News You Can Use | Issue 02 |
What We’ve Been Reading
On-boarding – One size NEVER fits all
Disengagement for new employees – particularly younger employees – begins with the onboarding process. Our research (and others, like the Gallup Q12) indicate that the most disengaged workers tend to be younger, with university degrees. Only, we don’t think it’s because of a lack of drive or a lack of work ethic. We wrote about that recently HERE.
We’ve been reading other stuff that points to what we hope is a new trend – a far more personalized approach to on-boarding an employee based on their actual competencies relative to the job for which they’ve been hired. It’s important – because the cost of disengagement and high turnover is one of those insidious, ‘hidden’ overhead costs that – particularly for smaller organizations – can make a huge difference.
The Association for Talent Development (ATD) in the US has an interesting take on this HERE
The key is the personalization of the onboarding process, and the need to put it in the hands of the department manager who’s ultimately responsible for integrating the new hire into the company.
Accurate competency profiles and assessments are critical to the process.
Not only can they help find and recruit the right people, but when the onboarding process is designed to address specific gaps and provide specific supports to a new hire in relation to the the competencies required for success, there’s a much higher chance that the employee will become engaged with the organization and feel that they belong. And too often this doesn’t happen, or it’s done in a really impersonal and haphazard way. This HBR article THIS HBR ARTICLE provides some useful guidance to new managers – but it’s equally applicable to experienced managers too.
We teach leaders about the 3 circles model (Task, Team, Individual) and the importance for leaders to focus on the Team and Individual aspects of the model to grow the capacity, agility and resiliency of their organizations.
And we know from the Gallup Q12 that when managers focus on growing people – based on competencies – the results are beneficial to the organization, AND raise the level of engagement of workers. It just makes good sense. Creating the conditions that allow individuals to work toward purpose, autonomy, and mastery leads to superior results. And… unsurprisingly – the key is thoughtfully developed competency profiles for every role in the organization.
If you’re interested in diving deeper into this – our TMA Method and Comaea technologies can help – Get in touch with us: dirk@workforcestrat.com
New Services and Events
TMA Talent Assessment and Career planning Resources
Many of the studies in 2023 and new predictions about talent management challenges for 2024 show the same trend – employees increasingly are looking for new, more challenging, and meaningful jobs. This trend will drive higher turnover, and employers will lose their competitive ability as they lose critical skills. Employee discontent with their jobs is evidence that traditional career maps and development practices are no longer adequate.
For organizations to recruit and retain the talent they need to prosper, it’s clear that change is needed. Emerging research suggests that employers who design their recruiting processes to ensure alignment between jobs and the natural talents of their employees will create more engaged, productive, workplaces. If they then develop those same employees in an intentional manner that leverages these natural talents, they can reduce time to competency and further increase productivity and engagement – today’s worker wants to be valued, developed, and take part in work that is meaningful and satisfying. When employers can create this sort of talent-first organization, they create better value for their customers, now and into the future.
Workforce Strategies has searched the global marketplace for tools and resources that assist people to understand and use their drives, talents, and competencies to make the best possible career decisions – and we are pleased to announce that we are now offering the TMA Method to our clients. This is an online resource which allows individual employees and their managers to gain access to a detailed assessment of talents and tendencies, but also to a portal that facilitates on-going development. It drives the sorts of talent-based conversations that improves fit between people and roles, and results in more effective organizations.
TMA is available for individual subscriptions, or can be licensed to larger organizations: click here to get in touch with Dirk Volschenk to learn more about how TMA can drive talent transformation and improve the performance of your organizational performance.
Upcoming Events
Good certification programs can be useful to organizations because they de-risk the hire (aka employee). In other words, they help employers know what they are getting (or have).
A great certification program utilizes the competencies that employers need, but struggle to find or develop. This truly de-risks the hire and provides real value to the organization.
Join us on March 21 as we discuss how to achieve a great certification program.
Cool Stuff We’re Involved With
Ideas we’re pursuing…
Over the next few months we’ll be going deeper in our research on the linkages between organizational structure, competency, talent processes and leadership behaviour – a collision of ideas that we think will reveal some new insights and approaches that will add value for our clients. Stay tuned – we’ll be “thinking out loud” about this stuff in a series of articles and blog posts. We welcome feedback, whether you think we’re right or you think we’re wrong – and are eager to hear your experienced around the challenges of creating a truly competency-based organization
Get in touch with us!
Contact Jeff Griffuths
“The WFSI team helped me define the skills and competencies I needed in the first official hire for my business. As a small business owner trying to grow, their help was absolutely instrumental. I can’t recommend WFSI highly enough especially for small businesses – we so often struggle to know what we need and having someone who really understands how to organize a team and find good people is a Godsend. The WFSI had me sit down and define what the business needed and then helped me find it. I can’t say thank you enough.”
Carla Davidson, PhD
Endeavour Scientific Inc.Sign up for updates!
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