The current business world is a rapidly evolving and highly competitive one; a landscape that requires us to be adaptable, resilient, innovative, strategic and digitally fluent. It seems more important than ever for organisations to be establishing their competitive edge, their value proposition and what it is that sets them apart from other industry competitors. A few questions to ponder: thinking about your current industry: what does it take to be a market leader? Thinking about your current organisation: what role do people play in setting up your organisation to be a successful market leader?
“A company’s employees are its greatest assets, and your people are your product” Richard Branson.
Organisations are increasingly turning to sophisticated tools to enhance their organisational development strategies. Among these tools, psychometric assessments have emerged as powerful instruments for unlocking human potential and driving organisational success.
Assessments aren’t just ‘tests’ as we know them in terms of getting a result, a right or wrong answer, a grade. At least not the way we view them. They are a tool that, if used correctly, can unlock potential, create awareness, strengthen confidence and open up new ways of looking at things. They have the power to activate people and teams to be more effective and realise their underlying potential. They can help individuals and management think better, make stronger decisions and create insight through an evidence-based process. A key focus of psychometric assessments is people, however, the results can paint a broader organisational picture.
In keeping the people-perspective central to our approach, ask yourself this: what are some of the people-focused problems that your organisation faces? While assessment may not be able to solve the entire problem in isolation, it can be a highly valuable tool in providing a foundation of insight, vision and plan of action on which to build.
Below I have highlighted five people-oriented concerns that are common in organisations. They are posed as questions to spark thought and reflection. While the list is in-depth, it is nowhere near exhaustive. I would be delighted to open the conversation up further and explore people-focused concerns that your organisation faces as well as your experience of assessment and their impact.
Have you made poor hiring decisions in the past?
The cost of a poor hire can be more than just the direct financial cost. There could also be productivity losses, potential reputational damage, impact on team morale and dynamics, missed-opportunity cost, cultural impact and potentially even litigation costs.
One of the benefits of psychometric assessments are their predictive validity. Able to predict future job performance and suitability for a role, assessments can assist in the process of making the right choice. Assessing for role fit includes matching an individual’s skills, personality and cognitive skills (among others) to the requirements of the role. Through this process, individual strengths and development areas arise, which can be a valuable resource for performance management if the individual is hired. Not only do assessments provide predictive validity but they also present an objective perspective, minimising the biases that can arise from subjective judgements.
Ensuring employees are in roles that match their skills and interests leads to higher job satisfaction and engagement. This can have a significant impact not only on the individual’s performance but also a positive impact on the broader team.
Essential to the success of our processes is partnering closely with our clients to understand their organisational needs. This helps us design a well-informed, comprehensive and tailored approach where the results are insightful and practical both for our client and their potential hires.
Is there a team in your organisation that has ineffective dynamics?
“A single leaf working alone provides no shade”
Chuck Page
Individuals have their own set of skills and strengths that are a valuable contribution to a team; they also have their blind spots or development areas. Bringing talented individuals together provides an opportunity to leverage the strengths of the individuals but also to compensate and ‘cover’ for their development areas. Employing individuals that are diverse and different can be one of the ways to integrate various skills, perspectives and avoid group think. This, however, can also bring along differences of opinions, disagreements, tensions. It’s bound to happen to each of us at some point in our careers. The question is how can we best deal with it when it does? How do we navigate differences effectively and productively?
One of the first steps is self-awareness. We can’t solve for what we don’t know, right? So how can we try to strengthen or improve our responses if we’re not even aware of what they are? From an individual perspective, knowing our strengths and weaknesses, our natural reaction / responses when under stress, can support us to acknowledge and increase intentionality. Individual development assessments have the purpose of highlighting such tendencies and preferences.
However, there is no ‘I’ in team. Team development sessions are a valuable platform in which to create a psychologically safe space to navigate individual similarities / differences, strengths / development areas and apply them to the broader team. So often we tend to focus on the developments, however, our approach also emphasises strengths. These are superpowers that can be of immense value to a team and are sometimes overshadowed and underutilised.
Individual awareness and awareness of others are two crucial elements in team interactions. Assessment in a team setting can help create awareness and insight into how these intricacies can impact team dynamics and performance. If we are able to interact with awareness, we can be more intentional about listening, understanding, being compassionate and working together to find a solution to the shared goal.
