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By Kyle Lagunas, HR Analyst at Software Advice. Guest Post
Business leaders invest a lot in their organization, and expect to see a tangible return on their investments. But as organizations search for opportunities to maximize the ROI of their workforce, they one process is often overlooked: onboarding. Sadly, the onboarding experience is often reduced to little more than a checklist of tasks to be completed in the first week. But the fact that many leaders fail to leverage is that an employee that experiences a smoother onboarding process will be better trained, more connected to the organization and quicker to produce.
Your decision-makers need to know their resources are being put to good use, and with the right metrics at your disposal, you can deliver the information they’re looking for. After all, the key to making the case for future resource allocation lies in being able to illustrate the effectiveness of your onboarding process.
Establish a Baseline for Measuring Onboarding ROI
The biggest obstacle many HR departments struggle to overcome is establishing a baseline for how their organization will assess ROI. Fact: Evaluating the value of an enhanced HR process is not always a straightforward process. As such, spending time with leadership to establish a baseline for measuring ROI is invaluable.
There are a few key concepts to keep in mind when establishing your baseline to measure ROI:
- Onboarding should be consistent. All of your fancy data gathering will be for naught unless you can roll out a universal process for onboarding new hires.
- The onboarding process is more than a checklist. Though checklists are great for staying organized, your new hires’ success depends on your ability to get them connected to your organization and keep them connected beyond their first day.
- The onboarding process goes beyond the first week. Though the normal probationary period for new hires is 90 days, The Wynhurst Group reports 22 percent of staff turnover occurs in the first 45 days of employment.
How to Brave the Metrics Madness
After identifying what information will be most valuable, you can implement tracking strategies. Keep in mind that some of the data you measure won’t be cold, hard facts that fit nicely into a spreadsheet. That said, there are three areas you can focus on for information: performance, experience and effectiveness. Also, broaden your scope beyond your new hires to measure the impact at various levels (team, department, organization).
Here are a few ideas of what you can measure (as well as how frequently):
| Employee(30, 60, 90, 180, 360 days) | Team(Quarterly) | Organization(Semi-annually) | |
| Performance | Progress milestones | Change in overall productivity | Headcount vs. output |
| Experience | Employee satisfaction | Impact on team morale | Cultural fit vs. retention |
| Effectiveness | New hire time to proficiency | New hire time to proficiency vs. team average | Impact on retention (both quits and terminations) |
For Maximum ROI, Take Engagement Beyond Onboarding
The best metrics should be forward-thinking analytics tools. According to Dr. John Sullivan at TLNT.com, “They tell you who’s going to win the Superbowl next year, not who won last year.” Furthermore, they should provide the information you need to win the Superbowl every year.
At the end of the day, your ROI is answering one question above all: What is the value of onboarding new employees more effectively? Here’s a hint: Take a look at your metrics and note improvements in employee performance, time to proficiency and increased retention. Once you can answer that question, move onto the next question: “How can we maximize the value of a better-onboarded employee?”
One way you can maximize this value is to keep the momentum going. Many organizations leverage the tools and technology found in talent management systems to better manage the process of engaging and motivating their employees. Beyond core talent management functionality, these systems also offer reporting analytics and dashboard elements that provide the information you need to support your ROI analysis.
One of our esteemed colleagues wrote this article about how organizational alignment can empower a company to rapidly adapt to change and at the same time improve growth and profit exponentially:
Aligning Talent With Strategy
by Bob Woodcock
Like other dynamic systems, an organization performs best when all its processes, metrics and policies are functioning well, moving towards continuous improvement and aligning with the needs of the market. Organizational alignment means linking the core business functions, processes and behaviours of the people in the enterprise so they work in harmony to deliver results.
While the strategic plan may be established by the senior leadership team the execution of that plan is very much a bottom up exercise. How well the frontline individual contributors in your organization understand and execute on the strategic plan will determine the overall level of success. That puts pressure on your leadership team to not only effectively communicate the message from senior leadership to the “feet in the street” but to provide active and ongoing feedback from their direct reports to senior leadership.
