What Makes HR Look Good in the Board Room – if indeed they even get there!
Its easy to see the results of the Sales Director, the Operations Director and to review the numbers of the Finance Director. These things are tangible and measurable and tend to receive the majority of the Board Room focus because of this very nature.
Most organisations will tell you that their people are the most important resource they have and that looking after them and developing them is paramount. So why is it that the person who is Head of HR is often not represented on the Board and if they are, they often have to shout loudly to be heard?
The answer may be contained in just one word: ‘evidence’. People are not machines; they cannot be counted as a stock number and additionally, unlike stock, they have a thing called choice!
There are no norms – all people are exceptions to a rule that doesn’t exist
Fernando Pessoa – Late 19th Century Portuguese Poet
Hence HR people are often left with unquantifiable results. Being experts in their own field they can see what strategic decisions have to be made in relation to developing a productive, engaged workforce but with no statistical evidence this can be hard to justify.
Dan Harrison’s 30+ years of research into what makes people successful in the workplace, in particular roles and working in particular teams now gives us the very analytics needed to:
Identify the success behaviours required to perform in a particular role
Produce profiles against which to recruit successful candidates
Assess for leadership, BCs, values-based behaviours, remote working EI and much more
Conduct progressive engagement surveys upon which to make strategic engagement decisions as well as individual ones
Armed with such analytics, the HR professional stands a much better chance of making effective business cases in the Board Room!
If you would like to know more click here, or please contact me at pat@quadrant1.com
Engaged employees who wholeheartedly give discretionary effort help the organisation succeed.
While employee engagement is now afforded greater focus, energy and resources by most organisations, traditional employee engagement surveys only measure group engagement issues, ignore the individual data that is crucial to engagement, and assumes only their managers are responsible for engagement.
To significantly increase employee engagement you need to understand the passions, motivations, and expectations of the individual, and use an approach which is based around engagement being a shared responsibility between the employee and the organisation.
Using objective data, we can map individual employee’s passions, motivations, expectations and the degree to which their expectations are perceived to be already being fulfilled, against eight essential Engagement metrics:
• Development • Remuneration • Authority • Social
• Appreciation • Communications • Personal • Work Life Balance
View of top 21 employees alphabetically sorted from a group of 81 employees in total
What does this tell us?
The graph above provides a clear picture of this group of individuals; overall fulfilment scores are predominantly high. This indicates that the majority of these employees feel that the employee expectations which are important to them as individuals are mostly being met.
Do Darvin and Esmerelda appear engaged in their day to day role? Their scores would indicate otherwise, and this will probably be apparent in some way in their behaviours and productivity levels.
Why may Darvin feel like his opinions are not being valued? What may be behind Esmerelda’s apparent lack of fulfilment in her advancement and desire to lead?
Amanda, Antoine and Britt look like it wouldn’t take much for their engagement levels to drop either, and there are some areas where various individuals have rated factors as very important (10’s) which are not being fulfilled and could cause some issues.
The key is to find out what is behind the data
Each of these people – and everyone else in the group – could all benefit from a positive 1-2-1 discussion with their manager to firstly to explore may be behind these scores and to see why they feel their individual expectations are not being fulfilled, and what could be done by their manager, the organisation and they themselves to improve this, and their engagement in their role.
We can also see from the number of high scores afforded across the first 5 expectations – the desire for Development, Advancement, a Capable Leader, To Lead, and to have Opinions Valued, that these seem to be the most often identified as being important to the majority, whereas Quick Pay Increases and Personal Help do not appear to be deemed as important to the individuals in the group.
Room for improvement
The yellow and red areas indicate those expectations that are not necessarily being fulfilled, and can provide a great basis for 2-way conversation firstly to explore may be behind these scores and then to discuss how both parties can improve the situation and benefit from greater engagement. There may be some personal circumstances which are influencing the scores. There could be some simple local solutions in the team which could be implemented, and individual’s feedback could also be useful in feeding into developing wider organisational plans and strategies.
This granular level of in-depth engagement analytics can develop your leaders’ capability to engage their teams and retain top talent. Being able to see how individuals’ values align with your organisation’s business objectives and goals can promote open and engaging discussions and make performance reviews comfortable and productive for everybody.
Understand individual employee’s expectations and the degree to which there are met.
Provide effective engagement intervention for each individual employee by targeting the factors that are important to each employee.
Place employees in roles that are engaging.
Identify how the organisation can help fulfil the employee’s expectations as well as what the employee needs to do.
Understand engagement and fulfilment levels across the business
As well as individual data, an Organisational view enables you to understand collective engagement and fulfilment levels across the business.
View of employee engagement expectations data from a group of 81 employees in total
Again, we can see clearly that whereas the overall fulfilment of the group of 81 employees is around 2/3rds satisfied, there remains 1 third of expectations unmet.
We can also see that ‘Wants Development’ is the highest placed expectation, and ‘Wants Opinions Valued’ is the most unmet of them all. The grey areas show where those expectations have not been ranked highly, and indicates that flexible work time, quick pay increases and personal help are of little value to this group of individuals.
Explore your data in many different ways
Interactive dashboards allow you to select groups to analyse by department, team, or manager using customisable tags and easily generate reports. A traffic light colour scheme easily identifies any hot spot areas to focus on.
Using advanced organisational analytics such as these for PEOPLE means you can measure, identify, develop, and improve across individuals, groups, teams, business areas and behaviours using global and individual data to support people plans, drive action, and to create a culture of engagement and high performance.
Visualise your Group Data
This is a snapshot of the high-level Organisational Analytics data available just across Employee Engagement Expectations. You can also get data for your people and your organisation on:
Senior and emerging leadership competency
Culture of your organisation
Collaboration and Team competencies
Team Dynamics
Emotional Intelligence competencies
Remote Working competencies
How helpful would this data be for informing your people development plans, culture and engagement programmes and succession plans?
