Employee Retention | Viatech Global

Many supply chain industries have seen a significant demand to keep their shelves full and shipments moving. How can you do that without the right people? Many are just filling an open space, but what if you could do more and ensure that the quick fix is also a long-term gain.

Are you part of a supply company that has been forced to hire a lot of new employees to meet the emergency demands of our present economy? Despite your efforts, are you finding it hard to stay ahead of the demand and conduct the essential screening interviews to ensure you get the best workers? For many, the increase of hire is for an entry-level position, so the fast hire and quick fix seems to be the way to cope.

As an assessment supplier with 25 years’ experience, I lean towards assessing as a screening tool. Why interview someone you have no intention of hiring? It seems, in my experience, a lot of companies rely on a screening interview to assess the next steps before they pass on for further evaluation or rejection. Interviewing takes a significant level of experience and talent that not many of us are trained to do or excel at. Couple this with the 300+ biases of the human brain and there is the significant possibility that some good candidates don’t make the cut and some that should never have been considered do. This is costly for everyone.

Our working clients have found that a focus on judgment can pare down the pool of applicants to the top potentials you really want to spend your time evaluating. This saves time, money, and leads to hiring employees with excellent performance potential. Our judgment assessment is not a self-report screen, making it virtually impossible to game. The assessment is objective because it requires the potential hire to process information and come to a conclusion in a short period.

In this pandemic world, you need the ability to act fast and hire quickly, but at the same time limit the possibility of making bad hires and to know what your applicant will be like after the interview. The cost of an assessment screening is easily offset by not having to do a screening interview. It is that simple and it is more reliable.

Keep in mind we are reacting to the current situation, trying to provide the best solution for the immediate need. Hiring for high-performance team members well suited for the job, the culture, and management style is a different challenge, but should not be lost in the moment.

Find out how you can reduce some of your risk of hiring by using our judgment screen as a part of your process. Gain insight in ready time that will improve your long term outcome.

Let us show you a path to bettering hiring practices at a lower cost. Find a time to talk https://www.timetrade.com/book/BLVWM

The last time you started a job you may have felt that your new boss said, “ You’re Hired. Now Figure Things Out.” That’s not far from the truth about how most American companies operate. You are hired to quite literally fill a position, a desk, in a box on an organizational chart. If they could find a monkey or automate the work, you would not even be needed to fill that space. At Valve Software, the organization chart in the employee handbook is a dig at traditional organizations.

Most of the employee handbook is a dig at most other businesses and that’s the way Valve likes to operate. They can pretty much do what they want because they are not bound to lenders or people who own their ideas. The business is fully self-funded and Valve owns the ideas and patents for their gaming software unlike anyone else in the gaming and software development field – and that’s not all that makes them innovators in American business.

Hold on to your seats: Valve wants their employees to be innovators who are thinking about where they can best serve the organization.

That’s right. Valve hires free-thinking innovators and creates an environment in which they can flourish. Why your desk has wheels is because the team at Valve wants their employees to be thinking about their next move within the company.

Where can YOU best serve the organization? When were you EVER asked that in corporate America? You have more than likely never been asked unless you have worked at Valve.

Team members of Valve actually move their desks to be closer to the teammates with whom they are working. There are maps not only of where each person should be; there are maps of where each team member is currently located. Pretty amazing and shockingly logical: Allowing employees to make decisions about their work and schedule creates and maintains an environment where employees are highly productive.

Here’s the catch – Companies like Valve have a specifically non-corporate environment and not everyone is going to flourish in this culture. How to identify prospective employees who fit the corporate culture is one of the ways Viatech Global can help your business grow. Our value science tools help employers identify, engage and retain employees. We want your business to gain the greatest value from your biggest asset – your employees!

As businesses continue to rebuild from the recession, it is important to understand how to engage and retain employees. Treating employees fairly is at the core of meeting this goal. It sounds simple but it’s often not well executed. Businesses see the bottom line and forget the path to the bottom line is the people within the organization.