When that feedback includes the element of intuition or interpretation on the part of frontline leadership the degree of misalignment can be significant from one team or business unit to another. The problem for senior leadership is to get a fix on where all of the moving parts within the organization are with respect to the strategic vision they have created.
If you want to find out where you stand you have to be prepared to ask some tough questions of everyone within the organization. Relying on the interpretation or “gut” response of your frontline leaders will provide you with as many different opinions as you have leaders. The trick is to ask the same questions of everyone and provide the level of anonymity that will spark frankness in the responses. A survey engine that contains correlation analysis, automated reports, cross tab analysis, alignment measures by workgroup, performance variation and gap analytics is the means to that end.
An intelligent diagnostics platform should be customizable and designed to allow you to capture the data that is pertinent to your organization. There is no use comparing the performance of your company to the metrics being driven in another company. If your frontline individual contributors are not able to articulate and deliver on your strategic plan you need to find out sooner rather than later. This is the difference between leading and lagging indicators of performance.
George Labovitz in his book The Power Of Alignment puts it this way, “Misaligned companies, like cars out of alignment, can develop serious problems if not corrected quickly. They are hard to steer and don’t respond well to changes in direction.” Alignment gives managers at every level of the organization the ability to:
- Rapidly deploy a coherent business strategy
- Be totally customer focused
- Develop best in class people
- Continuously improve business processes
All at the same time!
From an article in Time Magazine online
How much do Americans hate their jobs? A Gallup poll found that about 77% of Americans hate their jobs. Another found Americans hate their jobs more than in the past 20 years; fewer than half say they’re satisfied. Other surveys have found that 87% of Americans don’t like their jobs.
In the Book, Three Signs of a Miserable Job. Patrick Lencioni, a leadership consultant, speaker and author, writes this thoughtful e-mail:
I became interested in this topic because, as a kid, I watched my dad trudge off to work each day and became somewhat obsessed with the notion of job misery. Somewhere along the line, I came to the frightening realization that people spend so much time at work yet so many of them were unfulfilled and frustrated in their jobs. As I got older, I came to another realization – that job misery was having a devastating impact on individuals, and on society at large. It seemed to me that understanding the cause of the problem, and finding a solution for it, was a worthy focus for my career.
No argument there. So how does Lencioni define a miserable job?
In my view, a miserable job is not the same as a bad one. A bad job lies in the eye of the beholder. One person’s dream job might be another person’s nightmare.
But a miserable job is universal. It is one that makes a person cynical and frustrated and demoralized when they go home at night. It drains them of their energy, their enthusiasm and their self-esteem. Miserable jobs can be found in every industry and at every level. Professional athletes, CEOs and actors can be – and often are – as miserable as ditch diggers, janitors and fast food workers.
Huh. CEOs are miserable?
Attend any kind of social gathering, anywhere in the country, and talk about work. The stories and anecdotal evidence confirming job misery are overwhelming. Misery spans all income levels, ages and geography. A recent Gallup poll found that 77% of people hate their jobs. Gallup also contends that this ailing workforce is costing employers more than $350 billion dollars in lost productivity. The Conference Board has found that Americans are growing increasingly unhappy with their jobs.
Anyway, his book outlines three signs of job misery:
1. The first is anonymity, which is the feeling that employees get when they realize that their manager has little interest in them a human being and that they know little about their lives, their aspirations and their interests.
2. The second sign is irrelevance, which takes root when employees cannot see how their job makes a difference in the lives of others. Every employee needs to know that the work they do impacts someone’s life – a customer, a co-worker, even a supervisor – in one way or another.
3. The third sign is something I call immeasurement, which I realize isn’t actually a word. It’s the inability of employees to assess for themselves their contribution or success. Employees ho have no means of measuring how well they are doing on a given day or in a given week, must rely on the subjective opinions of others, usually their managers, to gauge their progress or contribution.
So what do we do about all this job misery?
The primary source and the potential cure for this misery reside in the hands of one individual – the direct manager. There are countless studies confirming this statement, including both Gallup and The Blanchard Companies. Both organizations have found that an employee’s relationship with their direct manager is the most important determinant to employee satisfaction (over pay, benefits, perks, work-life balance etc).
