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The Hidden Costs of a Bad Hire and How to Avoid Them

Thu, 29 Aug 2024 01:24:10 GMT

Introduction

Every business leader has seen the impact of hiring someone who was not well suited for a role. These situations are detrimental on multiple levels, affecting both the individual, their teams and the wider organisation. So, how can you prevent these costly errors, particularly at a time when the “ideal” candidate is hard to find?

The Financial Impact of a Bad Hire

The importance of hiring the right talent cannot be overstated, especially considering the substantial cost of a bad hire and a tight labour market. In Australia, conservative estimates [1] suggest that a failed hire can cost around 15% of the employee’s annual salary. This figure doesn’t even account for the expense of restarting the recruitment process.

In the U.S., the Department of Labor estimates the average cost of a bad hire to be 30% of the employee’s salary. For senior roles in Australia [2], the cost can range from 21% to a staggering 250% of the employee’s annual salary. Even with the most conservative estimate, this equates to about $14,700 for someone on an average Australian salary. When you factor in average re-recruitment costs [3] of $23,860, the cost of hiring the wrong person can start at around $38,000 and escalate depending on the role.

The Hidden Costs of a Bad Hire

The more obvious financial costs described above are just the tip of the iceberg. There are numerous hidden impacts and costs associated with a bad hire. As Shawn Sumner, Managing Director of PFERD Australia points out, “training and lost time when a new hire doesn’t last is significant”. An ill-fitting employee tends to have lower engagement with their role and the organisation, and if they’re a manager they are likely to negatively impact the engagement of their team. Keeping employee engagement high is vital to organisational success. A Gallup study [4] reports that the top quartile of engaged workforces are 23% more profitable than the bottom quartile.

A bad hire can also impact the productivity of the entire team and even affect clients or customers. CEO of ntegrity, Richenda Vermeulen reflects that the risk of a hiring mistake as her business is growing, is something that keeps her up at night and says “if a new hire can’t hit the ground running, it can be devastating for the team”. ntegrity’s People Operations Manager, Jade Doherty unpacks this further; “not only does (a bad hire) result in lost productivity, strained team dynamics and disruption to working rhythms, it can erode trust between leadership and the wider team”.

Sumner also adds that “the impact (of a hiring mistake) on the business culture can be an issue, and it can have a negative impact on service levels to customers and the perception of the business”.

These hidden costs and impacts show why it’s imperative to do everything in your power to make good hiring decisions.

Avoiding Costly Hiring Mistakes

When assessing a candidate for a role, it’s crucial to consider two factors: their likelihood of success in the role and whether they will positively contribute to your organisational culture.

Success in a role is multi-faceted—it’s not just about skills, qualifications, and experience. It’s also about the candidate’s temperament, motivation, and balance of behavioural traits. For instance, how they communicate, how they lead, how they handle autonomy, how much initiative they will take, how they handle conflict and how they react under stress are just some behavioural factors you would really like to know about a candidate before hiring them.

Interviewing a candidate does not tend to uncover these behavioural factors, as they may only show up 3-6 months into the reality of working under the demands and pressures of the actual role and interacting daily with your team and customers.

Behavioural analytics tools can scientifically measure a candidate’s behavioural preferences. At Salple, after evaluating various tools, we chose Harrison Assessments’ predictive analytics to assist our clients in making informed hiring decisions and eliminating unconscious bias in the hiring process.

Using Harrison, we can identify candidates who are likely to thrive in your specific job role and align with your organisation’s culture. Harrison is based on the psychology of enjoyment and measures an impressive 175 behavioural traits.

In practical terms, our behavioural preferences influence how we make decisions, collaborate with others, and what we expect from our colleagues and employer. This approach allows us to predict a candidate’s suitability for a specific job role and provides insight into whether they are naturally inclined to live your values and positively contribute to your organisation’s culture.

Harrison is a well-respected, workplace-oriented, psychometric test used in 70 countries by over 3.5 million people.

Sumner considers Harrison Assessments an excellent tool to assist in matching the individual to the company culture and the role itself. He also mentioned that for multiple candidates, Harrison helps him choose the best option.

The Cost of Behavioural Analytics

Considering the cost of a bad hire can exceed $38,000, adding behavioural analytics to your recruitment process is a cost-effective strategy. Typically, you’ll spend less than $1,000 per successful candidate for reports and an expert debrief, that can determine if a candidate is likely to be a good fit for the role, positively contribute to your culture, enjoy the role, thrive and stay.

