HR Focus in Start-ups to Succeed

Start-up companies can come in all forms and sizes. They seem to have high failure rates, but the minority who succeed can become large and influential.

It has been seen that most start-up founders more often have a casual or off-beat culture in their thinking, dress, office space, HR practices and Marketing, as compared to traditional corporations. Some of these casual approaches, such as the use of “flat” organizational structure, in which employees can directly communicate with the Founders or CEOs informally, are practiced to promote efficiency and to enthuse employees in the workplace.

Business Strategies for Finance, Marketing, Production, Product Development and Innovation are made without a robust HR and People strategy. The importance of this needs to be highlighted as this is one pillars of the foundation on which the businesses is built, and if this pillar is weak or not there the dangers will always loom. Having a HR and People plan is like a having Finance plan which is absolutely essential to a success of a start-up. If people are not the key focus area the start-up cannot succeed. The HRand People plan needs to be budgeted in the initial phase itself.

Hiring the right person is one of the biggest challenges for the start-up – it is not that getting people is a problem but getting the right-fit certainly is for most start-up organizations. Many a times compromises are likely to be made to get the organization moving quickly hoping that the incumbents will learn and adapt as we go along – something which a start-up needs to be careful about in my opinion.

All start-ups need people who are innovative, adaptable and flexible, analytical, emotionally intelligent, team players and have willingness to learn. They should be willing multi-taskers. Easily said than done – how do we find this out in an interview of an hour or two at the most?  The founder’s or CEO’s experience or gut-feel may not be sufficient to make those judgements. There is a professional way of doing thisby putting the person through professional Competency Assessment or Personality (Psychological) Tests.

As the organization matures and grows retention of good people becomes the challenge.Attracting,developing and retaining an amazing team are the hallmarks of success for any start-ups success. If there are right people they will design and redesign success strategies and fight for the organization’s success.

What HR policies should be there? How shouldthe elements of legality, predictability, fairness, equity and control be built into them require in-depth thought and insight as does the business plan. What has succeeded in one organization may not in another as each organization have a unique character and personality. Having policies is not good enough it is their proper implementation which is the tougher part and leads to dissatisfaction in most organizations over a period of time.

Just like business strategies and plans change the HR policies need to be revised and re-engineered keeping in view the business needs.

Making sure that the there is adequate focus on people besides other areas is most important in my opinion.

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Employee Satisfaction Survey

Making Performance Management Work effectively

Managing Performance and keeping the workforce motivated is becoming increasingly complex and difficult particularly for the young brigade who is far more mobile and impulsive.
No system is perfect and permanent in any organisation. We need to continuously improve and adapt our processes to the changing environment.
Most organizations do have some form of Performance Management System as in recent times even Performance Appraisal is called the same. Firstly, let me clarify that Performance Appraisal is only one of the elements of the Performance Management System.
A robust Performance Management System (PMS) has 4 distinct sub-processes:
1. Formal Target Setting Process cascading down from the Annual Business Plan. It encompasses a participatory approach and is an open, transparent,data-based and an alignedprocess wherein the organization seeks to set challenging but realistic targets for all its employees.
2. Monitoring and Control involves an institutionalised and an on-going process for giving feedback, coaching and counselling to keepthe performance on track. This is the most important part of PMS and the organization needs to build the competence of its employees – it requires specialized training. This has invariably been a weakness in most organizations we have worked for in the last 30 years
3. The Performance Appraisal against the targets set in step 1 and any revisions thereafter. This requires the elements of subjectivity to be reduced and objectivity brought in. For this the appraisal form needs to be well designed. Self-appraisal often helps to bring acceptance and reasoning in the whole process. Appraiser and Reviewer both need to be data-based and objective to keep personal biases out.
4. A clearly defined Reward and Recognition Policy linked with thePerformance Appraisal contributes to building a motivated work-force. This needs constant review and updating year on year.
It is desirable to have the whole process fully documented with timelines with responsibilities clearly demarcated.
Other process such as Career and Succession Planning need to be in place for Performance Management to be more effective. Some Organizations do keep the two processes independent. However, the retention of talent has thrown a big challenge to many organizations as they grapple with balancing these processes.
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Leverage Your Human Resources With Assessment Solutions

To retain the right employees and maximize their effectiveness in the business, you need to implement effective assessment resolutions. These are structured means of evaluating potential employees on a gamut of fundamental criteria. These ways can also be applied to subsisting employees too.