You can find out more about Organisational Analytics here. leaders skills and competencies
If you would like to discuss how Organisational Analytics can help support your business objectives and people plans please contact Pat Hutchinson: pat@quadrant1.com or on 07768 922244
You’ve just completed a great project, met the deadlines and brought it in on budget. You are feeling good but nobody says a word? As days go by nothing comes back and you start to doubt your success. The internal dialogue ramps up to a point where you become totally focused on whether or not you did indeed complete a successful project. You venture to ask a couple of questions of the people from whom you may have expected some positive feedback but the bemused looks set you back even further so what’s going on?
What’s happening?
Unconscious behaviour patterns are playing out here. You may have a high need for recognition and appreciation because your external reference system means you value other peoples opinions, external qualifications etc in order to measure your own success. Internally referenced people, on the other hand, measure their success against their own internal measures. They include the word ‘I’ to a large degree in their conversation and don’t need others to tell them they have done a good job. They will be bemused when externally referenced people ask for feedback and unconsciously view it as ‘needy’.
No feedback needed, thanks
Internally referenced people don’t take kindly to feedback because unconsciously they have a high degree of certainty that they are right (they are not always of course!). The unconscious thinking is that ‘if I don’t need feedback then nor does anyone else’. Consequently they don’t give it out and if they do it can sounds contrived and awkward. This type of behaviour can often come across as ‘confidence’ and will invariably help the internally reference person up the promotion ladder. They can also be very hard to give feedback to so here is a tip for you –
If you want to give feedback to an internally referenced person start with ‘Of course you probably already know this ……..’
A common thread often found in organisations is where managers and leaders have been promoted after demonstrating skill and success in operational roles. Unfortunately, many then appear to struggle to get to grips with the new role, and seem to lack some of the necessary skills and competencies required to make the step to becoming a successful leader for their teams.
The behaviours and resulting ramifications can often be seen and felt in the day to day workplace. Despite this, it can be difficult to pinpoint where to focus to help these people to develop more effective behaviours and strategies to improve these skills and bring better success in their role.
What could that focus look like?
This is a group overview of 40 managers, who have been objectively measured against 10 Leadership competencies.
If you were to look at the 9 areas of leadership competency in the graph below… which areas in particular would you say need some focus?
If you just look at the red areas then ‘Impact and Influence‘, ‘Leading People‘ and ‘Communication‘, in the first instance, perhaps? And then maybe ‘Achievement Orientation‘ and ‘Resilience and Perseverance‘. There doesn’t really seem to be any issues with ‘Problem Solving‘ skills or ‘Learning Agility‘. There’s a lot that could be improved across the amber areas as well to bring those skills up.
What could that look like and feel like in this organisation?
Perhaps a group of managers who are great at resolving issues, fighting fires, and taking learnings from experiences, success and mistakes and applying it to new situations.
However, perhaps some of them may not be so great at taking the lead in achieving the company’s mission and objectives, influencing and engaging their teams to contribute towards the company’s goals or communicating effectively with their teams to let them know what is expected of them.
Maybe a group of managers where some may have been promoted because they are good at their job – but haven’t yet been able to develop the leadership skills they need in their more strategic and influencing role.
And so if you look at the individual list view of those 40 managers below, who would you say could really benefit from some development and support to be able to better succeed in their role?
Clearly, everyone can always benefit from development and support. In this case, it would probably be helpful to get a better understanding of what is going on with Tuan Nyugen. And it would be worth looking at what additional development would be helpful for Adela Olga, Annalisa Elba, Shelby May and Minerva Dixon to improve their leadership skills.
It’s also quite easy to see who could make up a cohort for some skills development around ‘Impact and Influence‘ (last column), or Communications skills (2nd to last column).
And maybe it is apparent which managers could be considered for a benchmarking success exercise to support succession planning and recruitment plans. leaders skills and competencies
Visualise your Group Data
This is just a snapshot of the high-level Organisational Analytics data available just across these 10 Leadership competencies. You can also get data for your people and your organisation on:
Culture of your organisation
Individual’s alignment with your organisation’s core values
Individual and collective engagement factors and fulfilment levels of those engagement factors
Collaboration and Team competencies
Team Dynamics
Emotional Intelligence competencies
Remote Working competencies
How helpful would this data be for informing your people development plans, culture and engagement programmes and succession plans?
You can find out more about Organisational Analytics here. leaders skills and competencies
If you would like to discuss how Organisational Analytics can help support your business objectives and people plans please contact Pat Hutchinson: pat@quadrant1.com or on 07768 922244
Life is a paradox! Nothing is ever absolute as Yin Yang tells us. Flexibility is the name of the game and those who demonstrate it are generally more able to succeed in the world. Living by rules alone creates barriers and structures and limited thinking. Rules are often maintained long after they are obsolete. Living with constant choice, on the other hand, can create chaos for those involved not knowing what is likely to happen next and often paralysed into inaction because of it.
In an ideal world ‘All Procedure Should Increase Choice’. In other words the rules are there to create a platform of understanding from which to launch new, creative ideas. Take the rules of the road for example – without them chaos would reign and travelling from A to B or even C, D or E would become chaotic and traumatic.
Are your rules helping or hindering?
So next time you have a minute take a note of the rules (written and unwritten) that you abide by within your working environment. Are they helping or hindering creativity and progress. Equally are there some areas where rules might give people the confidence to break out of their comfort zones and make progress? Food for thought. Enjoy!
If you would like to know more about paradoxical success please get in touch with us
This is a snapshot of the high-level Organisational Analytics data available just across Employee Engagement Expectations. You can also get data for your people and your organisation on:
Are your rules helping or hindering?