The Brandon Hall Group Excellence in Technology Awards
Harrison Assessments wins Silver
Harrison Assessments are proud to have been acknowledged with a coveted Brandon Hall Silver Award for excellence in the Best Advance in Technology for the Remote Workforce category.
We are honored to be recognized for our Remote Work Behavioral Competencies which reveal key behaviors needed for remote workers and leaders who manage remote workers to be successful. This advanced functionality provides real-time data that enables targeted development on both a group and individual level for a personalized approach to development.
Dr Dan Harrison, CEO.
Proud to be associated
As Managing Partner for Harrison Assessments UK, I am again proud to be associated with the winning of this prestigious award. Harrison Assessment Talent Solutions offers a one stop, highly accurate approach to talent solutions based on what makes people successful in the workplace and this recognition is so valuable.
Previous accolades
In 2022 Brandon Hall Group, the leader in Empowering, Recognizing, and Certifying Excellence in HCM, announced that Harrison Assessments was certified as a Smartchoice® Preferred Solution Provider, confirming that Harrison Assessments delivers the most accurate and effective assessment tools in the industry.
In 2014, Harrison Assessments achieved the Silver Award in the category for Best Advance in Succession Management Technology and Tools in the Future of Work Awards for it’s work on Assessment Based Recruiting Campaign Management.
Know more
You can read the full recent Silver Award press release here and you can read our previous post on Remote Working Analyticshere.
If you would like to know more about how this unique approach to talent solutions can support your organisation do get in touch.
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
I was discussing Employee Engagement Expectations with a customer recently and he happened to mention that they had just completed an anonymous engagement survey. He was disgruntled because, although the survey suggested pockets of people who were likely to leave the organisation due to lack of recognition, as just one example, he didn’t know who or where they were and couldn’t therefore take action. In other words –
‘Someone somewhere in the organization is unhappy about something but we don’t know the details and can’t therefore have a progressive conversation’
So why do organisations involve themselves in the anonymity of such surveys? Frankly its due to a perception (not always reality) of a lack of trust.
In other words they believe that employees will be more open if they don’t have to put their name to something. Doesn’t this reflect on the very organisers of the survey who unconsciously believe the organisation can’t be trusted?
Engagement tools are really useful for retaining talented staff! But they have to be used properly. Dan Harrison believes that employee engagement is a two-way process – it’s as much the organisation’s responsibility to keep staff engaged as it is for them to be engaged. A survey should be the foundation for a conversation on an employee’s expectations. For example, if an employee wants recognition, in what format does he/she expect this, who from and how often? If an employee is looking for development – in what areas, when and what format? OK so it won’t always be possible to fulfil expectations but at least the employee receives the message that the organisation is interested in them and will consider them when opportunities arise.
Such an approach requires trust so pre-framing the exercise is crucial. Employees must understand that the tool is to be used for improving engagement and not for anything else.
If you would like to know how to assess groups of employees, individuals or even the whole organisation for engagement expectations quickly and effectively, and to see the results instantly on an easy-to-read visual dashboard so that you know with whom to have progressive conversations please get in touch at pat@quadrant1.com or on 07768 922244 or find more information here. You can also read further about engagement analytics in this blog.
In the meantime ‘Stay Engaged!’
Pat Hutchinson
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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
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