| | In This Issue: | | To Improve Corporate Performance, Look Beyond the Process TIP OF THE MONTH:
Your workers may not be engaged if....
PRODUCT FOCUS:
Paving the Way for a Happy Marriage | | What's on at PROFILES | | Partner Training: Wed 31st Oct 2007, 2pm - 4pm Seminar: There is no seminar scheduled for October. | | Product of the Month: | | Would your company's productivity improve if you had insight into employees' problem solving abilities, initiative and ability to work in a team? The Profiles Performance IndicatorTM measures key behavioural factors that critically impact success, providing management information that makes every employee more valuable and productive. The Performance Indicator tells you: How to motivate the employee Whether the employee is internally motivated or will need to be externally motivated Behavioral tendencies in critical, job-related competencies your company Employee response to job stress, frustration and conflict Employees' adaptability to change It also provides a guide for employees' self improvement. Profiles Performance Indicator provides managers information that can be used to individualise training and motivational efforts and communicate more effectively with the people they work with. It provides feedback to help your organisation build productive teams, develop effective managers, train a powerful sales force, improve customer service and ease both frustrations and interpersonal conflict. Contact us for a complimentary Performance Indicator assessment for this month only. | | Quotes of the Month: | | "Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work." — Aristotle, Greek philosopher "Real success is finding your lifework in the work that you love." — David McCullough, historian "Success in business requires training and discipline and hard work. But if you're not frightened by these things, the opportunities are just as great today as they ever were." — David Rockefeller, banker “Building a high-performance, fully engaged workforce means an organisation must analyse and prepare a plan to attract and retain the best employees who are engaged and deliver results.”— Jim Sirbasku, CEO Profiles International | | Previous Newsletters: | | Past newsletters can be found on our website | | Contact Us: | | For Further Information Please Contact: Profiles International -Victoria 277 Moray St, South Melbourne VIC 3205 T: (03) 9673 9888 F: (03) 9673 9898 . Email Us | | Workforce Engagement: Improving Corporate Performance Companies are under constant pressure to increase productivity, profitability and revenue growth. Many companies have launched initiatives focused on process improvement, automating and streamlining business processes to achieve improved corporate performance. One often overlooked aspect of improving corporate performance is the significance of employee engagement – and the impact that people have on the efficiency of key business processes and overall financial results. An unengaged workforce puts a huge drain on corporate performance, placing businesses at extreme business risk. This issue is focused on exploring how HR can leverage employee engagement initiatives to drive improved business performance. Key articles include: - Why a large % of today’s workforce is unengaged, and the impact this has on corporate financial and operational performance
- 10 signs that help you spot an unengaged workforce
- Tools and approaches to help you measure and improve workforce engagement.
Would you like to understand how to fully engage your employees? Need help? We are industry leaders and are looking forward to working closely with you as the talent war wages on. Contact us now.
To Improve Corporate Performance, Look Beyond the Process FROM JIM SIRBASKU’S DESK Although many companies are focused on improving corporate performance, they may be using the wrong measurements to keep score of how they’re doing. The CFO, for example, might be using the yardsticks of revenue growth, cost of goods sold, days in inventory and days sales outstanding. His attention may be glued to hot new developments in business process improvement and using software to automate processes. Software and technology are great, but whoa! Let’s look at more than process improvement to better our key financial measures. Although seeing the needle rise on financial performance is crucial to all organisations, getting it into the stratosphere requires improvement in more than just the process area. It requires that leaders take a broad view of the company and look at the combination of everything – process, systems and people – and envision them all clicking together. This is not to accuse leaders of ignoring poor performance. But many do fail to see the big role that people play in processes. We can automate process and measure process and monitor systems, but the area with the highest degree of variability is the one which people occupy. How do you measure the effectiveness of people? That’s a very good question. One way to do it is to measure employee engagement, a seemingly fleeting quality in our organizations. If you doubt this, just follow the numbers to their sad conclusion. Surveys show that less than third of workers describe themselves as engaged in their work. Engaged employees are the ones who care about the job enough to perform at the highest levels. Another 10 to 18 percent, are deeply disengaged, and are even looking elsewhere for employment. The rest, about 60 percent, fall somewhere in the middle. But instead of looking at employee performance when financial numbers are weak, top managers often look at the business process to see where the errors are. We all must understand that we cannot remove the employee from the process. People play a critical role in processes, most significantly when something outside the norm of the process happens – a glitch in the software, if you will. Perhaps a customer heats up the phone lines with a billing discrepancy. Only people can figure out the problem and find a solution in which both the customer and the company win. It is people who must perform superbly to solve the problem, and that means an engaged employee, one who understands the problem and cares enough to see it through to a solution. Until top managers realise that employee engagement plays a key role in driving financial and operational performance, and put engagement-friendly programs in place, they will not achieve the level of performance they desire. Employee engagement is not only about turnover or worker satisfaction; the boredom or indifference of an unengaged employee touches everything, including financial and operational statistics. For example, an accounts receivable problem might really be a “people problem,” and it might ripple across the whole company. Although the CFO turns to the accounting department when he sees a money problem, the real weakness could be: -
A problem in customer service that creates unhappy customers who are paying slowly -
A problem in sales that is turning customers against the company, causing slow payment With all of the potential places that irritating problems can hide, don’t you want more than a third of your employees trying to ferret them out and eradicate them? The unengaged workforce is a tough problem – otherwise it would not stick to us so stubbornly – but we can make headway in addressing it. We can do it by: - Making sure we have the right person in the right job from the very start
- Providing training that ensures employees have the skills to do their jobs
- Putting in place managers who understand what their employees need and show them how to get it.