Costco CEO Craig Jelinek understands how to treat employees fairly. He pays them a wage that sustains and retains them as employees. The industry average is $12.67 per hour compared to Costco’s $20.89 per hour wage. 80% of Costco employees have health insurance compared to 50% of the employees at their biggest competitor, WalMart. As a result of having a living wage and affordable healthcare, they are less stressed, and happier. Jelinek believes that treating employees fairly is the key to creating a healthy economy. He might be on to something with the Costco stock rising as much as 30% since he became CEO. (Source)

There’s no secret formula for treating employees fairly. It’s all about who you hire and promote to leadership positions and how they execute the following:

Effective communication of the company mission, vision and values. Leaders need to have a grasp of what the company values in order to hire and manage employees who fit the company culture.
Set clear roles and expectations. Employees want to know what they need to do and how what they do fits into the larger company goals.
Establish a path to recognition and rewards at all levels of the organization. An effective recognition program will help engage and retain employees.
Mentor and coach employees to their individual styles. Not everyone learns the same way. Pairing complementary learning styles during the on boarding stage for example dramatically enhances the process as well as increasing the engagement of the individual. At all levels of training understanding how a person learns is crucial to training effectiveness and productivity.
Understand the personality types of employees at all levels of the organization to ensure they fit within the organization.

It’s on this last point where the team at Viatech Global can be most effective for your organization. We believe in helping businesses hire the best, empathetic leaders who treat employees fairly and with respect. We accomplish this by measuring their inherent talent to be leaders. To learn how we can help your organization engage and retain employees, please contact us.

Science and scientific discoveries have resulted in many paradigms shifts throughout the centuries. From realizing the earth is not flat to the fact that not everything revolves around the earth and that the earth is but a spec in the larger galaxy that we are a part of. Scientific discoveries have led to much advancement, but at the same time each new discovery is met with objection and resistance. Take for example; in medicine it was discovered that doctors who wash their hands, had fewer patients that died. It wasn’t until later that we could see the microscopic diseases that they were carrying into surgery with them and many doctors resisted the necessity of washing their hands until it was strictly enforced and accepted. Today, it is amazing to see the many applications of new technology in medicine from the use of internal cameras that give a much clearer picture of what is happening inside the human to MRI’s that can help target specific medical procedures.

Science is on the verge of making a new paradigm shift when it comes to understanding the human brain and performance as well. There are more neuroscience studies coming out daily now that is truly possible to keep up on. However, the results of many of these studies should be turning people’s heads and practices when it comes to how organizations are run and when it comes to the selection and retention of employees. In a recent webinar by Dr. David Rock and Dr. Matt Lieberman, they presented information on over 30+ Biases that every human has that we cannot overcome by just simple training. Their implications for all of this, was that if we really want to break down the bias that exists in present organizations, we need to find better ways to factor out human bias. Very similar findings were presented in the book, Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People by Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwarld, where they point out mind bugs that keep us from seeing the truth, to the hidden cost of stereotypes that many of don’t know we even have. These findings should have a real impact on changing the present practices in organizations when it comes to the selection process, the promotion process, and the review process. In short, we need to come up with more objective measures than just human on human evaluation as it is impossible for even the best train individual to completely remove their bias. This really means that a whole new paradigm shift in how we attempt to manage and deal with employees needs to take place.

I had the privilege of attending a very intimate HR conference last summer and was able to sit down with 12 HR managers from larger companies, not just in the US but international as well and just ask them what their greatest headache was. The amazing part was that most of them said the very thing that Dr. Rock was attempting to point out. They felt that there was not a unified approach across the larger company on how people were selected and trained. Different sectors in different companies may have used one assessment or another, but there was not a unified front across the organization. In fact, one HR director would have given anything to finally find a system that could cross over from selection to help them with ongoing training and retention and succession planning.

We at Viatech Global would like to help you and your company become an early adopter in the future paradigm shift in the HR industry. We work with a series of assessments that will provide more objectivity to your selection, training, and retention of top talent. It will take the guess and bias out of what you do. It will provide your team with a language of understanding that will help you develop not only your individual employees, but also your existing work teams, so that they can become more productive and attempt to overcome some of the biases, blind spots, and blocks to performance that exist.