The One Book Needed in Every Boardroom
The One Book Needed in Every Boardroom
http://info.profilesinternational.com/profiles-employee-assessment-blog/bid/107693/The-One-Book-Needed-in-Every-Boardroom
President and Chief Executive Officer of Profiles International, Bud Haney, was honored to contribute a chapter to the new publication Essays on Governance by Andrew J. Sherman. A must-read for modern business and organizational leaders, the book provides 36 critical essays to drive shareholder value and business growth.
Here are some segments from Mr. Haney's contribution:
"Sound corporate governance practices dictate that organizational leaders should rely upon objective evidence to make sound decisions: these decisions affect the firm’s well-being, its tangible valuation, and its intangible assets retained at large. Quantifiable information can serve as the foundation of a persuasive prospectus, an indicator of a company’s recent performance, or a barometer of the firm’s potential in the future. Hiring decisions can be some of the most critical moves an organization makes, and employment assessments provide a scientifically tested, quantifiable measure of the candidate’s degree of fit."
"Ensuring the right fit between candidate and job position is critical; it leads to increased engagement in the new hire’s work and provides the company with value beyond the new hire’s technical skill. Empirical evidence is mounting that employee engagement translates into reduced turnover and on-the-job accidents, as well as into increased job satisfaction, productivity, profits, and, most importantly, company growth, all of which is based on a solid foundation (itself built on employee investment of personal resources and utilization of job-provided resources). Personal resources include positive attributes, such as self-esteem, optimism, and emotional regulation: attributes that engaged employees exercise regularly while working toward both their organizational and personal job-related goals. For particular positions, these attributes are required to varying degrees. Using pre-hire assessments along with job percent-matching techniques can identify those qualities in candidates before they are brought aboard."
"Job-provided resources include physical and social factors that assist employees in coping with the demands of a particular job; they can motivate employees both intrinsically and extrinsically. In the workplace, supervisor feedback, autonomy, and social support provide intrinsic motivation through learning and development opportunities, as well as fulfillment of social needs. Job resources provide extrinsic motivation by offering supervisors a productivity-assessing metric they can use to reward successful performance or to take steps for improving productivity."
"Board members should understand that the utility of existing employee performance appraisals can also be enhanced through the use of 360-degree feedback assessment (surveys), which include reviews from both those above and below the employee in the organizational structure. Ideally, such a tool is used for personal development and individual performance improvement. In 2002, 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies used 360-degree feedback assessments, which have multi-faced approaches that can incorporate a wide range of performance criteria and assessment perspectives, further supporting their effectiveness in determining the underlying reasons driving employee performance. Employee performance assessment tools, including 360-degree feedback systems, provide comprehensive and accurate pictures of employees’ performance outcomes, behaviors, and competencies. The evaluation process provides a measure of objectivity when determining employees’ performance that is otherwise vulnerable to performance raters’ biases or perceptions when making hiring decisions."
"Companies’ board members and executives should work with in-house counsel and outside law firms to address the legality of human resources professionals using behavioral assessments, when the HR pros are operating in a climate where they fear repercussions of discrimination or favoritism, and their personal judgments and opinions must be kept at bay. The U.S. Department of Labor’s Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures, for example, includes a section on using assessment results to distinguish individuals amongst a pool of applicants."
Do you want to learn how to drive shareholder value and business growth? Get your copy of Essays on Governance on Amazon today!