You know the dopamine spike you get from finding a candidate with the proper skill set, experience, and apparent culture fit. Things are about to get very competitive. Imagine that a near-perfect candidate chooses one of your competitors because they provided a better candidate experience. Even if your benefits package is competitive, the ease of the hiring process will reflect how your organization operates, and you need to show off your attention to detail.

Do some spring cleaning in these three critical areas of focus to keep a competitive candidate experience in your talent search.

Improving your company’s #candidateexperience starts with your careers page. Get @CaliperCorp’s tips on their blog:
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1. Your Application

Start with your careers page and your application. Your careers page is a billboard for your company. Make sure it’s mobile-friendly and easy to apply. Be clear and concise in how you portray your company, but show off your culture, too. Refresh how you represent your company on this page. The page should be tailored to your candidate’s needs rather than bragging about your company’s accomplishments.

Consider including these on your careers page:

• Company culture video
• Growth opportunities
• Exact benefits
• Career site chatbot for 24/7 assistance

Tip: Did your company shift to remote work? Your in-office ping pong table and breakroom snacks are no longer relevant. Make sure any changes in benefits (tech stipend, flex time, remote or hybrid office environment) are reflected on your careers page.

Your actual application should be quick and straightforward. An overly complicated process with repeat questions that could be answered through a resume will start your process off on the wrong foot if they apply at all. 60% of job seekers abandon the application process if it takes too long or is too complex. Though every company and position is different, in most cases, a resume, cover letter, and portfolio link are all you need to decide if you should schedule an interview.

Application best practices:

• Provide clear instructions
• Optimize applications for mobile
• Enable the LinkedIn quick apply option
• Don’t require candidates to make an account
• Send a confirmation email after they submit

The application process needs to be a quick first step for hiring departments to base the next steps on. A candidate shouldn’t be stuck spending hours filling out open-ended questions if they’ll receive an immediate ‘no’ because of their years of experience or a missing certification.

2. Interview Scheduling

The interview scheduling process can quickly get messy, awkward, and is ripe for hurting candidate experience. As mentioned above, every application should be followed up with immediate confirmation of receipt email. Thank them for taking the time to apply and be clear about the next steps in the hiring process. Will they receive an email? When is the latest they would hear back? 

53% of applicants say they did not receive a response from employers until three months after applying. And, 83% of candidates say it would greatly improve their overall experience if employers provided a clear timeline of the hiring process. Don’t overpromise — they just need a rough timeline. 

If you’re emailing them to set up an interview, avoid unnecessary back and forth by providing some suggested times or windows rather than asking about availability. Even better, leverage automation to automatically work with the candidate to find time on your calendar for an interview.

@CaliperCorp says hiring managers should review these three parts of their process to keep their #candidateexperience competitive:
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People wait anxiously to hear back after an interview. Let candidates know if you’re not interested as soon as possible. If you’re slow to respond or fail to respond completely, your company will leave a bad taste in their mouth. If you had an interview with them, take the time to send them a personal email and highlight their strengths rather than sending a generic email to each.

3. Personalized Onboarding

Candidate experience doesn’t end when an offer letter is signed. Your onboarding experience sets the tone for a new employee’s experience while getting to know their team and learning about the company’s attitudes, methods, culture, and tools. With increased remote work, your onboarding process needs increased personalization and should feel as welcoming as it would in-office.

Onboarding tips:

• Spread out the paperwork. Don’t overwhelm new hires by only focusing on onboarding documents on their first day.
• Make your new hire feel part of the team by greeting them with (or sending) branded company swag.
• Train cross-department so your new hire understands how the departments work together.
• Set expectations early for communication guidelines and deadlines.
• Don’t leave room for awkward downtime. Keep their first days tightly structured.

Simplify Selection

A quick and efficient hiring process benefits recruiting teams, those hired, and those that weren’t the right fit. Hiring teams can boost efficiency and boost their candidate experience by leveraging selection tools to identify critical information to gauge candidate fit and guide interviews. 

The Caliper Essentials for Selection report compares candidate results to a validated job model to inform you of their overall fit. The report is designed to support varying roles within your selection process. 

In addition to a report on a candidate’s fit with a particular job role, you are also given potential interview questions to help probe into developmental opportunities for the candidate, allowing you to further comprehend the individual’s potential within the role.

