Magic Beans

Psychometric tools that predict employee success

Once upon a time America’s industries measured productivity in tons of steel, board feet of wood, or cars off the assembly line.  Now, our economy relies on ideas – marketing, service, and information. Increasingly, our employees are our product. 

Yet, as vital as the human equation is to modern business, its elements have always been tricky to calculate.  Instruments for evaluating, describing, selecting, and motivating employees can seem like Jack’s magic beans. And what’s really up the beanstalk can be hard to see from the ground.

Fortunately for the smart CEO, devices for determining employee success and manpower optimization have been evolving. We no longer feel people’s head bumps to divine their intellect and honesty, like phrenologists in the 19^th century.

Psychometrics has blossomed into an industry in itself and some versions have become a mainstay for most human resource departments.  Technology has allowed us to easily merge algorithms with social science data and develop useful, precise tools not only to measure people, but to quantify the human experience in our corporate cultures.

Experts so armed are challenging our traditional hiring habits, offering better, more streamlined training, and providing ever more sophisticated tools for employee selection and productivity.

What can their innovations offer to a CEO’s biggest headache and greatest opportunity – the employee equation?

Engaging Your Workforce
Gallup Management Journal puts the current percentage of truly “engaged” employees at 29%. Most employees, 54%, fall into the “not engaged” category. The remaining 17% are “actively disengaged”.

Stop! Did you read that? Two-thirds of employees are not engaged, or are actively disengaged! This number is too high for any of us to believe that we don’t have at least some engagement challenge in our own business.

And although disengaged employees are MUCH less productive, they cost exactly the same! Wouldn’t you like to know if you have an engagement challenge in your organization? And, maybe, where in particular?

At Engagient, principal partner Michael Rheem is fond of saying “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” Traditionally, companies have not measured employee engagement, the “special sauce” of employee performance that is essential for creating customer satisfaction and loyalty – and managing your brand in the era of social media. 

Engagement leads to high returns in myriad ways, but you have to measure it first. That’s where Engagient’s High Performance Culture Assessment comes in.

Through twenty-six focused, on-point questions, Engagient assesses the degree of employee engagement throughout your company. Slicing by division, shift, level, age group, and so on, gives you great insight into where you may be able to yield untapped performance.

By retesting annually, Engagient determines the trend of the corporate culture, and through workshops and training, helps shape the corporate culture into a highly engaged one.

Statistically, Rheem says, several important factors go up when engagement goes up, among them customer satisfaction, workplace innovation, and profitability. What goes down?  Absenteeism, turnover, complaints, and other variables.

Measuring Innate Traits
Whereas Engagient examines the company, Taylor Protocols looks at individual employees, focusing on the innate, unchanging nature of each person. Lynn Taylor developed his approach while managing a complicated slate of corporate turnarounds.

Motivated by his desire to get “the right people in the right seats”, he devised a tool so accurate that it not only helped him achieve results, it has been lauded by psychologists as one of the most reliable assessments in the profession.

Taylor’s goal was to turn the bell curve of corporate performance on its head – instead of having 20% “A” performers, he wanted to achieve 80%. The assessment tool he created reveals the unchanging nature that drives each of us.

Results score the person in categories labeled “builder”, “banker” “merchant”, and “innovator” – each with its own innate drives and characteristics that contribute differently to a company’s success. Armed with that information, he can place employees where they were born to shine.

Employees doing the kind of work they are drawn to by their very deepest self not only produce more, they are happier, show up to work more, and contribute more optional time and ideas.  In short, they are doing what they should be doing with their lives.

By assessing the “A” performers already in place in your organization, Taylor determines which core identity “signature” belongs in which position at your company. New job descriptions are created to more accurately reflect top performers. And the human resources team is taught to hire and place people according to the new matrix. It’s a speedy process – the evaluation tool requires 10 minutes; job descriptions are rewritten in an hour.

Together, Engagient and Taylor Protocols could deliver a heady concoction: A corporation where the culture itself encourages complete engagement by employees who are accurately selected to innately desire to do exactly the job you’ve asked them to do.  The potential for bottom-line consequences is huge.

Training Protocol
At Catalyst IT Services, Michael Rosenbaum employs proprietary software, “Peg”, to evaluate talent. “Peg” combines a personality profile with data available online and through other resources, then applies customized algorithms to project a candidate’s professional success.

“Peg” enables Catalyst to pinpoint top IT performers early in their college track or even right out of high school, candidates other companies might overlook for lack of a traditional background. 

To guarantee proficiency and professionalism, Catalyst also employs innovations in training. New hires are immediately given a client project – one that has already been completed and delivered. Catalyst management monitors the new teammates to see exactly how they execute a real-world project at every step. 

Having freshman staffers run a project from outset to completion allows for a comprehensive understanding of their thinking, task management, communication, and problem solving skills.  It’s an exhaustive and expensive training protocol, but it guarantees high job performance, secures Catalyst’s reputation with clients, and saves money in the long run through efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Rosenbaum maintains that “Peg” has virtually eliminated failures in hiring for Catalyst and clients who utilize it. Catalyst makes precise decisions, hiring only about 1.5% of candidates, and enjoys a turnover rate one third of the industry average.

In an economy built on an exchange of skills and ideas, innovations in employee selection and management will become increasingly refined. These three gurus are only a small sample, but ones I have found to be valid, forward-thinking, and indicative of what’s possible. A handful of magic beans like these just might be worth your mother’s cow after all.

View this article online at SmartCEO.