When used in the engaging and selection process, assessment solutions help you to pick the apt candidate for the role through the usage of a number of structured ways. Employing tested criteria ensures the people you hire are not only the suitable for the position in question but also decide whether they can match and thrive in your current company culture.

Hiring and Recruitment

When it arrives at employee selection and recruitment, many companies yet cling to the traditional methods of recruitment. These methods – interviews, resume critiques, background checks and so on – are still valid but are nowhere near enough to decide whether a candidate is fit not only to do the work you’re choosing them for but also whether they will fit into your organization and be engaged to its long-term success.

Contemporary assessment systems incorporate skills and abilities tests, behavioral and character evaluations, structured interviews assessments and simulations, cultural fit, job fit and career fit, practical job previews, administration evaluations and can hold custom-built assessments.

As for your existing employees, assessment systems comprising a range of tests, interviews, and simulations provide an ideal method to assess training and development needs. By correctly determining these needs, you’ll be in the perfect position to formulate a training program that improves your employees and thus your complete organization.

Examples are assessment centers and simulations. These enable you to evaluate performance levels and development changes for current employees as well as candidates. These contain a wide range of stimulating and practical activities providing presentation and role playing exercises, written analysis applications and workflow simulation exercises.

Performance Indicators

These allow you to foretell how well your employees will be involved in their work and if they are likely to stick with your organization.

Assessment solutions can also help with another problem that some firms face, that of employee retention. Employees leave organizations for many reasons, but job dissatisfaction is high on the list. Job dissatisfaction can result from many factors including not fitting in with organizational culture to feeling undervalued or in the wrong role.

Employee retention

Proper assessment can improve employee retention in many ways. For one thing, it can work in the hiring process by making sure that the candidate is someone right for the position s/he’s applying for and also right for your company culture. The modern assessment covers such factors as cultural fit, job fit and career fit, to make sure your new employee is with you for the long term.

Ongoing assessment can ensure employee satisfaction by making sure an employee’s talent is recognized and put to its best use.

Cengrow is one among global leaders in management consulting firms and has transformed businesses in all sectors and regions in India and across the planet. They have partnered with a range of clients to develop need based assessment solutions for employees at reasonable costs.

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Choose The Assessment Tool Vital to Your Success

The objective within most organizations is to employ a happy, productive workforce that remains on the job longer and provides more. That mission is often tough to implement without personality assessment of your employees that is determined to foretell a candidate’s on-the-job performance and security. Volumes of research show that an evaluation technology-when positioned and deployed correctly will reduce turnover and improve while creating a reservoir of objective performance data designed to identify prospective employees who are good fits in specific job roles.

 A Personality Assessment is proven to predict employee performance. Assessment techniques are designed to assist organizations in recognizing candidates who will be active on the trade. To find out which assessment can completely meet your organization’s requirements, you must be satisfied with the system’s capacity to foretell performance. From an intention, scientific perspective, performance predictability of an evaluation solution is very often reported through two concepts: reliability and validity.

How Does the Assessment Work?

Validity responds to a very different question. Does it work? In the game of golf, some strokes to complete a round of golf offers an efficacy estimate of a player’s golfing abilities. It is necessary to understand that one game of golf at one golf course does not offer an accurate representation of one’s golfing ability. Golfers attain different scores depending on the course played, weather, type of course, the difficulty of the course, some holes played, the number of strokes required to make par, etc. It is not one round, but the body of evidence collected over time that provides the validity of a player’s golf game.

It enforces continuous workforce improvement

To stay aggressive, every company must desire to watch continuous improvement in the workforce. The benefits that an organization obtains through the hunt of continuous improvement are many: more productive artists, real process efficiencies, lower overall costs, and higher incomes, to name a few. The answer to that kind of long-lasting improvement lies in bettering the performance of every member of the organization. After all, people make up teams, teams make up departments, offices constitute company divisions, and units from corporations. Individual performers are the building bricks of the complete structure.

It focuses on fit; more is not always best

More is always better! Typically, assessments measure a collection of characteristics referred to as factors, dimensions, etc.. Many people assume incorrectly- that it is always better to be on the higher side of a characteristic the More is Better Syndrome.

Cengrow is a well-established organization that deals in providing services that include employee satisfaction survey, employee engagement solutions and projective techniques like an e-assessment form. Visit www.cengrow.com for more.

Should Small Businesses Rely on Personality Tests for Recruiting Staff?

