overlooked.
The other building blocks in this system of management individual performance are just as essential. If any of the blocks is omitted or neglected, it amounts to the same thing as leaving out a key step in the erection of a building: It will not be as sturdy.
While managers might believe that performance management is a mysterious practice that takes training to do well, some leaders do all four of these instinctively. The result of their efforts is high-performing workers who know what their employers expect and have the ability and resources to do it. Managing performance includes the four key strategies of planning, monitoring and feedback, development, and reward/recognition.
Let's examine each of these building blocks in turn. First is planning. This means that you set clear goals for your organization and your employees. Everyone who works there, from the secretary to the CEO, knows what is expected of him or her. It can include a mission statement for the overall company, but it also must include each employee's job duties and performance goals.
Next is the monitoring of the employee. Making plans and setting goals does no good unless a supervisor is monitoring the employee's performance regularly and giving clear feedback when necessary. This feedback should take the form of both praise and constructive criticism. The key is to "catch" the employee in the act of doing well and praise him immediately, or to see what he is doing in error and correct the mistake right away and in the right way: constructively and in private.
Development means that leaders give workers the ability to do their job through skills training and other resources. Think of this as giving someone careful directions and a road map to arrive at her destination on time and without mishap. Development has a broad meaning, and managers should think of creative ways to develop employees to grow into their jobs and climb the ladder.
Finally, there's the reward and recognition factor. Although reward does not have to come daily or even weekly, it's important to the process and cannot be overlooked. It can be as simple as praise and as detailed as the recognition scenario presented above. It can include increased compensation or a promotion. Employers should be creative and match the reward to the performance.
The final reward will be your organization's to reap. In a study of 100,000 employees of 2,500 organizations, the Gallup Organization recorded the attitudes of employees at work in highly productive groups. These attitudes are directly connected to the rate of employee turnover, customer satisfaction, and productivity. Employees in such work groups report high levels of agreement with the following statements:
- I know what is expected of me at work (planning);
- In the last 6 months, someone at work has talked to me about my progress (monitoring);
- I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right (developing);
- In the last 7 days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work (rewarding).
Is this what your workers would say? If not, shouldn't it be?
Source: U.S. Office of Personnel Management
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UPDATE: CHANGES COMING IN EEO-1
by Scott Haney
Employers who must submit the EEO-1 report, also called the Employer Information Report, need to know about upcoming changes in the survey that will take place in September 2007.
The survey is a government form that requires many employers to supply a count of employees by job category, ethnicity, race and gender. The report goes to several government agencies.
Employers who must file this report are those with federal government contracts of $50,000 or more and 50 or more employees, and employers who have 100 or more workers, even if they do not have a federal government contract. The report is due on Sept. 30 each year, and must use employment numbers from any pay period in July through September of the year it is filed.
The new report adds additional race categories and defines race and ethnicity categories this way:
- Hispanic or Latino: A person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American descent, or other Spanish culture or origin.
- White: A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.
- Black or African American: A person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa.
- Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander: A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, or other Pacific Islands
- Asian: A person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam.
- American Indian or Alaska Native: A person having origins in any of the original peoples of North and South America (including Central America) and who maintains tribal affiliations or community attachment.
- Two or more races: All persons who identify with more than one of the above races.
Self-identification, which means that employees provide it, is the preferred method of obtaining this information. However, if employees refuse to provide the information, employers can use employment records or observer identification. Employers should tell potential employees that submitting the information is voluntary, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission suggests the use of the following language:
"The employer is subject to certain governmentalrecord-keeping and reporting requirements for the administration of civil rights laws and regulations. In order to comply with these laws, the employer invites employees to voluntarily self-identify their race and ethnicity. Submission of this information is voluntary and refusal to provide it will not subject you to any adverse treatment. The information is kept confidential and is only used in accordance with the provisions of applicable laws, executive orders, and regulations, including those that require the information to be summarized and reported to the federal government for civil rights enforcement. When reported, data will not identify any specific individual."
The new EEO-1 report also has divided job categories into two levels based on an employee's responsibility and influence within the organization. These two levels will be:
- Executive/Senior Level Officials and Managers: These employees plan, direct and formulate policy, set strategy and provide overall direction. In larger organizations, they are within two reporting levels of the CEO.