Information at your fingertips:

• Overall fit score
• Key findings and recommended behavioral interview questions
• Summary of scores for critical, important, and supporting competencies
• Role-specific summary of the strengths and areas of development
• A detailed overview of how the individual communicates works with others, solves problems, makes decisions, and organizes and prioritizes time

View a Sample Report

You can transform your organization with Caliper’s scientifically validated assessments and reports and send your offer letters knowing your candidate experience stands out and your selections are perfect for your organization. See what Caliper can do for your candidate experience.

But, remote work isn’t for everyone and remote employee engagement strategies require a little structure.

While the extra freedom in scheduling is nice, some employees feel isolated or removed from their team. Additionally, without a solid remote work structure in place, employees can feel a lack of oversight and accountability. Below, we discuss three things leaders can do to implement more structure into their work functions to cater to those that prefer the office. 

#RemoteWork isn’t for everyone. @CaliperCorp offers advice for #engaging and #developing your remote employees that crave more structure in their role:
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1. Analyze & Evaluate Your Current Structure

Chances are your organization has been working remotely for a chunk of time over the last 12 months. While remote work can be beneficial for many organizations and often yields higher employee productivity rates, a poorly structured remote work hierarchy can slow down business and cause frustration. Leaders need to consistently evaluate the effectiveness of their workplace structures and identifying areas for improvement. 

Make sure your workplace structure works for the daily functions and operations of your teams. Are you providing the tools and resources needed for your finance and purchasing departments to collaborate on budgets? Does your marketing department feel adequately involved with the sales team? The structure of your organization should be clearly defined and dictated to all involved parties. To be successful in their roles, your remote teams need to understand the hierarchy of your organization. When you clearly express your expectations of your employees, they will feel a greater sense of loyalty and motivation to deliver high-quality work.

Tip: One way to manage the sentiment of your teams is to use organizational surveys. These quick questionnaires will help shed light on whether your structure and policies are working as intended. Check-in frequently with your employees to make sure you are encouraging a supportive and productive workspace.

2. Lean On Collaborative Performance Management Tools

Without added accountability, your remote teams will suffer. Workplaces thrive when employees clearly understand expectations and can track their task progress in real-time. A collaborative and insightful performance management tool will be your best friend when it comes to remote teams. 

Managers need access to insights to see whether their employees are staying on task and accomplishing goals as needed. Performance management tools allow managers to see their teams’ progress, analyze performance based on historical data, and evaluate the quality and quantity of work their employees can manage. But, just having access to this information isn’t enough. Leaders need to draw on this information to deliver meaningful and timely performance feedback. 

It’s no secret that employees crave consistent feedback from their employers. However, 50% of remote staff agree that they don’t get as much feedback now compared to when they worked onsite. Leaders need to capitalize on opportunities to recognize the excellent work or offer advice on how to improve performance. This not only reaffirms your vested interest in the development of your employees but also helps to break down any silos. By providing feedback and advice, you can grow new personnel to take on additional responsibilities.

Bonus Material: Need some advice for motivating and engaging your remote employees? We’ve got you covered!

3. Encourage Informal Communication and Structure

As you and your teams navigate remote work, creating a formal structure for your days is essential. Your formal structure consists of all activities that are official organizational policies, such as daily meetings, weekly deadlines, and the leadership structure of your business. It’s imperative to create a clear and transparent formal structure, but the job doesn’t stop there. Organizations need to also take an active role in creating a culture and informal structure that encourages conversations and connections between employees.

Your #remote employees want to feel connected to their coworkers and your organizational #goals, and @CaliperCorp says the key lies in instilling some structure to your virtual workspace. Find out more:
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Unlike your formal structure, your informal structure should be less about organizational policies and more about relationship-building. Many employees who have been working remotely have cited feelings of loneliness. The informal structure you create in your organization can help to reduce these feelings of isolation. Having consistently structured conversations with your employees and coworkers will stimulate employee engagement, increasing workplace productivity. 

When you look at your informal workplace structures, ensure you offer ample opportunities to communicate with your employees. While these conversations don’t need to be scheduled consistently on your calendar each week, they do need to be reliably available. Set up a quick check-in with your team, or schedule a Zoom meeting to catch up face-to-face. Ensure that your employees have access to and are using internal communication platforms and instant messaging apps to facilitate quick conversations with their team members. Informal communication reminds employees that they are still an essential part of a larger team with shared goals even though they are working remotely.