Research indicates that half of all new hires fail within 18 months, but most of them fail for attitudinal reasons (personality traits, human interactions, etc.) rather than cognitive competency (brain-based skills like logic and reasoning, problem-solving, language, etc.). So as a small business owner and hiring manager, what can you do to ensure you hire the right people?

Can do – will do – will fit

As business owners, we are responsible for hiring the right people and building teams which perform well together. And the smaller the business, the more costly it is when you get this wrong.

Personality testing

One tool in the recruitment process that larger companies tend to rely heavily on uponcertainly, but is often overlooked by smaller businesses, is the personality assessment. Personality testing, also known as psychometric testing is designed to predict how people will behave in the workplace. In other words, it attempts to predict how the candidate will work, rather than worry about whether they have the technical skills to do the job. It might cast light, for example, on how the candidate will work under pressure, how they will interact with co-workers, or whether they will fit into a given team, given the existing team members’ personalities. In other words, companies rely on these tests to screen candidates for ‘good fit’ – the end goal being to reduce turnover and improve productivity.

Developers of these assessments tend to counter that the tests do have controls that detect inaccurate answers, typically by asking a question several times in different ways to test the consistency of responses. This may help correct one misunderstood question or a slip of the mouse.

Personality testing as part of the recruitment is supported with some academic credibility, and businesses should certainly apply them in particular if they are being used exclusively to predict a candidate’s fit. A lot of the time, the candidate interview, and the psychometric test are seen as two separate processes or sequential ‘hurdles’ that the candidate must jump over. Take a more integrated approach with Cengrow that is leading organization that deals in personality assessment, and address in a second interview any concerns which arise out of the test results, probing any potential ‘unwanted’ personality traits.

Ironically, sometimes the ‘will fit’ (personality fit) assessment may conflict with the ‘can do’ (Skills) assessment. Research conducted on characteristics of successful salespeople suggests that employees who are assertive and display a strong will to achieve are more likely to sell more than those who gregarious, dependable and persistent. And yet psychometric testing may well find out the suitable types because they are present right with them. It’s necessary to always relate your recruitment assessments to a conscious consideration of the specific skills and attributes you need in a particular role, rather than blindly trust in an automated evaluation process.

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How to Use Personality Profiles to Improve the Recruiting Process

It’s no wonder that personality profiles have turned out to be a standard assessment tool in the hiring process for many companies. Hiring managers and recruiters understand full well that resume screening, interviews, and reference checks are not a very active or objective means for making hiring decisions.

All that being said, some organizations continue to struggle with recruitment, so they tend to use personality assessment in their hiring decisions. The most probable reason for that is simple: it needs to be in the right hands to get the great results. Used inappropriately, both of these tools can hurt you. The personality profiles are complex tools. And the information they provide is dark and not always easy to interpret. We humans are dark, complex creatures ourselves. To make their tools easier for HR professionals to use, the tool providers have interpreted the computer generated reports to improve readability. The downside to simplicity, however, is that simplicity reduces the depth of information and the power of the tool. Less granular indicates less detail. It often generates challenges to drawing useful and accurate conclusions that are helpful in the workplace.

They should be approved in the use of the assessment tool, and they should be experienced in imparting insight and value. The practitioner creates a strong profile of the candidate or an effective action plan for employee development. Some assessments offer many raw scores, some of which may or may not contradict other scores on the same assessment.

  • A certified assessments practitioner will realize how to address some of the extraneous information on the computer generated report. Also, they will be familiar with trends and patterns that imply certain strengths or blind-spots in the individual. Most importantly, two individuals with very different personality profiles can still both be satisfied in the same role. The practitioner will help recognize these scenarios so that HR does not overlook and miss out on great talent.
  • Analysis of learning abilities and talents. This is one of the most important aspects of the candidate assessment and is also powerful for employee development as well. The result is a strong profile of the person’s communications skills, interpersonal skills, emotional intelligence, work ethic, commitment levels, and leadership potential. These tools are useful for candidate assessment, but even more powerful for talent management and succession planning.
  • Personality Assessments provide clarity on where the drive and passion are in an individual, and so it helps ascertain how well a fit a person is for their role and career direction. This is one of the most crucial assessments to use when trying to determine the likelihood of success of any individual in a given designation. It is also useful in the midst of the talent management lifecycle to make sure that the individual is on the relevant career path within your organization.

But it is very important to note that it is possible to have two people with very different assessment profiles that are both competent of succeeding in the same role. Your assessments practitioner will have the expertise and experience to identify those and ensure great hiring decisions.

