How to Train Your Staff With A Decreasing Budget

In our last blog, How to Use the 70/20/10 Model to Develop Careers, we discussed the “what”, “when” and “how” of using the 70/20/10 Adult Learning Model for employee development. Now let’s discuss the “why”.

Managers face daily decisions to ensure their team gets what’s needed for success. But with budgets getting smaller, it’s hard to stretch resources. After reading this blog, you will learn several tips on how to stretch your training budget, spend wisely, plan strategically and still meet your employee development goals.

The “Why” to Employee Development

What is the return on investment (ROI) for a manager who wants to allocate time and financial resources for her employees? Simply put: a better prepared employee is a more productive employee. According to the Association of Talent Development (ATD), companies that invest in training employees see a 218% higher income per employee than companies that don’t. The 70/20/10 model for employee development is one effective tool to leverage the current talents of your staff and build stronger teams, which increases the organizational bottom line.

We know that the manager cannot motivate an employee to improve; that has come from within the employee. However, managers can create a learning environment for them to grow. How? The first step is to take an inventory of the current staff, using a consistent assessment tool such as a 360-degree assessment, with an objective lens to collect skills data. This full assessment will provide two sets of data in one assessment: strengths and areas to grow. By selecting the right 360 tool, you can complete two tasks at once for the same price, creating cost savings for your budget. This 360 view lets managers begin to leverage the strengths in their staff that can be shared with other employees; it also shows the delta between the strengths and weaknesses, so you can create the best strategy to decrease the weaknesses of the entire team.

Why Are Employees Leaving Your Organization?

In our daily lives, we use personal biases, intuitions, and gut feelings to make our decisions. And that’s perfectly fine. They serve us well in many ways.

However, when it comes to improving work performances, personal biases, intuitions, and gut feelings just don’t cut it.

Data can improve your own, your team’s, and your organization’s performance; people analytics can help. People analytics is the data that identifies workforce patterns and trends. Here are some questions that can be answered with people analytics:

• How engaged are our employees?
• What skills does my organization need to invest in, to achieve our mission?
• Why are my employees leaving the organization?

These questions and many more are the kinds of questions that people analytics can answer. Even if you don’t regularly use data in your job, you can still learn a lot with people analytics, regardless of your supervisory level.

A brief primer on people analytics

Before we answer why employees are leaving your organization, let’s start by defining a few terms:

Data are facts, statistics, or other items of information. Data are all around us; you just have to know how to look for it, compile it, and make sense of it. We can use data to understand problems and processes at a micro-level (between individuals), at a mezzo-level (team-level), or at a macro level (organizational level).

So who uses data?

One group of people who use data are data analysts. Data analysts organize, examine, analyze and use data to draw meaning. They tend to focus on understanding previous events to describe things that have already happened.

How to Break the Glass Ceiling

Panelists at the IREM Global Summit share best practices for mitigating bias and advancing diversity.

Cultivating talent is the industry-wide mission for the property management profession and all of the commercial real estate. At the Institute of Real Estate Management’s Global Summit last week in San Francisco, an international panel of rising leaders shared best practices and strategies for advancing that goal through diversity.

Signs of progress for women in real estate stand side by side with persistent contradictions. Women entrepreneurs enjoy a rising profile; nearly one-third of all privately held firms are owned by women. On the educational front, women bring more to the table; they hold more undergraduate degrees than men and earn 50 percent more graduate degrees than their male counterparts. Women’s workplace priorities are led by flexibility and quality of life, according to national studies; compensation ranks third.

The speakers also recounted the qualities that women in business tend to bring to the table. “The more diversity, the better your product is going to be, the better your bottom line is going to be,” noted Anne Loehr, executive vice president at the Center for Human Capital Innovation and the panel’s moderator.

Eight Ways to Improve People Processes in Your Organization

People are a critical part of every organization’s balance sheet. Investments related to acquiring, retaining, developing, and inspiring employees are critical to your organization’s success, requiring a thoughtful strategy to build and maintain a productive workforce.

CHCI’s talent life cycle, called PRIDALRM, refers to the interrelated strategies that support the most important assets of an organization – the people. Most of the activities that occur within an organization’s human resources, human capital, and talent management divisions can be distilled to one of the eight components highlighted in the PRIDALRM image. 

CHCI uses PRIDALRM to diagnose problem areas and develop targeted remediation efforts. This systematic approach to organizational performance encourages the interconnection among elements and alignment to outcomes. Let’s review the eight components.