Are you currently able to identify and develop your talent?
Living in a world where we constantly have information at our finger-tips, employees are frequently exposed to options and opportunities across the world. It’s no longer just local competitors, but global organisations and opportunities that are appealing to the workforce. It is important for employers to not only be creating a strong value proposition for employees, but to also invest in their employees. Top talent is unlikely to settle. The potential for growth, challenge and career progression are among a few factors that can increase employee retention. But how do you know who to earmark for opportunities? Sometimes ‘talent that whispers’ can be overlooked working in the shadows of ‘talent that shouts’.
Talent identification is an important aspect of employee growth and development. Assessments can support in identifying high potential talent. The impact of this is threefold.
- Individual development
The assessment process is an investment in the individual, providing an opportunity for self-awareness, learning and growth. Through individual one-on-one feedback sessions, they are given a platform to reflect, engage and activate their growth. - Performance management
Assessments are valuable in identifying skills gaps that need to be addressed through training or development. Personalised development plans can be designed that align with an individual’s strengths and development areas in relation to specific role requirements. This is a useful practical application to form the foundation of taking the next step and putting the ‘theory’ and knowledge into practice. - Succession planning
Psychometric assessments can support an organisation’s succession plan and development of leadership pipelines. The process can be used to identify future leaders who can step into key roles and ensure a smooth transition through a pipeline of prepared candidates. Strategic workforce planning can help identify and anticipate future needs as well as appropriate resource allocation. Through our assessment processes we support our clients to shape and strengthen their leadership teams entrusted at the helm to steer their organisation sustainably.
Does your current leadership team have a positive or negative impact on employees?
Have you ever had a bad manager? A manager that didn’t communicate well or listen to your ideas. Perhaps one that had poor EQ or that micromanaged. If so, I’m sure you can recall the effect it had on you. There is a quote that says “a bad manager can take a good staff and destroy it, causing the best employees to flee and the remainder to lose all motivation”. Poor leadership has a way of cascading down the organisation, impacting organisational culture, morale, productivity, and even the loss of talent.
As mentioned above, identifying and selecting the right person for the role can be useful in circumventing poor leadership in the first place. However, people and circumstances can change, and so addressing specific needs and gaps is also imperative. Leadership development through assessments can be a cornerstone to the development of targeted training programmes to address specific development areas of leaders. A particularly valuable combination we have noticed has been through our assessment pre-coaching process as well as feedback activation. These particular approaches make use of assessment, in-depth feedback sessions and/or coaching. The tailored process assesses and addresses specific competencies required of leaders in an organisation, equipping them with knowledge and support to actualise.
What is your company culture?
Forbes defines company culture as “the collection of unwritten norms, beliefs and collective attitudes that shape how things get done within your organisation”. You may be asking yourself, does a good company culture really make a difference? According to Gallup, companies that prioritise culture experience a significant 33% increase in revenue. And a remarkable 88% of job seekers consider a healthy work culture vital for success.
Assessment can help identify culture by investigating what employees see as their company culture as well as what kind of culture / environment they prefer to work in. Ensuring new hires align with the company’s values and culture, promotes a cohesive work environment. Similarly to aligning individuals to roles, matching individuals to the organisational culture can increase retention by hiring individuals who are more likely to thrive in the organisational culture.
Support organisational development through Multiplex’s Psychometric Assessment expertise
In our rapidly moving corporate world, it can be difficult to keep up and establish an organisation as a market leader. While there are many aspects that contribute to an organisation being a market leader, people are an essential part of this success. One of the tools valuable to addressing people-oriented concerns is psychometric assessments. There are multiple ways assessment can be applied to support organisational challenges. A few of these include selection, talent identification, succession planning, team development, identifying culture fit and leadership development.
In our processes, people are at the very centre of what we do and through our holistic evaluation, we strive to combine objective insight with the compassion that each individual encompasses even more than what we assess. Everyone has a story to tell, and assessment can be a powerful lens, a chapter therein that creates insight, empowers and activates potential, not only for individuals but for organisations. As a multidisciplinary team of organisational development consultants, we strive to unlock the power of assessments for our clients and share the positive impact that assessment can have on individuals, teams and organisations.
Get in contact with us today to unlock the power of assessment in your organisation.
