Gallup recommends that one of the best ways to increase engagement is to transform how companies develop their people. The ‘old school’ approach was to focus employees on developing their weaknesses; the ‘new school’ approach is all about talent and strengths. Managers who build strengths in their team can just about eliminate active disengagement and double engagement levels.
Employee Engagement in the recruitment process
What will improving employee engagement do for you? A disengaged workforce can bring toxic waste into a team and undermine a company.
The financial implications of employee engagement are profound.
- Gallup, a leading engagement researcher, quantified the cost of poor engagement and the results are quiet staggering. They estimate that disengaged employees cost the US economy between $450 and $550 billion per annum.
- Research by Blessing White indicates that in Europe only 3 out of 10 employees are engaged in what they do, a result closely mirrored globally and in Africa.
- Research by Aon Hewitt suggests that just a 5% improvement in employee engagement can directly increase revenue by at least 3% in the following year.
This tells us that the path to increasing engagement simply requires us to take a step-by-step approach in the right direction. - Furthermore, a comparison between the top quartile companies in engagement and the bottom quartile indicates the direct financial implications for high-engagement performers: 22% higher profitability; 21% higher productivity; 41% less quality defects; 49% less safety incidents and 37% less absenteeism.
If you took your own company performance figures and plugged in these factors, the financial benefit of higher engagement would sell itself.
Evidence shows that improving engagement enhances outcomes whilst improving performance and profitability.
The cost to company and the personal loss that comes from inappropriate placements and disengaged employees can be huge and in our view, can be avoided if recruitment is approached using the Contribution Compass profile.
Contribution Compass profiling allows for leveraging your strengths and outsourcing or managing your weaknesses accordingly. Putting the right profiles together means deliberately structuring the team to function at its optimum, like a well-oiled machine. This also means that the frictions which tend to arise when members are functioning out of their natural flow can be eliminated.
Employee engagement and retention is driven largely by the extent to which your team has the opportunity to do what they do best every day and love doing.
Your natural energy reflects the way that you naturally think and operate. Some people are naturally innovative and intuitively drive concepts, projects and activity forward, despite all odds. Other people wait for the right time to make a decision or take action based on their sense of the market, team or clients. Some people will always be focused on who is affected by a decision and who they can connect with, whereas others will naturally think of the process or the system first and how that should operate. The concept of natural energy acknowledges that different people will naturally be more effective at different aspects of a business’ activities.
The critical application area for natural energy and employee engagement is through the recruitment process itself.
The Contribution Compass is an online profiling tool that very accurately positions a person as one of eight types or natural energy profiles.
Many profiling tools shy away from being used as mechanisms for making recruitment decisions. We take the view that there is a definite link between the talent required for a role and a candidate’s natural talent. Using a talent or natural energy profiling tool therefore helps to align profile to position. It is not to say that one profile cannot deliver a positive outcome in a role that is out of their flow. What it does mean is that in a time of crisis or stress that person will revert to their natural energy without thinking.
It is often in those moments of great tension that the greatest opportunities can be seized and the most disastrous mistakes are made. If you have matured your flow, and your flow and your role are aligned, the chances of opening up doors of opportunity at the right moment and in the right way increase exponentially.
In applying this approach, you have to be absolutely clear on how the role being recruited for adds value to your organisation or to a specific team. In a sales team, for example, you cannot assume that every sales person you recruit must have a particular profile. Sometimes, a sales team needs the support of a different profile to bring process and data analysis to manage the sales activity.
Enshrine Placements have incorporated the Contribution Compass Profile into our recruitment process.
And in our Client Job Briefing Interview questionnaire to help improve employee engagement, we Align Profile to Position, as there is a definite link between the talent (natural strengths) required for a role and a candidate’s natural talent.
The Contribution Compass profile adds massive value in the recruitment planning stages:
- Supports us to focus our language in press and advertisements so that our position framing naturally attracts the profile our client need’s.
- In the interview and selection stages, the profile requirements and profile results can support us to validate short-list selections, thereby improving effectiveness and efficiency.
- The significant insight it provides about how teams work allows to avoid pitfalls when putting teams together. The danger of hiring a mirror image of yourself and duplicating skills is always a real and present concern – like attracts like.
- We are interdependent. When we are surrounded by profiles that are proficient at the things we are not good at, we can specialise and add a much higher level of value.
Enshrine Placements have partnered with Contribution Compass to work with our clients to start turning this disengagement tide by harnessing the natural energy and talent of your team.
All candidates short-listed for our clients positions will incorporate their Contribution Compass Profile at no additional cost (retail price per Contribution Compass Token is R995 inc VAT).