As simple as the three signs are, the fact remains that few managers
1. take a genuine interest in their people,
2. remind them of the impact that their work has on others, and
3. help them establish creative ways to measure and assess their performance.
But surely managers want a relatively happy staff; after all, happy workers are hard workers. Besides, what jerk would want to head up an office teeming with misery? Why wouldn’t a manager take those easy-sounding steps to ensure a satisfied workforce?
First, many managers think they are too busy. Of course, the real problem is that most of those managers see themselves primarily as individual contributors who happen to have direct reports. They fail to realize that the most important part of their jobs is providing their people with what they need to be productive and fulfilled (a.k.a. not miserable) in their jobs.
The second reason that managers don’t provide their employees with the three things they need is that they simply forget what is was like when they were a little lower on the food chain. They somehow forget how important it was to them when a supervisor took an interest in them, talked to them about why their work really mattered and gave them a means for evaluating their progress.
Finally, many managers don’t do this because they are embarrassed or afraid to try. They fear that their employees will see them as being disingenuous or manipulative, or that by taking an interest in their personal lives they will be stepping into inappropriate territory. It’s almost as though they fail to understand the difference between the interview process (where no personal questions are allowed) and the actual work experience (treat people like a full human being).
Pre employment personality tests, long a staple across corporate America, are starting to become popular among the middle-sized and small US businesses as well. It’s a small wonder — they help to select the most effective employees from what is, with the current economic conditions, a vast pool of candidates.
Most such tests have questions that are easy to manipulate. Realistically, when the question is “I have a good work ethic”, why would you ever say anything other than “Strongly Agree”? It seems like such an obvious thing to say that you might wonder why they ask in the first place. The real answer is that they measure how much the applicant actually cares about getting the job — if they don’t really want it, they won’t take the time to figure out and give the correct answers. Just a few of these “obvious” questions, and the applicant pool is cut in half. Quick win for the business.
More complex are the questions like this one: “Other people see me as hardworking.” These questions serve a dual purpose: first, to measure honesty, and second, to measure social intelligence. An applicant that answers “Strongly Agree” to the statement “I am hardworking,” but answers “Maybe” to the statement “Other people see me as hardworking” is admitting that either they lied about the first answer or they simply honestly believe that they are misunderstood — which indicates poor social intelligence.
Also intended as a measure of honesty are the questions that seem like repeats of previous questions. If you answer “Strongly Agree” to the statement “I am punctual,” but then later answer “Disagree” to “I have never been reprimanded for tardiness,” your actual level of punctuality isn’t in question at all — but you can be certain that your employer won’t see you as an honest person.
As an employer, however, you should be careful of making judgments like that based on the answers of pre employment screening tests. When reviewing the answers, it should always be foremost in your head that human behavior is contextual. What that means is that people act differently in different contexts, and there are a lot of factors out there that can influence the answers real people give to these test questions.
Behavioral interviewing takes preparation and organization. Being prepared will make the interview go smoothly and get you the information you need — fail, and you’ll end up with an interview that is biased and ineffective.
The first thing you must be aware of is to avoid your ‘gut feeling’ – intuition and instinct have a powerful place in the business world, but behavioral interviewing is a strict science. Applicants come into an interview determined to project the most positive image they can regardless of their actual skills and abilities — and some people are simply gifted with the ability to ‘sell you’ on that image. The existence of these natural salesmen make the science of behavioral interviewing a very important discipline to maintain.
The first goal should always be to develop a set of bias-neutral questions that will determine if the candidate has the knowledge, skills, and abilities to complete the job. The best predictor of future behavior being past behavior, these questions should focus on relevant experiences from the applicant’s history. Focus on open-ended questions that encourage reflection, long answers, and details. Make a list of such questions.
When the interview actually starts, stick to your script. No matter how interesting or intriguing a story is, don’t allow the applicant to derail the focus of the interview. Remember the amount of preparation you put into this interview, and don’t let it go to waste by improvising or wandering off-script.