Bonus Material: Check out the 7 things leaders need to keep in mind when it comes to managing remote teams.

While employees have expressed their appreciation for flexible work environments, you need to make sure you have a robust and resilient structure to keep those that prefer an in-person experience engaged and connected. Your employees want to feel connected to their team and overarching organizational goals, and they need remote employee engagement strategies to assist. Leaders need to ensure they are providing ample tools and resources to facilitate collaboration and communication. By leaning on digital performance management tools, leaders can easily track their teams’ progress and address any challenges or pitfalls before issues arise.  

Using our Caliper Profile, managers can better understand the motivators and competencies of their remote teams. Our science-backed assessments can be used to provide direct feedback, offer ongoing coaching support and even develop job skills. Are you interested in how Caliper can help you refine your employee development and coaching strategies? Reach out to our team of experts and get started today!

But the culture of your organization doesn’t always reflect the climate of your organization. The company’s mission, diversity initiatives, incentives, and perks all make for good culture on paper, but does the climate in your workplace reflect the culture you hope to have? Do your promises live up to your reality?

Does your #OrganizationalClimate match your #OrganizationalCulture? @CaliperCorp explains what's the difference, and what to do to make sure they're aligned. Learn more in the latest from their blog:
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The terms organizational culture and organizational climate get thrown around a lot, often interchangeably. But they’re not the same thing — and the distinction is important.

What is Organizational Culture?

Simply put, organizational culture is your company identity. It’s your values and the norms that have arisen organically over time.

Common Values Include:

• Curiosity – Embracing the desire to be continually learning and growing
• Quality – Assessing accuracy and logically thinking over situations and problems
• Innovation – Risk-taking and introducing new ideas
• Outcome Orientation – Focusing on overall results and achievements
• Diversity and Inclusion — creating space for minorities, women, those with disabilities, and other underrepresented groups.

For example, a bank might have,what would be considered, a more traditional company culture. A corporate bank is a structured environment, as the banking industry is heavily regulated by well-established laws. Banking is an old industry, which suggests the culture has had a long time to develop and is firmly ensconced.

At a bank, you’ll likely find a culture where people are expected to follow proper channels and defer to the chain of command — where being experimental in your methods and practices would be less favorable and where staff members present a calm, courteous face to the customer so as to convey trust and reliability.

On the other hand, a company like a tech start-up is likely to be more collaborative and unstructured — where disruption, innovation, and entrepreneurship is not only welcome, but also encouraged. Disruptive conflict, wild ideas, and challenging traditions might even be a key value in their culture. Everyone from the company president to the newest intern may be able to communicate laterally and casually.

Finding employees who match your values and exhibit natural behaviors that fit within your organizational goals is key to crafting an organizational culture that’s built around the things that matter most to your business.

How the Pandemic May Change Company Culture

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, many workplace conventions have been upended. A lot of people are working from home indefinitely, changing the way we interact with our coworkers, managers, leadership, and how we structure our work. Our idea of work/life balance has been recalibrated.

And born out of the pandemic comes another re-focus on values: The Black Lives Matter movement has challenged employers to take a closer look at diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and examine how they actually work with employees. Your company may say they value diversity — but do your underrepresented groups feel included? Is every seat at the table equitable? It’s an important place to review whether your organizational climate reflects the culture you aim to foster.

Defining Organizational Climate

Organizational climate is the way people experience the work environment. What is it like to work there? How do individuals feel when operating in that culture? How do business conditions, management decisions, and the actions leadership affect the general mood? When you consider the collective experience of all the talent in the organization, you’re evaluating climate.

Revenue swings, for example, can affect climate without changing the culture. If you work for a company built around a culture of process and efficiency, and then revenue drops, the solution would likely be to double down on improving processes and efficiencies — this might mean cutbacks in other areas, consolidation of responsibilities, or increased workloads. As a result, employees may start to feel resentful or despondent that their bonuses were canceled, coworkers were laid off, or they’ve lost certain perks or benefits. In this scenario, the culture stayed the same, but the climate changed.

If your company has a diversity and inclusion initiative, how many people from underrepresented groups have you actually hired? What positions do they hold? How many of those individuals are in managerial positions or within leadership? It’s one thing to have a diverse staff, but if every group isn’t represented through every department and at all levels, does the climate really reflect the value your organization claims as part of their culture? Your organization may have the diversity, but you can’t leave out the inclusion.