Setting your New Recruit Up for Success

The same pool of behavioural analytics data used for recruitment can also be used to ensure that the onboarding process sets your new employee up for success from the start. The data will highlight areas of strength which can be further leveraged, as well as growth areas where someone may need additional support, or to develop over time. When an employee has a growth mindset, evidence suggests that developing them can have as much as a 250% return on investment.

Sumner says that Harrison Assessments gives him the opportunity to see if a candidate is open to coaching and development. In a tight labour market, sometimes you can’t find the ideal candidate, but knowing that your top pick is coachable makes onboarding far more likely to succeed.

Conclusion

When hiring new employees, it’s critical to ensure they are likely to enjoy the role and succeed, while also positively contributing to your culture. The cost of a bad hire can be substantial. A cost-effective way of ensuring you get the right person into a role the first time is to incorporate a behavioural analytics tool, such as Harrison Assessments, into your recruitment process. A Harrison Assessment maps a candidate’s behavioural preferences and motivations into a prediction of successful job performance and seamless integration into your organisation’s unique culture. See how behavioural analytics can enhance your hiring process, by requesting a FREE Harrison for your company.

Conditions apply

[1] https://www.roberthalf.com/au/en/about/press/rising-costs-bad-hire

[2] Foresee (The True Cost of Bad Hiring Decisions) and https://www.peterberry.com.au/blog/what-is-the-potential-cost-of-a-bad-hire/

[3] https://hrexpertise.com.au/recruitment-cost/

[4] https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx

Remote Working Behavioural Analysis

glenn@salple.com (Glenn Brien) — Thu, 18 Jul 2024 08:36:59 GMT

The Covid 19 pandemic changed our relationship to the office. Some people thrive with remote or hybrid work arrangement, whilst for others it’s more challenging.

Harrison Assessments have released a “Remote Working (Behavioural) Analysis”. This analysis identifies a balance of behavioural traits that are likely to help someone succeed working remotely – in terms of productivity and communication.

The intent is to help managers support remote and hybrid employees. We also know that this shift has given many leaders and employees the opportunity to review their thinking about remote working and what role, if any, it will play in the future. This analysis will give you a better understanding of how well your workforce is positioned to work remotely into the future and what are the opportunities but also challenges that this might bring.

The overview report contains an overall score and scores for the following two competencies:

For employees;

Remote Productivity
Remote Communication

For managers;

Managing Remote Productivity
Managing Remote Communication

For a deeper dive, the individual scores for the dozens of behavioural traits (such as Takes Initiative, Wants Autonomy and Organised) that make up each of the competencies, can be seen in the Drill-Down reports.

This analysis can be a great tool to help with coaching your people to thrive in their roles during this difficult time and beyond.

Contact Salple to get a Remote Working Behavioural Analysis for your people.

How Workplace Culture Habits are Caught

glenn@salple.com (Glenn Brien) — Wed, 12 Jun 2024 08:18:48 GMT

This is a picture of an experiment designed by psychologists, building on the concept of social learning, pioneered by Albert Bandura. It shows how easily we pick up our cues on how to behave from those around us.

In the experiment, an unsuspecting woman enters a doctor’s waiting room where all the other patients are actors. The hidden experimenter rings a bell and all the actors stand up briefly.

After only 3 rings, this woman also starts standing when the bell rings. The experiment unfolds with all the actors being called into the doctor’s office, leaving only the woman. The bell rings again and she still stands up, even though there’s no longer anyone there to copy. Other unsuspecting patients enter the waiting room and she, unwittingly, teaches all of them what to do by standing at the bell, and they all follow suit.

In business, this powerful illustration shows that the way your people behave is very strongly influenced by the behaviour of their peers and in particular, the behaviour of the CEO and the leadership team. If your team is modelling poor behaviour, this is what others will pick up and repeat. Conversely, if you model behaviour that leads towards your business goals, this is what others will pick up and it will start to become part of your culture.

So, actions really do speak louder than words. But words can be used to reinforce the actions you desire. Bandura’s work showed that recognising someone for an action increases their learning of that action as a desirable thing to do. That’s why our culture activation platform, Salpulse, makes recognition of peers for behaviours consistent with your organisation’s desired culture easy to do.

Watch the video of the experiment.