Give the applicant plenty of time to answer these questions — don’t feel the need to fill any long silences; allow them space to think. When they do answer, take lots of notes. Not only will that force your focus onto the salient details, but it will help you remember your instantaneous responses to the answers given when the time comes to review the applications later on. Fail to take notes, and you run the risk of relying on your intuition rather than an accurate memory of the answers given.
Keep strictly to this careful behavioral interviewing process, and your chances of hiring top performers expand exponentially.
Have you heard about the recent employee survey that shows the percent of employees planing to look for a new job in 2011 is up 60% from a year ago? Leaders will need to take action in order to stem the tide of top performers heading for the door. This article, posted in the Business News Daily, gives the full story:
Don’t be surprised if your company loses top workers in 2011.
A recent survey reveals 84 percent of U.S. employees plan to look for new jobs in 2011 – up from 60 percent a year ago. Only 5 percent want to stay at their current position.
“This finding is more about employee dissatisfaction and discontent than projected turnover,” said Douglas Matthews, president of career-management agency Right Management, which conducted the poll.
“Clearly, if the job market picks up a lot next year many employees are going to take advantage of it, and organizations stand to lose some of their top contributors,” Matthews said. “So this is a wake-up call to management.”
Employees are unhappy because of the recession, job-market weakness and disruptive economic and workforce changes, he said: “Employees’ trust has been seriously shaken and there is a general lack of confidence in leaders.”
To alleviate dissatisfaction, Matthews suggests managers should:
- Identify star performers and have open and constructive career discussions with them. “High-value employees always have opportunities available to them. Know who they are and be sure to take care of them in ways that are meaningful and aligned with the businesses goals.”
- Be honest and positive with employees. “Provide them with feedback on what they are doing really well and ways to help them improve. A mentoring relationship between the manager and employee will build mutual trust and hopefully limit future defections.”
Right Management surveyed 1,413 employees in October and November.
“We view it as a barometer of their trust in management or commitment to the job,” Matthews said. “It’s a workplace equivalent to opinion polling on whether or not ‘this country is moving in the right direction.’ Just as people are questioning their elected leaders in government, so too are workers wondering if their management is up to the challenge of renewed growth or developing a sound strategy moving forward.”
Go to Business News Daily to read the original version of this article.
Multi rater feedback, simply put, is the process of having multiple people who interact with a worker — managers, coworkers, subordinates, and even customers — provide paper feedback regarding that worker’s performance. It’s often called 360 degree feedback due to the multilateral of the incoming evaluations. Multi rater feedback is exceptionally useful in helping managers guide employee development, continuously realigning the employee’s personalized goals with the company’s overall vision.
Employees want to know how well they’re doing, and 360 degree feedback is an excellent tool to enhance their self awareness by highlighting what their supervisors, subordinates, peers, and outsiders see as their personal strengths and weaknesses. By comparing and contrasting those strengths and weaknesses to the corporation’s goals and vision, a manager can create a detailed plan for what precise areas must be addressed in order for the worker to stand up to the corporation’s expectations.
Multi rater feedback creates accountability on a massive scale — sociologists call it ‘peer pressure’. Not only is a worker accountable for meeting his manager’s goals for him (which can often fail due to a personality conflict between the two), but he is also accountable to every individual he works with on a daily basis — and let’s be honest, if he has a problem with even most of them, he should probably be replaced immediately anyway.
Because 360 degree evaluations give an individual many different perspectives on his or her performance, they create a powerful sense of contrast between how an individual sees themselves and how everyone else sees them. It’s easy to say that one person who disagrees with your self-opinion is merely wrong, but when a dozen people all independently disagree, it encourages a powerful self-reflection that is an amazing tool to provoke personal change.
This is excellent for a frontline worker, but the effect is even more powerful in the company’s leaders. The most often-expressed complaint about managers can be summarized as a lack of emotional intelligence — an inability to empathize with their subordinates, and more importantly to understand that they can’t. With multi rater feedback, that predicament will never remain for long.
This morning’s post was sent to me from Mike Cendenella of The Ladders. Whether you are an executive looking for a new position or an employer perusing through resumes, I think you’ll find this fascinating. Thanks Marc for sharing this insightful article.