How Coaching Impacts Climate

An important part of fostering an organizational climate that is representative of your organizational culture is through leaders who embody those values and exhibit them throughout their work. A shift in mindset — from manager to coach — helps leaders not only demonstrate organizational values, but also listen to what’s happening throughout the workplace and help promote and build a climate where employees feel seen, heard, and supported on their way to achieve the desired culture.

Bonus Material: Check out how Caliper Essentials for Coaching can transform your leadership strategies as well as develop and strengthen your employees.

How does a coaching mindset help managers build a better #OrganizationalClimate? @CaliperCorp discusses why #CompanyCulture is lead-by-example:
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Issues That Arise With Organizational Culture

Problems of organizational culture arise when the existing culture is detrimental to achieving business goals or realizing the organization’s ideal state. For example, a tech company where the culture is collegial, collaborative, and academic — and where behaviors that are brash, autonomous, or cut-throat are discouraged — may be an engaging place for easygoing managers and low-key product engineers to work. However, the tech world is highly competitive and disruptive, and while internally, a tech company such as this may flourish, they may find themselves unequipped to deal with the characteristically more aggressive and venturesome competitors within the industry.

Other drawbacks to organizational culture include:

• It can become too entrenched, making it difficult to adapt or change
• It may ostracize employees who don’t feel like they fit in, or cause people to isolate themselves from coworkers they can’t relate to
• May form cliques or biases
• May make it difficult for employees to present opportunities for improvement or express concerns

Problems of Organizational Climate

Problems of organizational climate arise when you’re not paying attention. At companies that seem relatively healthy, management tends to chug along and maintain the status quo. However, many organizations are vulnerable to slowly escalating problems because they aren’t tuned in to the daily experience. It may be a problem with communication and messaging, general dissatisfaction with leadership and business decisions, or deeper structural and procedural flaws that are fomenting frustration and harming engagement and satisfaction.

It’s a good idea for business leaders to keep a finger on the pulse of the organization, so to speak, and not allow themselves to be blindsided. Employee surveys are a good way to get a broad sense of staff members’ prevailing thoughts, and survey results can serve as a springboard for programs around improved transparency, greater collaboration, better alignment of talent, or greater potential to address business concerns.

Employee surveys can address a number of different areas, all answers/results providing a clearer picture of how motivated employees are. Areas the survey may cover are:

• Individual feelings and beliefs
• Whether employees feel properly represented and seen
• How well leadership demonstrates and promotes company values
• Whether employees have the resources and support they need
• How employees fit in with their managers and team members
• Any additional open-ended concerns, suggestions, or ideas

By taking steps to ensure a positive culture and a healthy climate, management can both move the company forward and perform the preventative maintenance needed to maximize business results.

Caliper has the tools and expertise to identify and correct problems of culture and climate within your organization. Contact us today and tell us about your ideal future state. We’ll help you get there.

How can you keep #teams strong and productive while working remotely? @CaliperCorp says you can learn a lot from #MentalToughness:
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While mental toughness is not something all employees will have, there are lessons to be learned from how mentally tough individuals tackle challenges that can help managers develop their remote teams and help improve team bonds and build strong teams while working from a distance.

How Mental Toughness Facilitates Trust

One of the six personality traits of mental toughness is self-structure. Mentally tough individuals are self-sufficient, autonomous, and independent. People with these traits value accountability, and teammates know they can depend on that person to complete their projects on time and up to standard. When teammates feel like they can rely on one another to accomplish their goals, trust is more likely to build between individuals.

By leveraging what we know about mental toughness, managers can help develop some of the skills inherent in mentally tough individuals by coaching them to their core competencies. Developing skills in organization, time management, and accountability help facilitate a trust between teammates who know that they can rely on each other to complete their work and support one another’s efforts. With increased trust, job satisfaction and motivation remain high, facilitating better remote work.

Using Mental Toughness to Craft Well-balanced teams

Teams may have one or two mentally tough individuals among them, but there is still opportunity to coach everyone on a team to hone specific traits that are shared with mentally tough teammates. Well-balanced teams are ones that leverage the innate strengths of individuals and place people in roles that lean on those strengths.

Bonus Content: Download the Build Your All-Star Sales Team Guide!

Well-balanced teams are ones that are highly engaged, and highly engaged teams increase revenue. Building teams around the four key roles: Facilitator, Implementor, Champion, and Creator, makes for teams that are strong from within, structured around competency and personality, and leverage the proper strengths in the right places. When working remotely, it’s imperative that the structural foundation of the team is solid in order to maintain collaboration and effectiveness.

