The sometimes painful chasm between vision and reality
How there can be such a fundamental disconnect between the story we tell ourselves at corporate and the reality in the field - and what will it take to repair it?
Death by a Thousand Cuts is catching up with business executives and owners, says Jan van der Hoop of HiringSmart.
“Since the business climate began to soften 3 years ago, owners and managers have been focused on doing more with less. They have now reached a breaking point,” he says. “They have been cutting back for too long… now there is nothing left to cut.”
In a competitive market that is challenging every assumption and forcing business to actively reinvent itself from the bottom up, most executives find that their business model is going through more contortions than you could have dreamed, even six months ago. The only thing they know for sure is their cost structure; the revenue model is completely up in the air. Traditional sources are drying up faster than new ones can be found and tapped, and the only thing they’ve had to cut costs to survive.
Now they’re at the point where the law of diminishing returns has kicked in. There’s not much left to cut, if they want to stay in business. The only option is to grow their balance sheet. Not by acquiring assets or committing to new expenses, but to grow the contribution and the ROI they are receiving from their existing capital base – primarily their human capital.
Jan van der Hoop says that creative approaches to staffing will lead to better business results by helping mangers understand what characteristics separate top performers from poor performers and the factors that drive performance and productivity.
A recent study of 20,000 newly hired employees showed 46% of those new hires failed within 18 months. This happens not because the new employees lack technical skills, but because they are a poor fit for the job or the team, are not motivated, or demonstrate other problems "that never get assessed in the interview. To catch these mismatches, screening interviewers need expert coaching to help them look beyond technical skills and ask the right follow-up questions. This question received the highest “certain” response of all of the questions in our survey. According to a Purdue University newsletter, falsified information consists mostly of expanded dates to cover employment gaps. This is an often over-looked area of the reorganization and re-deployment process. Another study shows that productivity measures increased by 25 percent among employees who participated in an on-boarding training program.
He offers these strategies of reorganization, redeployment and recovery.
How there can be such a fundamental disconnect between the story we tell ourselves at corporate and the reality in the field - and what will it take to repair it?
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