Starting with the “north star” of the talent life cycle, the workforce PLAN sets up a framework that allows organizations to address current needs and identify future opportunities and threats. It helps answer the following questions:

• Does the organization’s workforce have the right capabilities today?
• What resources will the organization need to be successful in five years?
• How can our human capital approach give us a competitive advantage in our industry?

The next component, RECRUIT, is about talent acquisition. Talent acquisition is the organizational process which fills current and future positions and manages the transition of new employees to becoming fully productive. According to research commissioned by Glassdoor, 95% of companies admit to hiring the wrong people every year.  In fact, Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM) identified that the cost of a bad hire could be up to five times the amount of a bad hire’s annual salary; so hiring the wrong person is a costly mistake. Here are three categories of questions to ask candidates at the initial hiring process to help determine if candidates are a good fit in your organization:

People Analytics: Creating The Ultimate Workforce

People analytics, historically referred to as HR Analytics and utilized strictly as an HR function, has evolved into a systematic data-driven approach to improving your entire business.

If you are a leader or manager in a large organization, you are probably familiar with these terms. But you may be unaware how your organization can benefit from people analytics and what it will take.

That is what we will discuss today.

Table of Contents

·         What is people analytics?

·         Difference between HR, people, and workforce analytics

·         How organizations benefit from people analytics

·         Where do you begin?

·         How other organizations leverage people analytics

·         Understanding the ROI of people analytics

·         How should organizations implement people analytics?

·         What is the cost of implementation?

·         How does CHCI use people analytics to help organizations?

What is people analytics?

People analytics is the process of leveraging new or existing data within your organization to provide invaluable insights into your workforce and help you make better business decisions.

People analytics delivers facts about your organization such as why people are leaving your organization, the challenges they face, how much this is costing you, and more. Equally importantly, it paints a picture of how to anticipate and prevent these staffing challenges.

Difference between HR, people, and workforce analytics

People analytics, HR analytics, workforce analytics, and even human capital or business analytics are all different terms that share a common purpose: to improve all areas of business performance through the use of workforce data. Whatever you call it, the goal is to create a productive, innovative and powerful workforce, which positively affects the bottom line.

How organizations benefit from people analytics

The true value of a well-structured people analytics initiative will reflect directly on your bottom line. We’ll talk more about this in a minute, under the ROI section.

For now, here are a few ways your organization can benefit from people analytics.

Ten Ways Organizations Benefit from People Analytics

1.     Understand and improve retention

2.     Identify patterns of racial bias or inequity in compensation

3.     Create effective, non-biased processes for hiring and promoting

4.     Strengthen workforce decision making

5.     Increase accountability

6.     Shift team silos

7.     Improve employee productivity and commitment

8.     Determine the traits of your quality employees

9.     Seek better employee sourcing options

10.Develop a culture where decisions are made in accordance with the evidence

How does it help my organization make better decisions?

A crucial component of people analytics is the ability to make informed decisions based on user data. An example of this is McDonald’s. They learned that employees working in groups containing a healthy mixture of generations tended to be happier. Happier workforces can lead to improved service, product quality, and teamwork, all creating higher value for the restaurant brand.

Three Ways Learning Agility Can Help Your Career Growth

We have a guest blog this week about a fascinating topic: Learning agility. Thanks for David Hoff, co-author of Learning Ability-The Key to Leader Potential.

Learning agility is finding yourself in a new situation and not knowing what to do – but then figuring it out.

Why would that be important? In an organizational context, if you are promoted from one function to another or from an individual contributor to a manager role, how do I know you will be successful? The answer is that I don’t, because you’ve never done the job before. The research says if leaders make that decision without the help of an assessment process, the odds of the person being successful is 50-50 – essentially the flip of a coin.

What is the cost if the coin lands on the side of being unsuccessful? It depends; the range is anywhere from one to three times that person’s fully-loaded pay, including compensation and benefits. That’s an expensive coin toss!

Most organizations use a performance management system to give employees feedback on their performance and to equitably distribute merit increases. The output of this process is supposed to be a development plan, which describes the key objectives a person should achieve in the coming year and the areas he or she should begin to improve.

Some companies put additional time, effort and money into critical jobs and/or high-potential employees. There are different definitions of high-potential employees; a common one is a person with the ability to be promoted two levels above his or her current level. An example would be a manager with the ability to be promoted to a vice president. You can’t spend significant additional dollars on everyone, so who gets this extra time and attention? That is the $64,000 question.

