Communicating Corporate Values

photo by pasukaru76

Harvard Business Review’s latest email tip of the day is around how to communicate your company’s values.  While this isn’t exactly rocket science it’s often easy to fumble identifying, communicating or changing the value system.

Rosanna Fiske’s first two points are vital.

1. Ask employees what is important to them

2. Establish values across the company, not just within management

A company’s value system cannot be mandated top down.  You didn’t mind being told what you valued when you were 6, but you also didn’t know any better.

Each day you contribute to your company’s culture based on what you value, how you get things done and how you behave.

In fact, everyone does.

So while a plush corporate off-site to hammer out new values feels like important work, it’s a boondoggle.  Without assessing the value systems of the employees, not as they experience the existing culture, but what they truly value in the workplace, the initiative is destined to be a very public flop.

Culture initiatives typically suffer the same fate as the boy who cried wolf.  You don’t get many chances to make an impact on the culture so don’t waste that bullet trying to create something without the feedback of everyone who walks through your doors today.

As I said, this isn’t rocket science.  The best way to guess what someone is thinking is to ask them.

Moneyball for HR

photo by j9sk9s

Three years ago this month I started the research behind RoundPegg.  I’m a bit of a baseball nerd and love the assorted flavors of statistics that have brought evidenced-based management to the sport.

My goal was to help business professionals replace some of the subjectivity within talent management with statistical rigor.  We are still on step 2 of this process now, but the vision hasn’t changed.

At the risk of seeming narcissistic, I thought it was a good time (given Moneyball’s huge box office opening last weekend) to trot out a soliloquy I wrote to my soon-to-be business partners about the opportunity we had to make an impact.

———RoundPegg: The Beginnings———–

I’ve been thinking a lot more about RoundPegg’s place in the changing the future and why I get so fired up about all this.  I tried to elucidate the concept through an incoherent story I told on Friday about the conversation I had with a friend at the Houston Rockets and how they were using statistical measurements to assemble teams to predict the outcome of highly inter-connected interactions.  Particularly in a sport where individual success often comes at the expense of team success and the stats reported are selfishly obtained.  Like our workplaces.

Coincidentally that same conversation he and I had was recently played out by Michael Lewis (author of MoneyBall) in what makes a tremendously long article to read online, but if you’re into sports or using statistical measurements to build teams, an interesting one.

With that, I hope, a better explanation of why this is so huge and the direction we could take this is such a game-changer.

Ultimately, I see RoundPegg completely changing how people work together by changing how we evaluate, grow and utilize people.

Where we begin to de-emphasize previous experiences (having already done a task) and recognize the inter-connectedness of our work teams and the importance the ‘softer’ skills play on our work outcomes.  Where we stop managing and supervising and start coaching and leading.  Where we let people put their strengths to use and the current ‘managers’ are only there to herd energy and keep the bus running straight.  I wrote a post on why I thought this was important over the weekend.

A couple sentences that illustrated this point for me in the NYT article:

“Battier’s game is a weird combination of obvious weaknesses and nearly invisible strengths. When he is on the court, his teammates get better, often a lot better, and his opponents get worse — often a lot worse. He may not grab huge numbers of rebounds, but he has an uncanny ability to improve his teammates’ rebounding.”

What we’re trying to do now by making sure we get the right people on the bus is just the beginning.  It’s vital and quite lucrative, undoubtedly, but if we succeed in forcing the conversation to acknowledge that our working relationships are as much or more important than the tasks I’ve previously completed then it’s a foot in the door and we can continue that story into the workplace.

After that it comes down to providing the tools for personnel development on an ongoing basis.  Eliminating the bullshit, demoralizing annual review and collecting regular data on our performances, like box scores, that will enable organizations to develop and get more out of their employees and allow RoundPegg to collect data about how we all work together and what drives success.

We’ll be able to recognize whether someone is a net positive or negative to a team regardless of what his individual track record may be.  We can identify strengths and weaknesses in a far more objective measure than ever available before.  We will be able to put them in a position to capitalize on their strengths, figure out the secret sauce behind work teams and cobble them together for organizations in a way that drives the business like we only hope for today.

We’ll also change what we acknowledge as contribution.  Our organizations will foster collaboration as a way to move ideas forward instead of internal competition (e.g. boxing out the right guy so your teammate can grab the rebound).  And we’ll be able to measure the intangibles.  Where it’s not always the guy who speaks loudest or most or with the most conviction who is construed as having the best ideas.  It comes down to evaluating people for their unselfish play that often gets overlooked now.

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It’s been fun to re-read this.  Our vision remains and we’ve made a lot of progress to the goal.  But, obviously, this is something that is going to take time, but we’ll get there…for the good of us all.

RoundPegg Available via Jive Software

photo by Mel B.

[Self-promo alert]

We are excited to announce that RoundPegg is one of first few companies to partner with Jive Software on their new social business platform.

