Good management is all about understanding employee fit — and to be specific, understanding how employees fit with – their job requirements, their fellow employees, their manager, their team and the organization as a whole.
The old adage “People are hired for their talents and fired for their behavior” is true.
“The best strategy for dealing with toxic behavior is prevention,” Baird Brightman, PhD points out. “Approaches like self-assessment instruments and “360 degree” observer ratings work better in detecting potential problems than interviews and reference checks.”
6-step behavioral assessment program checkup:
- Do you actually have a behavioral assessment program? If so, 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? (Hiring, employee development, succession, etc.) Too often, close examination exposes a simple fact: Assessment results are simply being ignored, underweighted or “explained away” by the people on the front lines of the decision process.
- Is each assessment being used appropriately? In the Department of Labor’s (DOL) Testing and Assessment: An Employer’s Guide To Good Practices, this is a cardinal principle. 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 less subjective (more objective) your outcome measures, the more likely you will be to properly implement assessments. Be careful 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 intended to provide information and should be combined with a variety of reliable sources. In a hiring scenario this will be: pre-interview – assessment feedback – formal interview – references and background check. The goal is making smart, informed, hiring decisions.
- Complete this checkup now and repeat it at regular intervals.
The benefits of using behavioral assessments are two-fold:
- Behavioral assessments provide employee and candidate insights that can lead to higher productivity and job satisfaction throughout your organization.
- The feedback collected from behavior assessments provides leaders with perspective on the current workforce in the organization and highlights areas of concern affecting the total workplace experience.
And do not forget – designing and implementing an assessment program is a process, not a single action.
At Windridge we work with you to identify “best fit” candidates for the positions you are filling (all levels: top to bottom). We also provide behavioral assessment expertise (certification if desired) to help you develop your current workforce to their fullest potential.