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Know When To Get Help – Performance Management Consulting

Most people fear performance appraisals since it is tiring and tedious, and people think their jobs may be on the line. Of course, performance evaluations are pretty useful since management can completely make sense out of the questions that have been occurring in the company. By a regular performance appraisal of workers, companies can be able to find out about the motives behind why the organization is wasting money.

  1. Perform Appraisals in an Organized Manner

As the part of the administration that ultimately runs the company, the superiors who are making all that performance evaluations year after year, they must take this task sincerely so that that the firm will be able to benefit from the yearly performance appraisals of the employees greatly. In the event in which people who are going to head these yearly employee performance evaluations are clueless on what they should do, they usually have the option to get some performance management consulting. Hence, they will able to know what people from the management like them should do when it’s time to make those employee performance appraisals once again.

Employee performance evaluation may appear to be a highly difficult task but through great performance management advisors, you are sure to be able to get the plans as well as the methods that other organizations are doing with the help of performance management consulting. When it comes to performance management consulting, experts in the field of business administration will instruct company heads that before they go on to their employees’ performance appraisal meetings. Whether they will give out a presentation to other business heads or just be talking to the employees, a performance management consulting will provide advice the management to make a draft of what they are going to state first before actually going out to the meeting and fumbling on the employee appraisal meeting.

  1. Focus on positive, not negative aspects

When it comes to performance management consulting, it is extremely suggested that you plan everything out from the beginning so that the whole process of the yearly employee performance appraisal will go on evenly and without any hitch. The performance administration consulting activity should be able to help out the company’s management to be able to provide clear and concise ways for them to make their thoughts be fully understood during the performance appraisal report. Performance planning is the key to a well-executed performance appraisal meeting according to the performance management consulting.

– Heed the advice of the performance management consulting group

– Decide on the important factors

– Tackle those factors

  1. Make it work!

Based on research from the performance management consulting, top companies today are using the performance management process to reduce a best-effort directed culture in the enterprise. Instead, the company should move on towards a results-driven culture instead, the next is to be able to establish as well as strengthen the extreme importance of the company’s core competencies and ultimately, the company must also be able to point the poor performers in the company for the finish.

Cengrow is a leading performance management consulting firm that provides all above-mentioned benefits to their clients at a very affordable rate. Contact them to experience a decent consultation for your company’s growth.

 

The Fundamentals of Business Process Re-Engineering

Nowadays, some companies implement Process Re-engineering to attain quick savings and achieve the short term profits they have always wanted to make. Thinking good about this progress, they go to another ambition only to find that soon they are confronted with many of the same difficulties they believed they had cleared up. Now they are challenged with re-engaging the staff, incurring additional costs, to fix issues that may directly have been identified and dealt with without the loss of customer satisfaction had they originally planned for continuous growth.

Business Process Re-engineering simplified

Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) is a complete process demanding a change in the primary way business processes are done. BPR recognizes unnecessary or repetitive activities and reduces them. Wherever feasible, it takes standard procedures and automates them. To achieve, it needs you to have a thoroughgoing and complete agreement of existing processes. Using this in-depth information allows for an examination of how well to make each piece of the method more efficiently, while always focusing on customer comfort.

What is needed to succeed?

To achieve BPR, traditional thinking and management functions must give way to empowered leadership and think “outside the box.” The exchange of information at all levels throughout the organization is essential. It begins with implementing goals and objectives for each process, defining roles and detailing shared strategies. This step is necessary to the success of a BPR action. Management must discharge departmental mandates, spare the work from the departmental accounts and remove strict operational control. These are anti-productive to BPR initiatives.

The next step is empowerment, allowing employees to have a say on how the business will work efficiently. To make sure that this happens, senior management must agree to commit to several things. The most important commitment: providing and supporting the impetus for the initiative. Once started, they can’t look back, this will likely be the most difficult obstacle management will encounter. Employees must see and understand that management supports employee participation and agree changes must be made. Management can’t disregard suggestions; even those they feel are frivolous and must provide positive feedback to encourage continued participation and success.

Next, management should realize that there will be time commitments involved both for themselves and for the staff. They must be willing to share some of their time with the staff doing the process investigation and mapping, for not only are the daily functions of the business examined and mapped but the management services as well. If there is a commitment to enhancing the overall functionality of the business, then no area can be left unmapped.