The RoundPegg application is currently available to Jive consumers and allows employees to assess their cultural values, personality and communication style.

This matters because business is social. Now more so than ever.

It’s rare these days that our success is truly our own. We often have to lean on others in order to shine (and vice versa).  The more effectively we can tap into how others operate the more successful the result.

Too often, frustration mounts when we seemingly can’t get through to others. That makes it difficult to get through to people who operate differently.

RoundPegg enables Jive’s 15 million business professionals to share their psychometric results with one another and get specific actions detailing how to improve their professional relationship to get the best out of their reports, peers, managers and vendors.

For a limited time, the RoundPegg app on Jive will improve the inner workings of all Jive customers for free. Over time we will also provide companies with the ability to quantitatively assess their culture to understand what cultural values truly drive the differences in performance as well as the opportunity for customer companies to identify which candidates best exemplify their culture as well. (All of this can already be done via RoundPegg by contacting us at TellMeMore@roundpegg.com.)

Until then, let’s all understand our differences and work better together.

Introducing HR3.0

photo by mysza831

RoundPegg was mentioned on NPR’s Marketplace program last week talking about HR3.0 in the context of the hiring process.  (Disclaimer: we may very well have made up the term.)

Despite that, we fervently believe in the idea behind it and want to define it a little more detail.

HR3.0 introduces transparency to the job search/hiring process.

Even with more of the hiring process moving online, we are only just now beginning to catch up with where the process was in the offline world 15 years ago.

That’s not to say the digitization and transition online hasn’t improved the process some.  But it’s mainly recreated what’s already existed into 1s and 0s and improved things at the margins (see after the jump for a brief history of the online job industry).

HR3.0 marks the day when the power of the Internet is brought to bear to actually do things that were difficult, if not impossible, to do in the offline world.  HR3.0 starts the process of changing the game.

At its core, it is about transparency.

Transparency to ultimately figure out whether you can work successfully within a company or whether a job candidate will return you a positive ROI.

That includes peppering who you know and their contacts for information on working at a company or peppering shared contacts to get the real scoop on a candidate.  It also means having the ability to drill deep into a company’s real culture or a team’s sub-culture or drilling into whether a candidate will be able to work well with a team.

Changing jobs/hiring is a massive commitment and one where the deal is typically sealed after a three dates.  If a job seeker makes the wrong decision the downstream effects could derail the individual’s career path for a couple of years.  And a bad hire costs a company a ton of money (~150% of compensation) and has ripple effects throughout the team.

The commitment for both sides though is largely psychic though.  Will a new hire ruin a team’s chemistry?  Will a new gig and manager make your life miserable?  Team politics (used neutrally – every team has them) can be crushing for a new individual who doesn’t quite fit.

Being able to put more of that work-style information in the hands of the players involved means better decision-making (usually).

LinkedIn and apps like BranchOut have made it much easier to be proactive in the process.  It’s much easier to collect information about potential managers and candidates alike to begin painting the picture of what working together may be like.

We at RoundPegg are taking an exhaustive, objective approach to help companies understand their culture and who best fits while GlassDoor has started on the other end and offers candidates a peek behind the wizard’s curtain.

Ultimately it all paints a better picture of whether the grass really is greener.  Calling provided references is a joke and asking your uncle’s college roommate what it’s like to work at GloboCorp is a silly, invalid data point of one.

The Internet is helping reveal the true drivers of workplace success and providing both sides the opportunity to do things differently (and better).

Welcome to HR3.0.  This is just the beginning.  It’s going to get really damn exciting especially when these approaches start to converge.

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Read More >

Do Pre-Hire Assessments Affect The Applicant Pool?

People Don't Mind Assessments

This was a question we wondered about too.  For good reason, obviously.

Turns out, despite the fears of some, administering pre-hire assessments do not significantly diminish the applicant pool.

The fears are highly justified, but the bigger story here is that candidates want to avoid landing in a bad job as much as you want to avoid a bad hire.  After reading the comments it was clear they overwhelmingly supported the idea that applicants are not just willing, but hungry for something that will also help them identify whether they will fit a company’s culture prior to joining just as much as HR professionals and hiring managers.

The results (seen above) show that only 10% of applicants claim to flat out refuse to take a pre-hire assessment. [Though when push comes to shove, I'd guess not all of them will hold that line.]

Even better for hiring managers is that over a quarter will only complete the assessment if they are truly interested in the job.  This means pre-hire cultural assessments are a quick and painless way of lopping off the portion of the applicant pool who may have the skills and even be a good fit, but they just aren’t that into you.

Moral of the story: You may experience 1 in 10 people refusing to complete the assessment, but you’ll save time not having to weed through 1 in 4 who aren’t that serious or interested in your company or the job.  Even better, by administering pre-hire assessments you can tip the odds in your favor of hiring top performers who fit your culture.

[NOTE:  Given the number of respondents these results are accurate at a 95% confidence level +/- 3.56%.]