Evaluate new employee performance

You just spent six months and thousands of dollars hiring a senior vice president for your company. Now that a few months have passed, you're wondering if you've landed a veritable high-quality talent.

On the surface, the "quality" of a person is more of a subjective judgment and difficult to quantify. However, more and more companies are establishing their own talent assessment standards to help them assess both quantitative and qualitative performance of their new hires.

Assessing the quality of new hires is difficult and not widely used. A 2003 survey of companies by Staffing.org and the Human Capital Metrics Consortium showed that the number of companies evaluating the quality of new hires increased by no more than a year ago. to 1%. Only 30% of companies use this type of assessment, and most still believe in a rigorous selection process when hiring employees to ensure they can recruit "high-quality" employees.

Gerry Crispin is the head of the MMC Group and his company also needs to recruit people in multiple countries. "I think one of the key issues for most companies is to be clear about what they mean by the quality they recognize," he says. "Quality is measured by: 'Have I found the people I want?'"

Those companies that conduct employee quality assessments use different assessment systems, ranging from intuitive assessments to survey-based questionnaires. Experts agree that a recruiter or an employing department manager must define a specific definition of quality and establish some kind of criteria for evaluating employees.

Gallup: Q12 Measure

Robert Suttles, senior vice president of human resources at Health First, an integrated health care company, used Gallup's Q12 assessment tool to evaluate the company's new and existing managers. The Q12 measurement tool, derived from extensive research conducted by Gallup Consulting in the 1990s, measures what Gallup calls "employee engagement," which correlates with sales growth, productivity, customer loyalty It is related to other evaluation criteria of the enterprise.

Larry Emond, Gallup's chief marketing officer, said the company conducted numerous employee surveys in the 1990s asking employees about their overall satisfaction, but to no avail . "The questions in the survey were poorly set and it was difficult to get the expected results," he said. "The questions asked in Q12 were able to differentiate high-productivity work groups from other groups." Now, there are more than 500 companies around the world. Q12 is used as a barometer for company quality assessment.

Q12 consists of twelve questions: 1. Do I know the requirements for my job? 2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my job well? 3. At work, do I have the opportunity every day to do what I do best? 4. Have I been praised for doing a good job in the past six days? 5. Do I feel like my supervisor or colleagues care about my personal situation? 6. Is there anyone in the workplace encouraging my development? 7. At work, do I feel like my opinion is valued? 8. Do the company's mission goals make me feel that my work is important? 9. Are my colleagues committed to high-quality work? 10. Do I have a best friend at work? 11. Has anyone at work talked to me about my progress in the past six months? 12. Have I had the opportunity to learn and grow at work in the past year?

The information gained through Q12 allows Health First's Sutters to see how well managers are doing in creating the right work environment for their teams. The salary is then linked to the survey results. "We've benefited a lot from this approach," he said. "When the survey results were high, turnover was low, and the team under that manager was more productive, profitable, and customer satisfied. "

Bristol-Myers Squibb: How Involved in the Company

Introduced by Jim Ellinghausen, Vice President and Global Human Resources Manager at Bristol-Myers Squibb Said the company assesses the quality of its top executives by how well they are integrated into the company.

First, develop a specific plan for a manager's first three to six months on the job, which includes certain achievable goals, which Ehringhausen calls "integration goals." For example, for a newly hired research and development manager, goals were set to include visiting all of his major research sites within six months and meeting with key members of the executive committee. About three months into the hire, the manager met and talked with his immediate reports, telling them about himself and why he joined the company. After he left the meeting room, for the next three or four hours, his direct reports worked with the evaluators to design questions for him.

Design questions generally have four dimensions: what does the manager value in his subordinates, how does he work, what are his goals, and where he thinks the company is going. "It's a conversation that helps companies get the message across to new managers that to be successful here, you need to focus on these things," Erlinghausen said.

A year ago, Bristol-Myers Squibb also conducts quality assessments of new and existing managers around seven core behaviors related to the company's culture and its pledge to "extend human life and improve quality of life." During their six-month tenure, new managers in the company were assessed individually against the previously set integration goals and these core behaviors.

The Ritz-Carlton: Customer Satisfaction

As an international hotel with 28,000 employees, the Ritz-Carlton Hotel's approach to quality assessments for new hires feels more human. Also a little more flexible. It insists on asking customers for guidance, asking them in emotional terms about their experiences at hotels: Did they feel cared for? Are their greetings warm and sincere? Do they feel like they are a guest in someone else's home? The responses from such surveys may seem subjective, but they form part of the Ritz-Carlton's "Customer Satisfaction Score" for each department.

Ritz-Carlton's senior vice president of human resources, Sue Stephenson, said the hotel uses a method of assessing customer loyalty to determine the quality of new and existing employees. On a monthly basis, submissions from hotels and departments are aggregated to the company's Human Resources Department. Such as assessing the quality of a room service staff, not only to look at his work ethic or teamwork ability, "We also look at how well he cared for customers and so on." Stephenson said.

The findings were "surprising". So far this year, the Ritz-Carlton has achieved "best performance" 76.3 percent of the time -- the best result in a customer survey, which indicates the highest level of customer satisfaction. "That number is up 4 percent from last year," Stephenson said. "Most hotels are far from ours." Much of the success of the Ritz-Carlton is due to the evaluation of employees after they are hired and the rigorous selection procedure.

Most companies prefer to use a rigorous selection process when hiring employees, rather than evaluating employees after they are hired. The Ritz-Carlton also employs an employee Quality Selection Process that clearly defines expectations for new employees. Therefore, when new employees are assessed for quality, they are well aware of the criteria for the assessment. "Our focus is on the employee selection process and what talents they bring to the table," Stephenson said. "For example, you can't teach a person how to smile."

Expert: Qualitative analysis also works

As a Executive Director of a manager training firm, Dante Capitano specializes in manager evaluation and new manager integration issues. By the time the client company started recruiting, his main job was done: he developed a "Summary of Success" for each company's new hires. The handbook covers everything from behavioral traits to leadership styles that are critical to an individual's success.

Capitano then advised his clients to conduct a full 360-degree survey of senior managers during their six-month tenure, preferably qualitative rather than quantitative. "We interviewed 10 to 12 stakeholders who were interested in the success of a newly hired manager and asked how they perceived the manager's effectiveness," he said. It's more about evaluating against a set of principles."

Companies like Bristol-Myers Squibb and The Ritz-Carlton are leading the way in evaluating talent quality. The concept of assessing the quality of new hires is just beginning to be embraced by HR departments at many companies. According to Jac Fitz-enz, an authority on human capital, founder of the Saratoga Institute, and author of The ROI of Human Capital, the overall assessment of employee quality is Not objective enough and not getting the attention it deserves. While he admits there are plenty of good assessment tools, he says many companies are reluctant to use them. "Assessing employees in this way goes against some aspects of the corporate culture, so companies don't want to do it."

Peter Weddle, a publisher of online job search guides, says some people know Not suitable for some jobs, but prefer to apply. In this business environment, the quality assessment of people is becoming more and more important. Weddell and Fitzenz agree that most quality assessments are too subjective: "That's where the difficulty is, you say?"

The measurement of employee quality may be difficult to grasp accurately, But you can absolutely measure the impact of high-quality employees. "You can assess the work done and the quality of the work done by the employee. That's an indication of whether the employee is a good fit in an organization," Wedel said. "Quality assessment is: a measure of how well a person fits into a company."

Original text reproduced with permission from the October 2003 issue of Workforce Magazine, copyright registered by Crain Communications, Inc. Translated by Nina.

Author Eilene Zimmerman is a freelance writer based in San Diego, California.