Is #MentalToughness the key to successfully developing #RemoteTeams? @CaliperCorp shows what you can learn from mentally tough individuals to make teams stronger:
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How Caliper Makes it Possible

The Caliper Profile is a valuable tool to get a better understanding of individuals strengths, inclinations, and competencies. Using what you learn from the assessment, managers can align, develop, and coach to specific skills that can help build more robust, well-rounded teams.

The Caliper Profile also provides a detailed Competency Report, which not only shows natural skills, but also preferred communication style, work style, and other personality insights that help managers better understand how to best coach and develop on the individual level in order to build skill and motivation as effectively as possible.

At a time when we’re all experiencing additional challenges to our work environment and work processes, strong teams are a crucial part of maintaining motivation and productivity. To learn more about the ways the Caliper Profile can help you build stronger teams and coach individuals to their fullest potential, reach out to our experts today.

Effective leaders believe in the value of coaching, and they think about their role as a manager in such a way where coaching occurs naturally. So, why is coaching so much more effective?

Here are a few ways professional coaching facilitates better results than being a “boss.”

Increased Employee Engagement

According to Forbes, only 34% of employees feel engaged at work. By instilling a culture of effective coaching, it’s possible to overcome this issue. With a coaching culture in play, employees are pushed to do their best and reach their highest potential. When employees are putting out their best work, they’re more likely to learn personal accountability and become more engaged in their career and overall performance.

With a #CoachingCulture in play, employees are pushed to do their best and reach their highest potential. @CaliperCorp offers insight into how you can integrate #coaching into your current strategies:
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Follow these steps to create a coaching culture and improve employee engagement:

• Focus on your company’s mission and vision. Clearly identifying the mission of your organization helps employees understand the ways they fit into the processes of your team. It can be difficult for employees to be actively engaged without understanding and embracing the vision of the company first.

• Assist employees with defining their personal and professional goals. This step takes coaching a step further, creating an open dialogue with employees about what they hope to achieve out of their job. This includes both professional goals and ambitions outside of the office. Take the time to sit down and find ways you can assist your employees in achieving their objectives.

• Identify employees’ strengths and weaknesses and communicate expectations. Communication is one of the most vital aspects to a company’s success. In fact, 4 out of 5 employees say communication is critical in helping their job success. Maintaining respectful and authentic conversations with employees can increase the accountability and collaboration of your team.

Take the time to lay the groundwork of expectations in the organization. With expectations firmly set, the coach and employee can have a constructive conversation about the overall strategy and goals of their professional development plan. Take the time to ask probing questions such as:

• How do your personal goals align with the goals of our company?
• What do you hope to achieve in terms of professional growth within the next year?
• How best can I assist in helping you achieve these goals?

Use this time to identify a customized strategy for coaching on an individual level. They get the personal development they desire, while aligning to the greater goals and needs of the organization.

Boost Confidence

Confidence in the workplace has resoundingly positive effects. Research has shown people prefer confidence to actual expertise. As competitive as business can be, it is no shock confidence is necessary for success. Without confidence, an employee won’t feel comfortable to take any risk or go beyond basic expectations. Lack of confidence in an employee can result in hindering their professional growth, keeping them from reaching their full potential.

There are many ways individuals can boost confidence on their own, and educating employees on how to practice these techniques can be very beneficial. If an employee feels good about themselves, this confidence at work can help map out the best path for them in their career.

Coaching can help foster confidence by distinguishing the employee’s strengths and weaknesses. Identify areas where employees excel. Highlighting their strengths helps build self-worth and keeps employees from focusing too narrowly on the areas they could use improvement. While identifying weaknesses and improving upon them is necessary for personal development, make sure employees don’t dwell on limitations — instead, find ways to tackle these weaknesses and improve upon them.

Improve Employee Retention

Learning or starting something new can be a nerve-racking feeling. But, having a professional coach who can provide guidance makes a big difference in what an individual is willing to tackle. In the workplace, when employees are on-boarded and coached on new skills, they feel supported and encouraged by their manager.

Showing support for employees leads to higher levels of retention, in turn creating a more positive company culture. Your employees want to feel like a valued and respected member of the team, and effective coaching can facilitate this feeling.