- First/Mid-Level Officials and Managers: These employees direct implementation or operations within specific parameters set by Executive/ Senior Level Officials and Managers and oversee day-to-day operations.
The revised report also moves business and financial occupations from the Officials and Managers category to the Professionals category to improve data for analyzing trends in the mobility of minorities and women within Officials and Managers.
To provide consistency, uniformity and economy, the EEO-1 report was developed jointly by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Department of Labor's Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs. This form is also a valuable tool for companies to use in evaluating internal programs for equal employment opportunity.
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PROFILES XT ™ IN USE BY A HEALTHCARE ORGANIZATION
Leaders of a healthcare organization faced with low employee productivity wanted to find a way to hire more employees that excelled in their positions. The current study was conducted to examine the relationship between employee productivity and Job Match to ProfileXT™.
Participants
The study was comprised of 60 enrollment specialists. Each employee who participated in the study had been administered the ProfileXT™ and had their performance evaluated by a superior from their company on a fivepoint rating scale. These company performance evaluations revealed 13 employees exceeding expectations (rated 4 or 5) and six employees failing to meet expectations (rated 1 or 2). The remainder of the sample, 41 individuals, met performance expectations (rated 3).
Job Match Pattern In a concurrent study format, a Job Match Pattern was developed for the enrollment specialist position using the ProfileXT™. A sample of 13 current top performing enrollment specialists served as the basis to formulate the Job Match Pattern. This pattern now serves as a benchmark to which other employees can be matched.
Performance Grouping With the enrollment specialist Job Match Pattern created, all 60 enrollment specialists were matched against the pattern. After a review of the sample's ProfileXT™ percent matches, an overall Job Match percent of 78 percent or better best identified top performing employees and was selected as a breakpoint to represent a good match to the Job Match Pattern.
This study has demonstrated that the pattern efficiently identifies top performers:
- Top Performers correctly identified as Top Performers by the pattern: 9 of 13
- Top Performers incorrectly identified as Bottom Performers by the pattern: 4 of 13
- Bottom Performers correctly identified as Bottom Performers by the pattern: 4 of 6
- Bottom Performers incorrectly identified as Top Performers by the pattern: 2 of 6
Of the 60 employees included in the study, 34 met or exceeded the benchmark. Nine of the 13 (69 percent) top performers were included in this group while only two of the six (33 percent) Bottom Performers were able to display the same match for the pattern. Thus, the pattern is differentiating top and bottom performers as delineated by the company's own performance evaluations.
Details
The company indicates its hiring practices have become more consistent after using the ProfileXT™. The organizational leaders of this company have become more confident in their hiring decisions knowing that the ProfileXT™ is based on the firm ground of employee attributes.
Summary Using the ProfileXT™ to benchmark employees, the organization has shown the ability to successfully screen enrollment specialist candidates. Of the 34 individuals that either met or exceeded the Job Match Pattern benchmark, only 5.8 percent (2 of 34) were bottom performers. Additionally, approximately 70 percent of the top performers (9 of 13) were included in this group. Clearly, selection practices can be improved by using Job Match Patterns created by the ProfileXT™.
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PRODUCT HIGHLIGHT: PROFILES SALES INDICATOR
If the new employee on the sales team is not doing as well as you expected, you should check the shape of the hole. You may have put the wrong peg in it. Put another way, your new sales employee might not be a match for the job.
Not everyone succeeds in sales. Sometimes even those who excel in other areas don't fit well into this one. That's because it takes key attributes to attain sales success. These include competitiveness, reliance on self, persistence, energy level and sales drive. Furthermore, seven important sales behaviors affect sales performance: prospecting, closing, call reluctance, self-starting ability, teamwork, building and maintaining relationships and compensation preference.
Profiles Sales Indicator™ assesses all of these, and offers clear reports that show how closely the person assessed will match your open position. This assessment takes only minutes of the worker's time and can be custom-tweaked by company, sales position, department, manager, geography, or any combination of these. It gives you the percentage of Job Match so you can determine just how well this potential employee will do. The assessment also works as a training guide.
Taking the surprise out of hiring just makes good sense--both for your peace of mind and for your company's health.
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