One answer is to spend time on the most learning-agile person. But how do you determine learning agility? That question has stumped people in the talent management field for some time. My favorite response is, “Those who can learn on the fly.”

How do you operationalize that definition? What would I see a learning-agile person do? How would I teach someone to? Be more learning-agile? These questions are where learning agility becomes more complicated.

Researcher Scott DeRue, from The University of Michigan, established a model that identifies speed and flexibility as the two most important factors determining learning agility. Learning agility is about being able to digest a large amount of information quickly and figure out what is most important (speed). DeRue defines flexibility as the ability to change frameworks to help you understand how different things are related or connected.

DeRue also made a distinction between learning agility and learning ability. “Ability” means the cognitive ability or “smarts.” Ability is important to a point, but then, smarter is not necessarily better. Earlier, I noted that learning agility is being in an unfamiliar situation, not knowing what to do and figuring it out. The ability takes you to a certain point. Then, agility becomes more important.

DeRue says there are both cognitive and behavioral components to learning agility. The cognitive ones – the “hard wiring,” if you will – are difficult, if not impossible, to change. The behavioral ones are more learnable, because if you do the things described by the behavior, then you are demonstrating that part of learning agility.

Another researcher, Dr. Warner Burke from Columbia University, confirmed what DeRue described and found seven additional dimensions of learning agility. He embraced speed and flexibility; his research also identified experimenting, performance risk-taking, interpersonal risk-taking, collaborating, information-gathering, feedback-seeking and reflecting. Burke also developed a test to measure learning agility; his work led to a valid and reliable tool with years of research to support its results. This is a huge step beyond the 50/50 coin flip to determine who we develop and promote.

Here are three tips for using learning agility in your work:

1. In the future, people are more likely to be hired less for what they “know” and more for their ability to figure out what they “don’t know”. So get curious about what you don’t know as a way to make a difference in your career.
2. To increase your flexibility (one of the learning agility dimensions), take the opposing point of view (from your own position) during a discussion. Support that contrary position as strongly as you would your original position.
3. When seeking feedback (a dimension of learning agility), seek to understand what the other person is saying by truly listening. Defensiveness gets in the way of learning agility.

Want to learn more about learning agility? Reach out here.

Optimize Your Recruitment Process by Using Competencies

Recently, we wrote about the five steps to optimize employee development with a competency framework. This 5-step process begins with identifying organizational competencies and determining expected proficiencies by employee position and continues. The next two steps include assessing competencies and aligning the current proficiency with organizational needs and career aspirations. Finally, each employee should track progress to enhance accountability and results. This process helps develop employees and optimize organizational performance.

A meaningful competency framework can also improve recruiting practices. By aligning organizational competencies and expected proficiency levels with position descriptions, it allows you to hire people who are a good fit for the organization in a strategic and targeted way. Here are three ways to do this:

1.     Assess and categorize competencies by type.

2.  Map the minimum expected proficiency by competency within each group to position descriptions.

3.  Identify and align behavioral questions with priority competencies during the interview process.

Assessing and Categorizing Competencies

Many organizations have “core” or “foundational” competencies that are distinct from technical competencies. Core competencies are the skills, knowledge, and abilities that all employees should have and work to improve, no matter their technical expertise. Examples include effective communication, problem-solving, and customer service. Technical competencies capture areas of expertise needed to be successful in a particular job series or position. Examples include competencies related to accounting, mechanical engineering, or computer science.

Identifying the expected proficiency for core competencies can often be streamlined by creating categories instead of defining them position by position. For example, CHCI recently updated its competency framework and categorized its foundational competencies into four groups: 

1) Corporate Member
2) Senior Consultant
3) Consultant and
4) Organizational and Project Support. These categories were defined by responsibilities and experience across all current and projected CHCI employees. 

Mapping Expected Proficiency to Position Descriptions

Once the categories are defined, the expected proficiency by core competency can be set. This expected competency clarifies the behaviors and skillets expected of employees in a particular category, at the time of hire or in their current position. Returning to our example, a small group at CHCI went through each foundational competency and identified the expected proficiency by competency in the four categories mentioned above by using a standard proficiency scale ranging from 1: Awareness to 5: Expert. The process included a select group of individuals who aimed for consensus agreement. The following criteria and/or process steps were identified to ensure consistency:

• No category of the employee should have an expected proficiency of “5” or “expert.” This doesn’t mean that an individual cannot have a current proficiency of “expert” but that it should not be expected in order to be successful in the organization. This criterion also encourages the idea of development and growth for all individuals, regardless of title.