Like with all things, communication is vital, and with coaching, it’s a two-way street. As managers provide feedback to employees, employees are then able to use that opportunity to present their input to the manager. Employees are 4.6 times more likely to stay in their current position when they feel heard. Integrating coaching into your company culture will encourage yourself, and other managers, to be more present among employees, and will open up communication channels across all levels of your organization.

Employees are 4.6 times more likely to stay in their current position when they feel heard. Through #EffectiveCoaching, you can increase employee #engagement while making your employees feel valued. Find out how with these tips from @CaliperCorp:
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Activate Your Coaching Skills

Ready to improve your coaching skills as a manager? Here are a few tips to get you started:

• Maintain a positive outlook. Positivity in the workplace leads to higher levels of productivity and increased employee happiness. Try to remove negative attitudes in the office, and everyone’s experience will benefit from your efforts. Lead by example, and your employees will follow suit.

• Know how to navigate conversations. Whether the conversation is regarding performance reviews or ways to inspire and motivate employees, there are a plethora of resources with tips and tricks for initiating a productive and respectful conversation. Take time to educate yourself on best practices before talking with employees or managers.

• Ask good questions. Sometimes the most difficult questions to ask are the best ones. The healthiest company cultures are ones where leaders and employees feel able to express opinions honestly without getting defensive.

• Listen to what they have to say and encourage them to share their opinions. Authentic and open communication is vital to success. Encourage your employees to be honest with their feedback so that improvements can be made when necessary.

• Coach in the moment. A willingness to remain adaptable is necessary for success, and being able to customize your coaching strategies will allow for a more individualized approach.

Organizations with senior leaders who coach their employees can improve business results by 21%, compared to those who never use professional coaching. Developing effective coaches is critical to the success of your company. Allow your leaders to thrive and build a pipeline with otherwise overlooked internal talent. Allow Caliper’s Essentials for Coaching report to help you coach, develop, and retain like a pro today! Reach out to our experts to get started.

What “it” is, varies from job to job, but the scenario plays out in a similar way. First, there’s the initial period while you wait for things to click. This is followed by the constructive coaching effort. Then, finally, the escalation to performance management, which is a coded way of saying warnings and performance improvement plans.

Right Qualifications, Wrong Role

Let’s pause and clarify; this is not unqualified individuals who should not have been hired in the first place, people who are experiencing personal problems (though that’s something to consider with struggling employees), or those who are openly uncooperative and insubordinate.

We mean someone who has the education, credentials, or work history and came well recommended. Let’s also assume your company administered proper training and made efforts to integrate the employee into the environment. And that the employee is, of course, eager to succeed.

Often times it’s as simple as this: The employee is in the wrong role.

Pre-Employment Assessments: The How

Ideally, companies would assess all of their top candidates using a scientifically valid pre-employment assessment. Not a cheap, gimmicky “personality test” without proven reliability, but a validated instrument that has been thoroughly researched, tested, and refined over decades and is respected throughout the industry (modesty prevents us from saying “Hint Hint: the Caliper Profile”).

Pre-employment assessments are becoming a crucial necessity for many companies, saving them time and money and improving their turnover. So, how do these assessments work? Such a tool can reveal an individual’s strengths, motivations, and limitations relative to (here’s the important part) the job responsibilities you expect that individual to perform. Take a closer look:

Provide Data-Driven Results: Assessments provide you with standardized and useful insights, regarding how candidates interact in the workplace and also predict job performance and fit with the company. This data will also help improve the team’s overall productivity and success.

Fast Fact:

Unlike in face-to-face interviews, personality assessments enable a company to quantify a wide range of attributes in detail objectively. Ensuring both accuracy and fairness.

Improve Selection Process: A large percentage of employers already understand that assessments provide highly valuable information about specific aspects of a person’s potential. Not only does this make employee selection decisions more accurate and useful, but it also informs how the individual should be onboarded, managed, coached, and professionally developed throughout their career.

Increase Employee Retention: Over 70% of candidates are expected to leave a company within two years of getting hired. So, while finding the right candidates is crucial for any company, having the ability to retain them and keep them engaged in a role they will succeed at is just as important.

But say the company did not assess the employee prior to hiring them. They’re in the role now, so it’s too late, right? Not at all! Existing employees can benefit greatly from completing an assessment.

Did you know?

Pre-hire assessments can have a positive impact not only for onboarding, candidate fit, and retention but on a wider range of positive HR indicators, including time to hire, performance, and engagement.