Salple takes an integrated, data-informed approach to organisational culture

How to Measure Culture

glenn@salple.com (Glenn Brien) — Wed, 08 May 2024 08:03:27 GMT

In order to measure culture, you need to know what you’re measuring, but also how the results will be used. Your measurements should be purpose-driven and aligned to your values. Toxic cultures often form when behaviours that aren’t aligned to your purpose and values are tolerated, celebrated, or rewarded through incentive schemes or financial remuneration.

People often think that to measure culture, all they need to measure is employee engagement. This is one component (which I’ll describe later), but your employees can be highly engaged, but working on the wrong things.

To properly measure culture, you need to have a blueprint of the culture you are aiming for and measure how well the organisation is living up to that blueprint. The blueprint we recommend is a co-created Culture Code , which aligns values and behaviours to achieving your strategic objectives, whilst advancing your organisation’s purpose.

With a Culture Code in place, you can then measure if your employees are living up to your culture code. Using the concept of “people as sensors”, our software platform, Salpulse , gives you insight into how well your organisation’s lived culture is tracking compared to your blueprint.

Diving Deeper

Your Salpulse survey will possibly uncover areas where the lived culture is not matching your desired culture. For example, you might find that one of your values is not being lived well. At this point you can dive deeper using behavioural analytics tools. These tools measure an individual’s or a group’s tendency towards or away from certain behaviours.

One such tool is Harrison Assessment . We use this tool to build up a values map, specific to your organisation, which shows an individual’s or a group’s tendency to be able to live each of your organisation’s values, based on their behavioural preferences.

The values map allows you to drill down into an individual’s behavioural drivers (eg: “Diplomatic”, “Optimistic”) that are impacting their propensity to live each of your values. This is a solid, data-driven foundation for having discussions with employees and teams about how they can further embed your organisation’s Culture Code into how they think, behave and work together.

What about Employee Engagement?

Many organisations run an annual employee engagement survey to arrive at a number for their employee engagement level, either as a traditional percentage or an Employee Net Promotor Score (ENPS) . And then fall into the trap of focusing effort and energy on lifting a low engagement score – rather than on actually increasing employee engagement. So you start to see initiatives that are based around providing people with free lunches whilst they complete the annual engagement survey, management encouraging employees to increase the score they give the organisation, people giving high scores “mark it 5 to stay alive” as they don’t trust that the data is truly anonymous – there are lots of horror stories around engagement surveys.

It’s OK to measure an engagement score (and Salpulse does this), but don’t let that become your focus. Engagement is a very individual thing. Global initiatives to lift engagement usually don’t work. One person will be looking for flexible work time, another for development opportunities and another will want their opinions valued. Engagement should be a two-way conversation with mutual responsibility between the organisation and the individual. In this conversation, explore what the employee is looking for, but also, what characteristics the employee can work on to support that. For example, if the employee wants development opportunities, are they taking the initiative to research what development opportunities would suit them.

The Harrison Assessment Engagement Survey can help with this discussion because it drills down into an individual’s engagement factors, how fulfilled they are for those factors and measures their supporting behavioural traits.

You’ve measured culture, now what?

You’ve measured your culture, you’ve had individual engagement discussions with your employees. Now, how do you continue to keep your desired culture alive and fresh. There are three components to this:

Remind people regularly of your Culture Code (your blueprint of the culture you desire)
Share stories about when people are living your values
Recognise your colleagues for behaviours consistent with your values

When you recognise and celebrate desired behaviours, it becomes a cue to individual employees of what matters most. This continual reminder serves to reinforce desired behaviours and further strengthen the desired culture. Our software platform, Salpulse , helps your organisation strengthen your culture by reminding, sharing and recognising.

Conclusion

Measuring individual elements of culture can be a misguided activity if you don’t first have a blueprint for what your desired culture is – a culture that moves you towards your strategic goals and advances your organisation’s purpose. Once you have that in place, you can then measure how well you are tracking in relation to that blueprint.

Build a Culture Code for your organisation.

More information about Harrison Assessment

Salple takes an integrated, data-informed approach to organisational culture

Use Belonging Cues to Lift Engagement

glenn@salple.com (Glenn Brien) — Wed, 24 Apr 2024 07:40:56 GMT

To fit in, is a deeply rooted psychological need and a powerful motivator. Consider an experiment by Harvard Business School’s Alison Wood Brooks; You are standing in the rain at a train station. A stranger approaches and politely says, “Can I borrow your phone?”. In the experiment, a second group of strangers were approached politely with the alternative statement; “I’m sorry about the rain. Can I borrow your phone?”. With the addition of this single statement (that author of “ The Culture Code ”, Daniel Coyle calls a belonging cue), over four times as many people handed over their phone!