Before he was famous, before he painted the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper, before he invented the helicopter, before he drew the most famous image of man, before he was all of these things, Leonardo da Vinci was an artificer, an armorer, a maker of things that go “boom”.
And, like you, he had to put together a resume to get his next gig. So in 1482, at the age of 30, he wrote out a letter and a list of his capabilities and sent it off to Ludovico il Moro, Duke of Milan.
Well, we at TheLadders.com have tracked down that resume, and I’m presenting it to you in honor of da Vinci’s birthday, April the 15th. You can click on the image below to see the full-size version.
The translation of this letter is quite remarkable:
“Most Illustrious Lord, Having now sufficiently considered the specimens of all those who proclaim themselves skilled contrivers of instruments of war, and that the invention and operation of the said instruments are nothing different from those in common use: I shall endeavor, without prejudice to any one else, to explain myself to your Excellency, showing your Lordship my secret, and then offering them to your best pleasure and approbation to work with effect at opportune moments on all those things which, in part, shall be briefly noted below.
- I have a sort of extremely light and strong bridges, adapted to be most easily carried, and with them you may pursue, and at any time flee from the enemy; and others, secure and indestructible by fire and battle, easy and convenient to lift and place. Also methods of burning and destroying those of the enemy.
- I know how, when a place is besieged, to take the water out of the trenches, and make endless variety of bridges, and covered ways and ladders, and other machines pertaining to such expeditions.
- If, by reason of the height of the banks, or the strength of the place and its position, it is impossible, when besieging a place, to avail oneself of the plan of bombardment, I have methods for destroying every rock or other fortress, even if it were founded on a rock, etc.
- Again, I have kinds of mortars; most convenient and easy to carry; and with these I can fling small stones almost resembling a storm; and with the smoke of these cause great terror to the enemy, to his great detriment and confusion.
- And if the fight should be at sea I have kinds of many machines most efficient for offense and defense; and vessels which will resist the attack of the largest guns and powder and fumes.
- I have means by secret and tortuous mines and ways, made without noise, to reach a designated spot, even if it were needed to pass under a trench or a river.
- I will make covered chariots, safe and unattackable, which, entering among the enemy with their artillery, there is no body of men so great but they would break them. And behind these, infantry could follow quite unhurt and without any hindrance.
- In case of need I will make big guns, mortars, and light ordnance of fine and useful forms, out of the common type.
- Where the operation of bombardment might fail, I would contrive catapults, mangonels, trabocchi, and other machines of marvelous efficacy and not in common use. And in short, according to the variety of cases, I can contrive various and endless means of offense and defense.
- In times of peace I believe I can give perfect satisfaction and to the equal of any other in architecture and the composition of buildings public and private; and in guiding water from one place to another.
- I can carry out sculpture in marble, bronze, or clay, and also I can do in painting whatever may be done, as well as any other, be he who he may.
Again, the bronze horse may be taken in hand, which is to be to the immortal glory and eternal honor of the prince your father of happy memory, and of the illustrious house of Sforza.
And if any of the above-named things seem to anyone to be impossible or not feasible, I am most ready to make the experiment in your park, or in whatever place may please your Excellency – to whom I comment myself with the utmost humility, etc.”
I’m a hopeless pedantic, so of course I’m going to take this opportunity to let you know what you can learn from Leonardo’s resume …
You’ll notice he doesn’t recite past achievements. He doesn’t mention the painting of the altarpiece for the Chapel of St Bernard; he doesn’t provide a laundry list of past bombs he’s built; he doesn’t cite his prior employment in artist Andrea di Cione’s studio.
No, he does none of these things, because those would be about his achievements, not the Duke’s needs.
Instead, he sells his prospective employer on what Leonardo can do for him.
Now imagine being the Duke of Milan and receiving this magnificent letter/resume from the young Wunderkind of Florence. The specific descriptives paint a wonderful picture (that is, if you’re a Renaissance Duke) of siege engines and bombardments and mortars and trench-draining and bridges to defeat the enemy. You can almost imagine the scenes that ran through the Duke’s head as he held this letter in his hands and read through Leonardo da Vinci’s bold statements of capabilities.