Sometimes a coaching strategy and an action plan arise from the evaluation. Other times, like in the scenario described above, we find that the individual’s strengths do not align with the current position. It could be that a struggling sales rep would be ideal for a warehouse operations supervisor position. Or that a seemingly absent-minded administrator is really a frustrated account manager waiting to take flight.

Employee Assessments: The Benefits

The benefits of finding ideal roles for promising, but struggling employees are often greater than simply resolving an underperformance problem. Using employee assessments to help align your struggling employee with a better role is the key to ensuring they succeed. You save time and money rather than having to train a new person from scratch on your products, services, procedures, and organizational goals.

How can you and your employees benefit from these assessments?

More Engagement: Employees who are struggling or not fitting in their current role are less engaged and more likely to churn than those who are. With an assessment, managers can identify and gain insight into what an employee needs to help stay engaged and active in a role they can fully grasp and will fit in better.

Increased Productivity: Every employee is different and requires their own unique management style to ensure they’re getting the most from their managers and can put their best performance in action. Completing an employee assessment will give managers the information they need to understand what coaching style works best for each employee for them to be productive and efficient.

Problem Employee to Top Performer Transformation: Having a struggling employee take an employee assessment can help unlock their full potential which was overlooked before. While they may have the qualifications on paper, discovering their personality type and understanding how they accept feedback can turn any problem employee into a top performer.

With assessments, you gain insights into what type of coaching would work best for the struggling employee. The results can be revisited later for career path development. Companies who have a struggling employee could have a top performer just waiting to get their opportunity to shine. However, if the role is not quite suited for them, or the development opportunity is overlooked they could be deemed as a wrong employee altogether.

Before you think about the write-ups and warnings, use the time and have your employee take an assessment, such as Caliper’s employee assessments, and find out if you have a hidden top performer just waiting for the right role to use their skills to the fullest.

Updated on April 17, 2019.

45% of HR professionals believe coaching is essential in their organization, and 93% of managers need training on how to coach employees. So how can you develop useful coaching skills to ensure success with your employees and company? Apply these five essential skills for effective coaching.

DYK? 45% of HR professionals believe coaching is essential in their organization.
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Offer and Accept Feedback

Offer and accept feedback gracefully, constructively, and constantly. This means creating a feedback loop with your employees. The ability to offer both praise and constructive feedback is highly underrated in the workplace. Excellent coaches not only understand its importance, but study the best ways to handle a constructive feedback loop within their organization.

Employee Feedback:

Employees very rarely receive enough feedback. Provide employees with meaningful feedback and suggestions on ways they can improve on their areas of weakness. Use this time to provide constructive criticism and solutions to these areas. Ensure the positive communication is specific, valuable, and reinforcing. Establishing this will, in turn, create positive results in productivity and the future quality work of your employees.

Leadership Feedback:

“Orders come from customers, not from leaders.”

– Joyce Rachelle

An active coach must not only be willing to accept feedback, but they should also be ready to make the most of the feedback employees give them. Ask your employees for ways you can improve in your role as a coach and how you can help your employees achieve their goals. In general, it’s vital you keep an open mind and attitude during any discussion with your employees. Once you’ve received the feedback, compare and contrast how that feedback tracks across your employee relationships and begin to look at ways you might alter or leverage the employee feedback in the future.

Trust Your Team

Train your team and then trust them to do the right thing. If you are reading this, you likely want to be the best leader you can be. That’s great news. Whether they know it or not, your employees are put in a great place to trust you, as it’s built into the hierarchy of the company.

Trust is a crucial part of any positive relationship. As their leader and coach, it’s your job to build relationships, share visions, motivate your employees and team, and create a positive company culture. You may begin the relationship with their trust, but keeping it is up to you.

A relationship can’t be established without respect. Respect your employees as more than just people who work for your company. Use this time as a chance to lead by example. Trust your employees as individuals and allow them to have faith in you in return.

One of the best ways to establish trust in the workplace is by setting expectations. It can be effective to have a group conversation about what it looks like to trust one another. When you have all established what workplace trust is and what breaking that trust looks like, you all have a map to how to keep that relationship strong and balanced.

Offer guidance when needed and be involved with what they do every day, without taking over and controlling every part. Building mutual trust with your employees will allow you to form a positive bond with them and result in higher productivity.