• Key assumptions were identified that distinguishes the categories. For example, responsibilities in the Executive Member category focused on organizational outcomes and integrating processes across the organization while the Senior Consultant category focused on integration across the project as well as project delivery and leadership. Other assumptions included general levels of responsibility and proficiency required to be successful across all categories.

To define expected proficiency for technical competencies, a slightly different process was followed in the CHCI example:

1.   Position descriptions (PDs) were written for new hires based on priority needs and organizational capabilities.

2. Each group member independently identified expected proficiency across technical competencies using the PDs and the standard proficiency scale as their guide. It is worthy to note that not all technical competencies were required for each PD.

3.   The results from each individual’s process were consolidated into a matrix. The group met to review and analyze results.

4.   Expected proficiency scores were agreed upon and finalized for both technical and “foundational” competencies for each position description. A rationale for each expected proficiency was documented across all competencies for each PD to double-check the logic.

Aligning Competencies with the Interview Process

The example mapping exercise allowed PDs to become competency-based, aligning potential employees with both organization culture and performance. The alignment then streamlined the interview preparation process for hiring managers, allowing them to prioritize questions based on targeted competencies and expected proficiencies in a particular position.

For CHCI, that meant preparing interview questions for Senior Human Capital candidates in four priority areas. Behavioral questions were developed to understand the depth and breadth of each candidate’s experience.

Creating a recruitment process that incorporates the organization’s competency model will lead to high-performing hires that make a good cultural fit for the organization, the project, and the position. When individuals fit into the culture of the organization, they are likely to be more motivated, interact more easily with other employees, and stay happier in the job. All of this translates into higher-performing employees who will stay longer and potentially become highly qualified candidates for succession plans.

Once you hire a candidate, you can reinforce the organization’s values, culture, and competencies through your onboarding programs, annual competency assessments, and constructive feedback. This helps bring the entire talent life cycle together Click here.

Do you want to learn more about aligning competencies with your hiring process? Learn more by contacting us.

Why Leadership Training Fails

It happens all the time. Senior leaders seek leadership training to strengthen the leadership team. Yet they don’t know exactly what will make their individual leaders better in their roles.
Some will base their leadership training on the flavor of the month, such as emotional intelligence. They have heard in leadership circles how powerful emotional intelligence is for leaders, so think training in that capacity will improve their individual leader’s abilities. And while that might be true, it might also be true that a particular leader is actually not lacking in emotional intelligence, and there are other skills that would maximize the results of their training. This is how leadership training fails.
For effective leadership training, we must know what the leader needs. This need should also be aligned with the organizational vision and mission, which requires foundational work. And in order to do that work, competencies must first be established.

The Foundational Work Needed for Leadership Training to Succeed

Sometimes referred to as ‘KSA’, competencies are the things people need to know (knowledge), do (skills) and have (abilities) to be successful in a specific role. Competencies can be grouped into technical, foundational and leadership areas. They are defined by specific behaviors that describe what that competency would look like if someone were using it effectively. These behaviors are often laid out across a proficiency scale so the employee can clearly assess her current behaviors and understand what behaviors are needed for the next level.
Some examples of competencies are problem-solving, conflict management, technical skills and speaking up. While some competencies will be applied to every employee, others are role dependent. The CEO of a large organization likely won’t need to have specific technical competencies, and a coder on the tech team likely wouldn’t need to be competent in sales communication.
Once competencies are defined, the next thing to do is identify five clearly defined proficiency levels. For example, for problem-solving skills, level one might be, ‘asks questions and looks for information to identify and differentiate the symptoms and causes of every day, defined problems’. Level five might be, ‘anticipates problem areas and associated risk levels with objectivity; uses formal methodologies to forecast trends and define innovative strategies in response to the implications of options; and gains approval from senior leadership to solutions of multi-faceted problems".

After competencies and proficiency levels are clearly defined, the next steps are:

1. Determine the expected proficiencies by job position.
2. Assess the employee’s competencies using a standardized process, on a regular basis. Competing an assessment will help the leader know which competencies to focus on for future leadership training.
3. Facilitate career conversations with employees to match organizational needs, career aspirations, and current employee proficiency to a leadership development program.
4. Track progress using accountability measures in the leadership development training.

Read in depth about each step here.

Using this process will prevent your leadership training from failing. You seek training because you are invested in your employee development. If you’re willing to make that investment, it’s worth doing all the foundational work necessary to get effective training that elevates your leaders.