In modern business, personnel assessment is not a luxury, but a necessity. It is a tool that helps companies meet current and strategic challenges.
At the same time, the object of research is quite extensive and multifaceted: the assessment can be aimed at determining the current level of qualifications and professionalism of employees, at studying the motivational-value or personal characteristics of people, at identifying the degree of personnel involvement and determining the personnel potential of the company.
Methodologies and assessment tools will also differ: psychometric questionnaires are perfectly suitable for studying personal aspects, sociometric studies will help to understand the current state of personnel and their attitude to work and organization, a section of knowledge can be made by testing or interviews, and competencies can be better studied using more reliable methods – an assessment or development center, business simulation or practical management cases.
It is important to understand that sometimes we evaluate not so much the staff as the actual results of their work. For example, evaluation of performance through the analysis of KPIs of departments helps to notice deviations in performance indicators timely, while their reasons can be both in employees and in the organizational environment, however, in this case, most likely, the procedure will be called “personnel assessment” by KPIs.
Regular staff assessments help identify and resolve problems in a timely manner, improving overall performance. At the same time, not all companies have enough resources to maintain cyclical and repeat assessment procedures with a certain set frequency. It is not rare that HR issues are assigned a relatively low priority compared with production, technological, financial and other tasks that are significant for business. However, there are a number of situations when it is advisable to take the issue of assessing people into focus even with its initial absence in the tactical and strategic plans of the management team. Let’s take a closer look at some of them.
The company is not productive
The most widespread situation when most organizations reasonably decide to think about the need to evaluate personnel is the occurrence of problems with achieving goals or implementing projects. If the team does not cope with the tasks, the reason is not always obvious right away: employees may lack qualifications, lack specific knowledge (product, market) or practical skills, or maybe highly professional employees are simply not interested in achieving the desired results or are demotivated by some factors in the corporate environment? In such multifactorial conditions, of course, it is important to understand the true causes, identify weaknesses and only then begin to develop measures to improve the situation.
The tools for solving such problems are best used in a comprehensive way: for example, a full-format Assessment Center, including a set of projective practical exercises aimed at assessing corporate competencies, a professional knowledge test and questionnaires aimed at diagnosing people’s motivation and involvement. This approach will allow to get immediately a voluminous diagnostic picture “at the exit” and thereby improve the quality of further management decisions.
The company is growing or preparing for expansion
Preparing for business expansion or opening new areas (entering new types of activities, new product niches, new specific client audiences or new work formats, etc.) requires thinking about forming a “dream team” capable of becoming successful “discoverers”: identify those who are ready to take on new tasks and who will really cope with them. It is not uncommon for such expansion vectors to be called corporate startups. When it comes to large-scale projects, it is often necessary to find answers to the questions posed both about leadership positions and about the jobs of ordinary performers. Identifying employees with suitable motives, attitudes and personality traits, analyzing their experience in targeted and related areas, assessing leadership and management skills are all integral stages of work that precede the successful launch of new areas and business expansion.
A special case of the situation described above is the well-known “Personnel Reserve” – a strategically important project that becomes a priority task of the HR service for any actively developing company. The main purpose of creating a personnel reserve is to provide personnel for a certain list of key positions for the company. Moreover, not any personnel who formally close the gaps in the staffing table, but effective personnel: capable of achieving their goals due to the totality of developed competencies, personal characteristics and the desire to succeed in the chosen activity. It is important to note that a systemically and qualitatively built personnel reserve system has a special focus on assessing the potential of employees, which determines a person’s ability to develop and achieve high results in the future. It is a two-dimensional model where the current level of efficiency is compared with the potential that allows to divide the reserve into groups of different urgency, make a correct forecast for filling key positions and draw up an effective plan of the necessary HR measures to support the business.
The company is changing
When changing working conditions or implementing new processes, it will also be useful to pay time and attention to personnel assessment. The transition to a hybrid work format requires testing the skills of time management and self-organization, and the introduction of a CRM system requires assessing the readiness and ability of employees to learn. How will the planned changes be perceived by the established team? What support measures or activities aimed at ensuring the introduction of innovations will be necessary and sufficient? Are there any “forwards” in the team that you can rely on in the transformation process? The answers to these (and not only) questions will be provided by a timely assessment of the staff.