Set Goals

Don’t let goal-setting fall by the wayside, particularly during challenging times. When setting goals, it’s crucial to include time-based milestones and objectives, as well as making sure the goals are reasonable and achievable. The goals should go above and beyond employees daily tasks. The set goals should drive employee behavior, challenge your team, and ultimately lead to the improved success of your company.

Employee Goals Should:

• Set expectations
• Connect employee’s tasks to the company’s vision
• Drive employee behavior
• Challenge your team and employees

Encourage Collaboration

Encourage collaboration across skill sets and skill levels. Encouraging employees to work together and acknowledging the accomplishments of the group, rather than focusing on individual success, will allow you to promote a company culture to prosper as a team.

Collaboration Skills of Successful Employees:

• Analyze problems without blaming others
• Voluntarily think of solutions to problems
• Assign out tasks
• Meet deadlines
• Give credit where it’s due
• Take responsibility for mistakes

Celebrate Achievements

Celebrate achievements, big and small. Celebrating the success of your company is a powerful tool and can result in many outcomes:

• Increased employee engagement
• Enhanced company culture
• Improved productivity
• Stronger team relationships

On top of celebrating the success of your company, make it part of your duties to highlight accomplishments of the employees as well. Creating an effort to celebrate everything from work anniversaries to individual achievements will promote enhanced motivation and morale from all employees.

Coaching serves as a competitive advantage in the workplace today. As a leader, you want your employees to succeed in accomplishing their goals and add to the success of your company. Coach, develop, and retain your employees like a pro. Caliper is here for you!

Are you looking for new approaches to growing and coaching your employees? With Caliper Essentials for Coaching, discover existing behaviors that are holding back your team’s abilities and develop new approaches that can lead to improved personal performance as well as a better bottom-line result for your organization.

Source:

http://schoutenoceanrace.com/media/1843/coaching-style-leadership.pdf

By bringing awareness of one’s self into the workplace, leaders are able to better identify who they are as an employee and why they work the way they do. Using this information, leaders can then play to their strengths while understanding their areas of developmental opportunity. Leaders with awareness are also better at managing their emotions in high-stress situations, admitting when they are at fault and leaving their personal lives at the door. For these reasons, employees often note a healthier work environment under such superiors. Not only are there benefits to the leader and the employees, but there is also a significant positive correlation between self-aware leaders and company performance.

So, how can you become the self-aware leader you, your employees and your company are craving? Start with the following tips:

Put Your Personality to the Test

You may think that you have a good idea of who you are, and you likely do! Take a personality test or two to confirm your beliefs, while also discovering more about yourself. Many tests, such as the Myers Briggs Type Indicator or the Big Five, provide results specific to how you perform in a work type environment. Gathering personality and work specific insight can help you determine your own characteristics and in turn provide better self-awareness.

This information is not only valuable to yourself as a leader but also your employees. Encourage them to take personality assessments as well and create a dialog about how your qualities can better play off of each other.

Bonus Material: Advance your professional development through self-awareness.

Ask for Feedback

To take your self-awareness to the next level, create an open conversation with your employees, your equals and your superiors. Discuss with each of them the qualities you possess, which are of value to them and the company and what leadership skills you could work to improve. Your co-workers may point out you coming into work with a positive attitude and smile on your face brightens the office space, or your last minute preparation for the weekly meeting keeps other from completing their section of the agenda.

Great leaders are the ones not only asking for other’s input but taking the feedback they receive to heart. Think to yourself: Is there frustration with an action in which I can change? Is the way I’m leading what’s best for my employees and the company? Use questions similar to these as a jumping off point to thoroughly think about your leadership skills.

Reflect

Self-awareness is all about reflection. Take time out of each day to think about how you handled different situations. Were you proud of your response towards an upset client or could you have handled it with a more level-head? Make specific mental notes of what you did well and what you could have improved upon. By looking back on your daily interactions, you will better prepare yourself for the next time a similar situation comes around. As you begin taking time to reflect, ask others who were in attendance to also evaluate your actions and responses. Their feedback and confirmation of your analysis will help grow your confidence in your personal reflections.

The value of self-awareness at the workplace is immeasurable. By taking these tips to improve your awareness, you’ll be able to develop your leadership skills, enjoy a positive work environment and increase the company’s performance. Get started on your journey to self-awareness with Caliper. Reach out to discover how our Caliper Profile can assist in enhancing your self-awareness.