Many tasks are involved in Business Change. The first step towards success is planning and empowerment. The balance of tasks involved in a successful BPR implementation requires a fair amount of strategic thought and planning. Positive attitude, process thinking, avoiding the temptation of quick savings by eliminating staff, and being concentrated and on task, are the heart of the process and can be difficult. Remember, these are essential qualities in a productive transformation of the company.

Business – Quality Management Evaluation: Validate the work

Most successful companies these days are using some quality management system. This is not only a traditional method but one that is entirely justified and shown to be effective in the performance of the company’s goals; in particular on the business side.

A quality management system has been found to be highly beneficial for any business. This system helps the company make certain that all the ideas are taken sincerely and served meticulously for a more dynamic process that touches goals. It additionally works to reduce the volume of waste besides the way.

The system aids in keeping customer satisfaction in the long run. This is because nothing beats the good quality and high standards when it comes to making the customer happy enough to get back to an extra round. More so, happy customers are continuing to support the business to other characters within their political networks.

There are some options when it arrives at business quality support systems. Starting with one does not mandatorily have to be complicated. The only information necessary is a clearly established goal and a belief of the processes that make up the complete business. It does not end there. An evaluation of the operation should be carried after it is implemented to make sure it works and can do what it is deemed to do – guarantee the products and services delivered are of the highest quality all the time.

A good way to evaluate the effectivity of a quality management scheme is to have an independent audit. It involves an orderly and fair check of the various procedures in the industry. It assesses how the methods are using and profiting from the system. The statement should reflect every single person in the corporate ladder to ensure that all phases of the development profit from the policy.

Staff from within the organization can and should accompany the audit themselves. These internal auditors should maintain complete objectiveness in doing the assessment. Furthermore, they should keep the focus, which is to improve the procedures and not to find fault with their co-workers.

Consumers could also be obligatory auditors. This is a fair thing to do because they are not associated with the company and are more objective in recording observations and assessing the business methods and the entire quality management system being used. In addition to that, the customers are going to end up impressed with and appreciative of the company’s desire to be better.

Another good idea for an audit is to hire a consultant to conduct an entirely biased evaluation. Probably the only downside is the cost of paying for this professional. However, one can be sure about the quality of work done. It pays to have someone who is highly knowledgeable and trained in this particular process.

Cengrow is among the leaders in Management Consultants. They have a dedicated team of experts who understand the complexities and challenges of your Business performance management. The team then customizes solutions to meet the specific needs of your business.

Advantages of 360-Degree Feedback to Improve Employee Performance

360-degree feedback allows you in receiving the helpful development advice from required multiple sources, and the sources are none other than an employee’s work circle, which includes colleagues, direct reports, and line managers. In most of the cases, 360-degree feedback involves a self- evaluation and some parties prefer to include external parties like suppliers and clients. But such isn’t the scenario always. The 360-degree assessment process is carried out by a team to provide help to each person to improve and progress, and it is all about spotting strengths and weaknesses which are used to plan their personal growth and some specific paths for development.

Cengrows is here to throw the light on the advantages of 360 degrees feedback system, which allows the team to progress. It is a collaborative process which eliminates certain issues that arise when only the managers act instead of allowing the people also to perform with their team.

Following are the advantages to improve the performance:

  • Accountability and self- awareness: self-awareness is possible due to feedback only which helps you to be better and enhance your performance. People’s motivation comes from knowing that their works are being well- acknowledged and this helps in being them more responsible towards work.
  • Peer group: as a manager, you might have the different view about the employee, whereas, on the contradictory, peers will have a different perspective altogether, as they are more aware of the working styles, the way of interaction and the way they are utilizing their time. This is the reason why 360-degree feedback works and always welcomes the input that managers may lack to provide. It happens many times, you might work with people from the different team or department on the same project, and your manager might not be aware of the know- how’s of the task and the work involved. According to recent research, peer relationship has an enormous impact on the work lives on individuals. All these things directly contribute to the working environment of the office.
  • 360 feedback and managers: this feedback also assists the managerial performance which involves receiving both- the constructive as well as positive feedback from your team members. This also encourages the employees to come up with upward feedback on the issues which might have been underground over the period. This is a unique opportunity to expand new insight into your working style and also the way you interact with your team.

Hence, it was found that 360-degree feedback is obliging in the overall development of members and has been found quite beneficial and also, has shown improvement in the task. So all those, who haven’t yet tried it must implement in their company to have the excellent result, as this feedback helps to create more communicative,  continually developing and high- achieving team.