When we help companies build Culture Codes , we embed belonging cues such as story-telling and purposeful play into every step of the process. What we like to see is everyone in the company embracing the new Culture Code and belonging cues help do this.

Practicing belonging cues helps to build collaboration and alignment of behaviours to what matters most. Eye contact, mimicry and taking turns are simple ways of practicing belonging cues every day. And recognising a colleague for behaviour that’s consistent with your desired culture is both a strong belonging cue and a re-enforcement of the culture.

What belonging cues are you practicing?

Salple takes an integrated, data-informed approach to organisational culture

Why Process Improvement is Broken

glenn@salple.com (Glenn Brien) — Sun, 10 Mar 2024 06:33:19 GMT

Leaders often tell me, “Culture is on our list, but we need to fix our processes first. We’ll get to culture when things settle down”. But guess what, things never seem to settle down. No matter how well defined the systems become, they remain broken and ineffective because the people executing them often don’t do what they should. The business continues to operate in fire-fighting mode, lurching from one crisis to the next.

Culture is actually the engine room for implementing effective process and system improvement. Culture is so powerful it once led Peter Drucker to comment: “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. Culture should never be an after-thought. In fact, it should be at the top of your list.

A culture that underpins an effective process improvement initiative has these 3 key characteristics:

Alignment

There’s an overarching purpose to the business (your “why”) that guides every decision. There’s strong agreement on the “way” you will conduct business (your values and behaviours). These values and behaviours serve the purpose. And there’s also strong alignment on what you will “do” (your strategy) in pursuit of your purpose. Alignment acts as the solid foundations that don’t change, whilst everything else is changing during a process and system redesign initiative. This stability gives your people that solid sense of security and direction they need to thrive during change.

Reinforcement

Behaviours that are consistent with your values and that further your purpose, are encouraged through recognition and positive re-enforcement. People share stories of how they and others are acting in harmony with your agreed culture. A constant theme that employees raise with us is their desire for recognition from their boss and their peers. Reinforcement builds a shared understanding of how to behave as you implement your process improvement plan.

Personal Growth

There’s a growth path for people and teams to overcome their primal emotional responses. Negative behaviours that sabotage process improvement efforts typically emanate from perceived threats (eg: to status or security). People who understand what their individual threat triggers are and why they instinctively react the way they do, are more able to reason their way through the threat and act with greater emotional intelligence, to help drive the success of the change initiative.

When alignment, reinforcement and personal growth are present in your culture, your process improvement initiatives will grow in fertile soil. There will be stability and direction in the face of rapid change as everyone understands “what matters most”.

Develop the culture you need to support your strategic goals with a co-created Culture Code .

Salple takes an integrated, data-informed approach to organisational culture

Profit! Is That All There Is?

glenn@salple.com (Glenn Brien) — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 06:10:03 GMT

181 CEOs of America's leading corporations have recently redefined the definition of a corporation from maximising shareholder value (ie: profit) to maximising STAKEHOLDER value (ie: for customers, employees, vendors, community as well as shareholders). This echoes the shift we're seeing as more and more businesses want to be a force for good - becoming PURPOSE driven - not profit driven.

Pioneering companies such as Barry-Wehmiller (a manufacturing company with 12,000 employees) and movements such as B-Corp and Conscious Capitalism, have been leading the way in causing the idea that every decision should be made principally through the lens of profit to lose ground to more human ways of doing business.

In Barry-Wehmiller’s early days, they made the effort to codify their values – the unique way in which they would conduct business. And their manifesto that guides their daily interactions is: “Everyone wants to do better - trust them. Leaders are everywhere - find them. People achieve good things, big and small, every day - celebrate them. Some people wish things were different - listen to them. Everybody matters - show them”.

Begin your journey to stakeholder value by building an authentic Culture Code .

Salple takes an integrated, data-informed approach to organisational culture

Dead Company Values? Top 4 Mistakes Exposed

glenn@salple.com (Glenn Brien) — Wed, 10 Jan 2024 05:49:00 GMT

Do you have a Unique Culture Proposition (UCP)? You’ve probably heard of the term USP, your Unique Selling Proposition – the idea that customers should see something unique in what you offer. But what about culture? What makes your culture unique and does uniqueness really matter?

Most companies have values, but they are “dead values”, not lived and not contributing anything to the culture.

