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Basic Behaviours
in Short Supply: Showing Up, Working Hard...
Opinion by John W.
Howard
While it's
possible my Grandpa's memory is playing tricks
on him, employers are confirming that some of
the things Grandpa says about "the way things
were" are true - and important. For example,
Grandpa said that a long time ago people just
expected to show up for work, on time, every
day. But today?
A manufacturer of complex machinery, when
discussing this issue, indicated their cost
accounting process had identified another hidden
cost of absenteeism and its little brother,
tardiness: When the person who was supposed to
be performing a specific task was gone and
replaced by someone else, the average cost of
the process itself increased by an average of 23
percent. That's not too surprising. They also
found the cost of warranty claims attributable
to the process increased by about the same
amount, 25 percent. (Not surprising either.)
The revelation, though, came when their
figures showed the process cost and the warranty
cost of the nearest upstream process on the line
and the nearest downstream process both
increased by about half that number, 11 percent
... and the next stage upstream and downstream
also increased, by about 7 percent! This "ripple
effect" in a production environment means for
every minute a worker is not doing the job
assigned to him or her, for whatever reason, the
cost of the production process in their care
increases by a net amount approaching 100
percent!
Not many manufacturers in our competitive
world can graciously accept a 100 percent
increase in costs of production processes, so it
is not surprising that the problem of
absenteeism/tardiness looms large in
manufacturers' concerns.
If the perceived value of "showing up on
time" leads the work values declining over the
past two generations, "working hard" must be
close behind. In our own surveys of employers
attending our seminars on hiring and retention,
leading concerns have been "finding enough good
people who will show up when scheduled and work
hard when they are at work."
In addition to the production costs discussed
earlier, lack of reliability and work ethic
dramatically increases hiring costs when those
factors are not measured in the hiring process.
Now obviously, not every worker who has
entered the job market in the last 10 years
suffers from lack of these values. To find
enough good workers, an employer's task is
difficult but not impossible, and the payoffs
are substantial:
- Expand your recruitment pool so you have
enough applicants to be selective
- Use a valid and reliable assessment to
predict reliability and work ethic
- Avoid hiring those who are unlikely to work
out on those dimensions
- Work to keep those good people you do
hire.
More Employers are Checking
Backgrounds
ADP reports that for
2005, employer background checks increased by 12
percent. According to their figures, 49 percent
of the checks showed a "data inconsistency" in
education, employment or credentials, compared
to information provided by the applicants.
"Our Assessment Program Isn't
Working... "
If your assessment
program appears to be having less effect than
you anticipated or no effect - or worse, a
negative effect, it is time for a thorough
checkup! Here is a list of questions we offered
for your assessment program checkup:
Do you actually have a program?
Examine the process your business is using to
administer and apply assessments. Are the
procedures written, consistent and used as
designed?
Are you using the assessment results to
affect your decisions?
Too often, close examination of the usage of
assessment information exposes a simple fact:
Results are simply being ignored, underweighted
or "explained away" by the people on the front
lines of the decision process.
A simple analysis of a prescreening program,
for example, will often reveal there is simply
no significant difference in the assessment
results of those hired and those not hired after
assessment. (It's not being used!) In these
cases, the front-line decision makers may well
believe they are using the information and will
often passionately defend the reasons for not
using the assessment information in specific
decisions.
Is each assessment being used
appropriately?
Use assessments as they were designed to be
used and for purposes tested in the validation
process.
Are your outcome measures job-related,
specific, measurable and repeatable?
The selection of outcome measures is critical
to the success of your program. The less
subjective your outcome measures, the more
likely you will be to properly implement, adjust
and maximize your program. Beware of "fuzzy"
measurements such as managers' opinions of
effectiveness, self-scoring of variables like
happiness and satisfaction and correlations with
other variables with low or no established
reliability of their own.
Are you using a "whole person"
approach?
Assessment programs are, at the most basic
level, simply intended to provide information.
Information, from any source, is subject to
error.
It is important to have information from a
variety of reliable sources, and any single
assessment's information should be combined with
information from other sources to minimize error
and increase the probability that a good
decision will result.
Complete this checkup now and repeat it at
regular intervals.
Designing and implementing an assessment
program is a process, not a single action.
Constant review, continuing measurement and an
open mind are the hallmarks of an assessment
program that works!
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