We have to address the issue of workforce engagement on several fronts, just as we do any dug-in problem. Only then will we begin to see that small percentage of engaged employees creep up. Only then will other significant numbers begin to rise as well. The sky’s the limit.
Jim Sirbasku, CEO
Profiles International
PROFILES TIP OF THE MONTH: Your Workers May Not Be Engaged If… - They miss important deadlines, not once, but chronically.
- They frequently report that they are too ill to come to work, and usually on Fridays or Mondays.
- Key managers expect high turnover.
- The same errors appear on the ledger sheet month after month.
- No one accepts responsibility for common mistakes.
- Team members are not communicating about basic job duties.
- No one can find Jennifer Employee after 3 p.m.
- Unfounded rumors about the organization frequently float throughout the office.
- Important equipment needs repair or replacement, and no one reports it, fixes it or replaces it.
- Workers’ pay remains the same even as their performance soars.
PRODUCT FOCUS: Paving the Way for a Happy Marriage In many ways, a work-to-worker relationship resembles a marriage. The organisation is attracted to the worker and/or vice versa. The two connect, commit with an engagement, and decide to unite. With good planning, hard work and a bit of luck, the relationship will be a healthy one that grows and flourishes. Just like a marriage, the work relationship will experience bumps along the way and the “couple” may need professional help. Profiles International’s family of products can help this union stick together instead of growing apart, starting at the very beginning. So, from the getting-to-know-you stage, or courtship, here goes: The employee wants to be wooed, and the organisation wants to make sure its potential mate is truly what he or she says and appears to be. Profiles’ Step One Survey II™ focuses on the trust issues essential to a healthy work relationship: integrity, substance abuse, reliability and work ethic. It's easy-to-understand report tells the employer-partner everything he or she needs to know, and promotes positive behaviours on the job, including good attitudes about work in general, as well as promptness, confidentiality, dependability and loyalty. This sets the tone for the employee. Everyone wants to feel understood, and this is just as important on the job as it is in a household. The Profiles Performance Indicator™ measures the behaviour factors that help a leader understand, motivate and manage his employees, helping to reduce conflicts that could become obstacles to solving problems. In a detailed report, the manager learns how best to motivate the employee, and whether he is internally or externally motivated; his behavioral tendencies in key competencies; and how he responds to stress, frustration and conflict. A second report for the worker provides ideas about professional growth and communication skills. The versatility of ProfileXT™ means that we can use it at almost every stage of the employee lifecycle. Let’s say we are trying to fill an important job from within the company and wonder how several key employees would fit there. Job Match Patterns provided by ProfileXT™ are effective because they compare the qualities of our job candidates to the attributes of the most productive employees already in the job. The patterns tell us whether candidates are similar or different from our top performers. Job Match more accurately predicts job success than any of the commonly accepted factors, such as education, experience, or job training, according to a study by the Harvard Business Review. And when people fit their work, the result is like a good marriage: they are more satisfied and productive, with less stress, tension, conflict, miscommunication, and costly divorce, or employee turnover. Organisations are using ProfileXT™ for placement, promotion, self-improvement, coaching, succession planning, and job description development, and clients say it is three to five times more effective than any other assessment they have tried. Healthy feedback is crucial to any relationship, and Profiles’ Checkpoint 360™ Competency Feedback System gives a manager the opportunity to receive an evaluation of his or her job performance from all around -- bosses, peers, and direct reports. Checkpoint 360™ can fortify an employee’s perceptions about his strengths if they are accurate, and offer insight into other areas where he may need to improve. It examines a manager in the crucial areas of communication, leadership, adaptability, task management and development of others. The feedback allows for comparison of the opinions of others with a manager’s own perceptions for an easy and accurate look at strength and weaknesses. |