Your company values, when lived, are a powerful component of your culture and are one expression of your UCP. But even having company values is controversial - Brian Roberson, the creator of Holacracy, talks about what he calls the “dark side of values”. His premise is that defining a value (eg: adaptability), implies that you “de-value” its opposite (eg: stability) and that in some situations, that opposite might be more appropriate.

Whilst I have great respect for Brian and the self-management movement (often called Teal), I disagree on this point.

I think, it very much depends on how and why the values were created, and the depth to which they are developed. The problem is that most company values are not well-designed. Here are the 4 biggest mistakes companies make when defining their values;

Mistake #1 - Values that are just 3R values

Most values are created simply to reflect the 3R’s – ie: a “Reasonable, Responsible and Responsive person”. Often, they are expressed as one-word values, like “teamwork” or “communication”. I call these hygiene values that every company will need, in order to succeed in today’s hyper-competitive world. Also, single word values don’t give your mind a “how to” hook. For example, “Be Curious” is a better value than “Creativity” because it’s more specific and tells you what to do.

Mistake #2 - Values that don’t serve your purpose

Most values are not created to serve the company’s purpose. It should be very clear to all your employees, that if they conduct themselves in line with your values, their actions will further your company’s purpose. Of course, this pre-supposes that you have a purpose . The combination of your purpose and values that serve your purpose, become a filter for guiding decisions and working together.

Mistake #3 - Values that don’t reflect “who you really are”

Your values should reflect your unique organisational DNA. The experience your customers have with your brand is strongly influenced by your employees – and their ability to deliver that experience is shaped by your culture. As with a USP, you want your UCP to shine through to your customers so that they see something different to your competitors. We’ve collected a library of over 300 values and whilst there are common themes, the combination of 4 or 5 values that you craft for your company, should be unique to you.

To design a value that genuinely reflects your DNA, using a behavioural analytics tool to can really help. The figure below, is a Harrison Assessment extract for a company’s leadership team:

You can see that this company should have a value centred around innovation because its leaders love experimenting, taking initiative and problem solving.

Having values that come naturally to the majority of your people (ie: that reflect your DNA), is the central key to ensuring they are actually lived and come across as genuine to your customers.

Mistake #4 - Values that aren’t co-created

When we encounter a company with “dead values”, the first question we ask is “how were they created?”. Invariably, one (or sometimes a few) leaders came up with them and then “handed them down to their workforce”. This rarely works. People in your organisation need to be a part of their construction so they can wrestle with what they mean for them in the context of their role and day to day activities.

Co-creating your values gives everyone an opportunity to be part of creating the future and uncovers a core group of employees who are passionate about your culture. These “culture champions” will spearhead behavioural change in your organisation as you seek to live authentically by your values.

An example of a great company value

One of the best expressions of a value I’ve been a part of co-creating is at BrandWorks. They are a design agency in Melbourne with the purpose of “bringing extraordinary to life”. Their value “Anchor ‘N Twist” is deeply authentic to who they are, directly serves their purpose and gives the mind a “how to” hook.

Anchor ‘N Twist is described by BrandWorks’ Co-Founder and Creative Director, Michael Tan this way; “We see through a different lens by asking how we can make the familiar new again. This value played out in our work, when we designed a day-to-night concept for the Goldie Restaurant where we anchored on the popularity of yum cha and dumplings and twisted, by turning it on its head to seamlessly introduce Chinese street food concepts”.

Conclusion

From our research, we know that your employees long to be part of something special. Having a clear purpose and unique supporting values can help create that “something special”. We often hear stories from people who have worked for a company with a clear purpose and strong, lived values. They talk about that culture like a departed loved one. They yearn for the clarity that the purpose gave to help them do “what really matters”. And they hunger for the empowerment the values gave them to make decisions and work together in ways that always advanced that purpose.

Now, back to Brian Robertson’s premise that values have a dark side. What he is really referring to are behavioural traits. And often, seemingly opposite behavioural traits are in fact complementary depending on the degree. This paradox can best be captured in a set of behaviours that operationalise each of your values. To take Brian’s example, let’s say you had a value that spoke to adaptability. I’ll call it; “There’s always another way”. An expression of this value at the behaviours level might be that “we expect to see people flexing our systems when needed, to turn a difficult customer into a fan”. Complementing this behaviour, an expression of the seemingly opposite trait, stability, might be “we don’t want to see systems flexed to the point of breaking down completely”. These complementary behaviours are both ways of operationalising the core value; “There’s always another way”.