I mean, who wouldn’t want “kinds of mortars; most convenient and easy to carry; [that] can fling small stones almost resembling a storm”? Sounds pretty enticing.
And that’s exactly what your resume needs to do, too. Not the laundry list/standard bio that talks about you, but the marketing piece that talks about the benefits to your future employer and how you fit into his or her needs and desires.
So it turns out that even on his 559th birthday, this remarkable fellow Leonardo da Vinci is still teaching us something about the future. What a genius.
In Part I, we talked a bit about how to prepare for a rock-solid employee performance review; in summary, the key is to establish firm expectations early and then observe progress carefully over the appraisal period. This puts both the worker and the manager in a position to enter the actual employee performance assessment with an understanding of what is about to happen and why. Here’s what should happen during the ideal appraisal itself:
Manager’s Assessment
As the time of the appraisal meeting approaches, the manager should set time aside to reflect on the worker’s performance, assemble the requisite paperwork, and fill it out with specific reference to the goals that were explicitly laid out for the worker at the beginning of the appraisal cycle. At this point, the manager should also consider the specific bonuses, pay scale changes, or other special changes in compensation that the worker has earned for his performance — positive or negative.
Ideally, the manager’s boss will review the completed paperwork before the appraisal meeting happens. The boss should be made aware of the specific goals that were set, but the manager should avoid stating everything in numerical terms — it’s equally important if not more so that the boss get a feeling of the manager’s opinion in qualitative terms as well. That gives the boss not only a feeling for the employee, but for the manager’s performance management abilities as well.
The Meeting
The manager and the worker meet at the end of the appraisal period. The previously-reviewed paperwork is gone over again between the manager and the worker, along with an employee self-review that the worker filled out on their own. An honest discussion follows about the worker’s performance: strengths, weaknesses, successes and failures, and any compensation changes that follow as a result of the above.
At the end of the appraisal, assuming that the worker stays with the company, the process immediately starts over at Step 1, with the worker and the manager going over the next set of goals going forward. The worker leaves the meeting understanding not only the impact of his previous work, but how he needs to modify his behavior in the future.
Employee engagement has become a business buzz term lately. Why are we hearing about it so much, and does it really matter? After all, you have selected and hired employees who bring not only the appropriate skills set, but also are able to work well with their team, right?
Here’s what author, Judith Bardwick, PhD says about employee engagement: “Gaining employee commitment results in greater profits because enthusiastic employees stay, contribute discretionary effort, and engage customers. Performance soars when customers are enthused and stay and when executives, managers, and employees are a collaborative team, united in achieving common goals.”
If we follow Dr. Bardwick’s lead, then the logical conclusion is that ignoring employee engagement leads to leaving profits on the table! Here is how you can shift focus and start to engage the workforce in your organization.
Engage First-Line Leaders
The impact of first line supervisors can’t be overstated. These employees are often an underutilized tool in spreading employee engagement through the ranks. Get these employees involved by developing their ability to lead (and therefore engage) team members. In recent years, the 360-degree assessment has taken the place of a more subjective one-on-one job review and also provides the foundation for their development. These assessments provide a balanced view of performance and build trust between management and staff.
Communicate
There is now doubt that an actively engaged workforce is the result of committed leaders. Engagement must be included in executive objectives. because engaging first-line leaders will follow only after executives have led the march. What can they do? Identify communication ambassadors within the company who can help transmit the company’s messages; supply engagement ambassadors with direct channels and information; and provide consistent information directly from the CEO that should be communicated with all employees.
Develop a Motivational Culture
While many leaders cringe at the thought of potential budget issues related to employee development, organizations can implement a few key employee development programs and assessments and gain maximum results by publicizing the efforts, consistently communicating regular updates about initiatives and changes that affect employees and providing opportunities for employees to be part of the their own development and engagement process.
The Takeaway: Engagement leads to profit and profit, wisely publicized and communicated, leads to to engagement.
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