Conflicts in the company
If your organization is like a fragmented feudal state, employees are reluctant to help and assist each other, and corporate events are uncrowded without an announcement that “presence is mandatory,” then with a high degree of probability your company loses up to 15% efficiency due to insufficiently productive atmosphere in the work team. This is another reason to think about evaluating personnel. Uneven distribution of tasks or inefficiently built business processes not rarely lead to the fact that someone feels deprived of rights or overloaded with responsibilities.
The study of relationships in the team using the analysis of network interaction and the “360 °C degree” assessment method, a series of individual interviews to identify the causes of conflicts, diagnostics of cooperation skills and constructive resolution of contradictions of interests will help determine the points of application of efforts and understand how to proceed.
The company is losing customers
Growing customer dissatisfaction with the company’s products or services, which has reached the stage when the actual loss of regular customers and a decrease in the corresponding indicators occur, at first glance, is a special case of a decrease in performance and failure to achieve goals. However, upon closer examination, as a rule, the situation turns out to be more complicated, being rather a hybrid of the two cases described above. On the one hand, the company needs to diagnose the reasons for the decline in efficiency in order to develop subsequent corrective measures, on the other hand, in parallel, the organization faces the need to restore its market reputation and gain a lost market share, which, in fact, is an exit to a new area of activity requiring the formation of a “special purpose team”. Preference from the point of view of tools in such a difficult situation should certainly again be given to comprehensive assessment methods: its results will be equally useful for both vectors of the company’s work.
Company loses staff
High turnover is certainly also a reason to evaluate staff. Moreover, it is important to study the motivational and value field of employees – to find out what is the incentive for them to work and what keeps them in the company, and in addition, to study the degree of their current satisfaction with significant factors. Psychometric questionnaires, together with exit interviews and regular satisfaction surveys, will help identify and eliminate the causes of turnover by developing an effective employee retention program.
The company is building a training system
In conditions when the labor market is unstable and highly competitive, and the search for qualified specialists is becoming more complicated and costly, many modern companies are trying to switch to an internal hiring model and decide to create their own system of training and development of employees. Such corporate projects can have a different scale: they affect only a narrow circle of key specialists, to a greater extent resembling the process of creating a targeted personnel reserve, or cover the activities of all employees without exception through the creation of corporate training centers or corporate universities – in any case, personnel assessment is an essential element of this system and a starting point that largely determines further success.
The hard part is said to be training staff on two things: what they already know and what they don’t need. Therefore, first of all, when starting training for employees, it is useful to determine their current level of development and identify the needs for knowledge and skills. However, with a systematic approach to building training and development processes in the company, an integrated approach to personnel assessment will be more effective, diagnosing not only the level of development of competencies, but also their ability to adapt and learn, motivation for professional growth and career development, leadership potential, etc.
Recently, companies have often highlighted work with talents as a separate area in the system of internal training and development. Some organizations operating in high-tech industries, where there is a constant struggle for rare narrow-profile specialists, make this area of work a priority. This is not surprising, given that, on average, the cost of cultivating internal experts in a corporate environment is 2-3 times lower than the cost of hiring similar ready-made specialists from the market.
It is important to understand that when forming a pool of talents, in contrast to the personnel reserve, the company is not faced with the task of closing a specific list of vacancies, but creating a special group of promising employees capable of generating new ideas and leading them into reality, achieving breakthrough successes and outstanding achievements. This, in turn, leaves an imprint on approaches and methods for assessing personnel – the formation of a talent pool requires attention to parameters such as the ability to learn and adapt quickly (tests of ability and intellectual potential), creative thinking and innovative potential (analytical case tests, business game simulations, creative practical tasks), leadership qualities and managerial competencies (role-playing games and other practical tasks of classic assessment and development centers), motivation for professional growth and career development (psychometric motivational-value questionnaires), readiness to work in conditions of uncertainty and turbulence (personality questionnaires).
Thus, staff assessment is an indispensable tool for sustainable development. Timely initiated and well-conducted assessment allows to overcome and sometimes prevent crisis situations, identify hidden reserves and opportunities, find accurate answers to external “challenges” and threats, becoming an investment in the successful future of the company, which is difficult to overestimate.
By Elena Kadyrova, CEO of Talent Q