So, if you’ve got company values, but they’re not lived and don’t inspire, engage and guide your people, ask yourself; are they just 3R values, do they give the mind a “how to” hook, do they serve your purpose, do they reflect your unique DNA, have they been operationalised with behaviours and were they co-created? Then consider instead, building your Unique Culture Proposition through designing values that will come alive for you. The difference between dead values (which most companies have) and living values is stark. But the positive impact that living values have on alignment, employee engagement and the experience your employees deliver to your customers is worth the effort. Watch these videos to see how leaders and employees from Sutton Tools and Littlepay (a couple of our clients) connect with their living values.

References

Brian Robertson: The Limits of Company Values

BrandWorks’ Goldie Project

Salple takes an integrated, data-informed approach to organisational culture

The Dead Duck Principle and the Power of Purpose

glenn@salple.com (Glenn Brien) — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 05:24:32 GMT

When my wife was learning to windsurf, she encountered a dead duck on the lake. Her mantra at the time was “don’t hit the dead duck, don’t hit the dead duck”. But even though she wanted to avoid it, she was looking straight at it. In windsurfing as in surfing and skiing, where the head leads, the body follows, so unwittingly, she steered straight into the dead duck she was so intent on avoiding.

For a company, obsessing about the competition is like focusing on the dead duck. You’re so intent on beating them that you aim straight at them, becoming just like them and end up competing just on price.

But an inspiring purpose can help take your focus off immediate competitive threats and get you considering how what you do will impact the world for the better. Your decisions become more strategic with a longer-term benefit.

In our research, we asked 32 CEOs and founders “why” their business exists. The most common answers we heard related to creating something unique and working with and caring for great people. All noble causes, but very few were able to articulate a clear and concise purpose.

So, do you have a purpose statement for your business? One that inspires but also aligns everyone and is used as a filter for making decisions? For example, our purpose at Salple is “to help leaders excite and delight the human spirit”. It permeates everything we do and every decision we make, big or small.

Over the years, we’ve refined a very deliberate process for uncovering the purpose of a company. Here are some purpose statements we have helped our clients define.

Salple takes an integrated, data-informed approach to organisational culture

WhyWayDo – Bring Strategy to Life Through Your People

glenn@salple.com (Glenn Brien) — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 05:14:57 GMT

WhyWayDo is a simple but powerful framework for deliberately designing your culture so that it contributes to achieving your strategic goals. WhyWayDo helps everyone in the company focus on “what matters most”.

Why

“Why” is an articulation of your purpose. Why does your business exist? To discover this, tap into your founding story. Challenge yourself to imagine how your customer’s lives are changed by what you do. Your purpose can be a higher purpose - how humanity is improved by what you do; a functional purpose – what you do; or more likely, a hybrid purpose – how humanity is improved combined with how you do that. For example, Automatic Heating Global’s (hybrid) purpose is to “design, deliver and maintain sustainable, energy efficient solutions that enables others to live and work well”. A well-crafted, intentional purpose becomes a guide for every employee. It means that when prioritizing effort and making decisions people can ask themselves “does this advance our purpose?”. In a time of rapid change, this allows people to make decisions with certainty within their area of influence.

Way

“Way” is your behavioural operating system. It should articulate the 3-6 values that are most important to how you operate and the behaviours that operationalise those values. Your values should reflect both your DNA (who you are now as a company) and your aspirations (who you want to be or who you are when you are operating at your best). For example, one of PFERD Australia’s values is “We build open and honest relationships through communication”. Psychometric analysis of your team’s behavioural preferences can help identify seeds for your values. Behaviours are best represented at 3 levels: “Love to See”, “Expect to See” and “Don’t Want to See” so people are clear on what’s expected.

Do

“Do” is an expression of your strategy. It includes a Shared Ambition that is co-created with your employees. The Shared Ambition is the high-level articulation of your strategy. It’s a short sentence or paragraph that describe the common goal your company is aiming for in the short to medium term (typically 18 months) as you pursue your purpose (the Why). “Do” also includes strategic goals for teams and individuals that support the Shared Ambition and advance the purpose. A good framework for this is Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) popularised by Intel and Google. The advantages OKRs have over Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are that they are more adaptive to real-world changing circumstances and they incorporate the concept of failure as a pathway to learning, which encourages innovation.

