The “Human” in Human Resources – what does your data say?

“A company’s employees are its greatest asset and your people are your product.”— Richard Branson

Employees are the company’s greatest assets. The intangible value of a committed employee cannot be replaced by an automated system / robot- at least not today. Hence, your employee is a great asset and resource. However, the way to manage them is different as compared to machine resources (which are the closest replacements I can think of). Are we treating them as ‘human’ resources?

Look at the data we maintain about our ‘human’ resources – our HRMS looks just like any other ERP – Date of joining / deployment of machine; Number of leaves / downtime for maintenance and so on. Yes, compare the data points and see – don’t we capture the data about the employees just like we capture for our other machine resources?

Where is the ‘human’ data about our employees? Do you have a Talent Database where the Interests, Motivation of work, Aptitude, Leadership ability, Skill Competency, Behaviour Competency etc.

In most companies the Manager is expected to know his team and the HR SPOC is supposed to know the employees. Is this a robust system of data management of your most critical data? This is also a reason that many employees leave with their managers, since the manager is the only person who ‘knows’ the employee.

I do hope the above is making you think of creating and maintaining a ‘Human’ attribute-based database for your people. Want to discuss more? Do comment!

I will share an example on how this information helped a mid – size tech company to recruit ‘good fit’ people – who were more likely to stay with them for a period of 18 – 24 months. This organisation was run by a young CEO who had spent the first 2 decades in the US with top-notch tech companies like amazon, and then moved to India. He was straight forward and had a good understanding of quality in work – and the company had more enquires that they could handle – because the rate of attrition of the ‘bright, young talent’ was a big handicap. The payment slabs were above average and so, attracting talent was not a problem. However, some of the people who stayed served for 5+ years and some left in less than 5 months. On the surface, the hiring was consistent – same set of colleges, similar qualifications and skill levels, similar desire to learn and excel.

We suggested a simple 16 question 4I Job Integrity Survey (yes, do try it out at: https://pexitest.com/Survey/WebsiteSurvey/Start?assessmentcode=PEXADM0422253 ) for all the employees . The scores measured the scores under Goal Focus, Need Focus, Role and Responsibility Scores and also a critical understanding – is the person dependent on the job for his income? If yes, to what percentage.

What came out that people who have Role and Responsibility scores in the greater than 60% range and Income Dependency scores above 75% stuck to the organisation. People who scored below these ranges seemed to find the job ‘very stressful’ (this was the most common reason given in the exit interview).

Outcome of this insight is that the organisation is using this 6 minutes, 16 questions only psychometric profiling as a first level of screening for potential employees. Each applicant is sent the link thru a WhatsApp with the request to fill up a short Survey which will help the company ‘know the better’. This link is also inserted into the Campus recruitment emails shared with Engineering colleges.

Only applicants who meet the score ranges are further screened for skills and interviewed. This small intervention cost INR 100 per test but helps save the company time and mis-hiring to the tune of nearly 50 Lakhs in a year!!

I look forward to hearing from you about organisations where you feel such an intervention can help.