Using WhyWayDo

In WhyWayDo, the “Why” and “Way” components will rarely change. The “Do” component however will change over time as the strategy unfolds. Key to the technique is to deliberately consider the “Why” and the “Way” every time an objective for an OKR is written or the key results are updated. Ask, how does this objective advance our purpose, and bring our shared ambition to life? And then consider how each value contributes to achieving it.

WhyWayDo is captured as a Culture Code for your company. The best Culture Codes are co-created with all staff having the opportunity to be involved. This ensures that everyone understands the strategy and their role in bringing it to life, as they advance your purpose. This is what creates true employee engagement.

Salple takes an integrated, data-informed approach to organisational culture

Intuition in a Data-Driven World

glenn@salple.com (Glenn Brien) — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 05:04:31 GMT

Data-driven decisions are now common place, and for good reason. But what about intuition? Does gut feel still have a place?

Intuition is a pattern matching process in the brain that draws a conclusion from incomplete data. This is exactly the same process that some advanced AI techniques use. One technique that closely mimics human intuition is Bayesian Inference.

In humans it’s called the “Intuitive Bayesian” – Consider deciding on taking an umbrella, without seeing the forecast. I guess that the chance of rain is about 50% which is true for Melbourne in May. In the morning, I look out the window and see dark clouds. I adjust my intuitive probability to 75%. Then I notice that the grass is wet. It could be dew, but with the clouds it’s more likely that it rained over-night, so I adjust my intuitive probability to 85%. My brain is doing the maths automatically and I perceive it as a gut feel that it’s a good idea to take an umbrella.

Don’t discount your gut feeling at work. Your brain is taking into account all the evidence it knows and filling in the blanks. Instead, unpack that feeling to identify the evidence that led you there and use your data to confirm or deny the truth of that evidence and adjust your Intuitive Bayesian accordingly.

Harrison Assessments is a behavioural analytics tool that measures, amongst other things, the paradoxical balance between analytical and intuitive thinking.

Salple takes an integrated, data-informed approach to organisational culture

Toxic Cultures and Lower Productivity

glenn@salple.com (Glenn Brien) — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 05:51:52 GMT

So, are you a red zone chicken or a green zone chicken? Huh? Well, let me explain. Bill Muir from Purdue University ran an experiment breeding chickens for egg production. He found star performing chickens, but they tended to be aggressive and he wondered if they were rising to the top by suppressing the other chickens. So, he grouped the chickens into red zone chickens (who were aggressive to their peers) and green zone chickens (who were friendly to their peers: ie: collaborative).

He took the best egg producers from each zone and bred them, measuring egg production and mortality rates for each zone. After 1 year (5 generations), the egg production for the green zone (collaborative) chickens was up 260%, but the red zone chickens had decimated themselves and killed half their peers.

The culture lesson from this experiment is that a toxic culture spirals in on itself, breeds further toxicity and leads to excessive internal competition and self-destruction of the group, whereas, highly collaborative cultures use their energy on external competition and collectively lift the group to higher productivity.

Have a think about whether your group is populated with green zone or red zone behaviours.

Harrison Assessments is a behavioural analytics tool that uncovers people's behavioural preferences so you can help eliminate red zone behaviours. Salpulse is our peer recognition platform that helps encourage green zone behaviours.

Salple takes an integrated, data-informed approach to organisational culture

Feedback that Sucks!

glenn@salple.com (Glenn Brien) — Tue, 15 Aug 2023 05:41:53 GMT

I cringe when I hear, “we’ve got a culture of fearless feedback”. But I love to hear “we’ve got a culture of feedback and praise, with careful delivery”. It’s often very transparent what the motive of a person delivering feedback is. And motive counts, a lot!

The right motive is to want to improve outcomes for the company and also for the recipient. The wrong motive is to point score or to make yourself seem better at the other person’s expense.

So, your motive is pure, what now? To give feedback that will be well received, you need to have two foundations in place. Firstly, a culture of praise. People need to hear, often, what you value about them to be open to receiving critical feedback. Research suggests 5 times more praise than criticism. Second, you need to adapt your delivery to the psychological makeup of the recipient. Does that person like a frank delivery, or are they more open if it’s delivered diplomatically, with warmth and empathy?

To get the behavioural change you desire by giving feedback, it’s up to you to set the environment (praise often) and tweak the delivery for each person. This way, they will know your motive is pure and are more likely to take that feedback on board and change.

Salple takes an integrated, data-informed approach to organisational culture

Are You a Paradoxical Leader?

glenn@salple.com (Glenn Brien) — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 05:37:06 GMT

As a leader, your behaviours are the strongest driver of your company’s culture. Your employees take their cues from you. But how is the thinking behind how you behave impacting your company’s culture?

Paradoxical leadership is the idea that you reach behavioural maturity when you can hold paradoxical behavioural traits in balance. For instance, do you like analysing pitfalls, but also like taking business risks. If so, you have balanced approach to strategic decision making – this is called “mindful courage”.

But what if you’re out of balance. This is when your thinking negatively impacts the culture. Take Ryan. He loves analysing pitfalls but doesn’t like taking risks. Ryan’s faulty thinking is that he’s trivialised and demonised risk taking. Years ago, he had to wear the fallout of an impulsive colleague who lost the company a ton of time and money. He vowed never to be “one of those irresponsible types”. This thinking pattern sub-consciously constrains his behaviour to be overly cautious. At his company, instead of promoting a culture of “mindfully courageous risk taking” to seize new opportunities, Ryan’s thinking causes him to unwittingly promote a culture of timidity.

What thinking is holding your culture back?

Salple takes an integrated, data-informed approach to organisational culture

Culture is NOT the Staff BBQ and Free Beer

glenn@salple.com (Glenn Brien) — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 02:24:57 GMT

Valuable as social connection initiatives are for building relationships, they just aren’t as important as you might think!

Being naturally introverted myself, I was curious to see what the data says. So, I selected 100 random employees and leaders from 7 companies out of recent Harrison surveys we’ve conducted at Salple and looked at how people ranked factors known to be drivers of engagement.

It didn’t surprise me that, “wants social opportunities” ranked near the bottom of the list, with an average score of only 3.1 out of 10. I wasn’t surprised because that finding is consistent with what I hear from many leaders who’ve instigated social activities in an attempt to boost engagement and found that they get poor attendance and no discernible increase in engagement levels.

However, if you combine a social event with a learning opportunity, such as a guest speaker or a knowledge sharing lunch – that’s a totally different story. The most popular engagement factor in my sample was “wants development” (ie: learning new skills and abilities) with an average score of 8.5 out of 10.

So, spice up your next staff BBQ or lunch, with a bit of learning sauce to boost employee engagement.

Salple takes an integrated, data-informed approach to organisational culture

The IKEA Effect and Co-Creating your Culture Code

glenn@salple.com (Glenn Brien) — Fri, 26 May 2023 04:23:52 GMT

In 2011, Michael Norton and his colleagues did some interesting experiments. They got people to build or partially build a piece of IKEA furniture then tested how much they would pay for that item compared to what they would pay for a pre-assembled item. It turned out that people would pay 63% more for something they built or helped build themselves.

This is one of the reasons we are so passionate about co-creation when it comes to building your Culture Code. If everyone in your company has the opportunity to contribute to its creation, not only do you tap into their collective wisdom, but you also get the IKEA effect of your employees taking ownership of it and defending it.

After all, you want a Culture Code that people will “live by”, not just pay lip-service to.

Salple takes an integrated, data-informed approach to organisational culture

360s are Popular, But are they Effective?

Wed, 12 Apr 2023 02:05:44 GMT

We meet people who’ve experienced a 360 degree feedback and “hated it”, leaving them feeling demotivated and shocked.

In the HBR article, The Feedback Fallacy , the authors challenge the belief that a culture of fearless feedback about a colleague’s performance (including their weaknesses) leads to learning and excellence. They point to research indicating that humans are poor judges of another’s abstract qualities. This is due to the idiosyncratic rater effect - more than half of your rating reflects your own characteristics, not the person you are rating. So, when 8 colleagues rate you on business acumen, the resulting score is mostly noise and cannot be trusted.

They also explain why our strengths (not our weaknesses) are our greatest development areas. Neural pathway growth (the mechanism of learning), is more likely in areas of the brain with already strong pathways (ie: our strengths).

An effective alternative to 360s is self-assessment. We use a self-assessment tool that measures enjoyment levels for specific traits (eg: “Diplomatic”) to indicate strengths. Performance conversations then take the form of “which of your strengths can you combine to bring about this outcome?” instead of “you’ve got these faults that need fixing”.

Salple takes an integrated, data-informed approach to organisational culture

What is Organisational Culture?

glenn@salple.com (Glenn Brien) — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 00:12:35 GMT

Is it ping pong tables and free beer on tap? When you hear about a company having a “great culture” what does that mean?

Culture is simply:

“The way we do things around here”.

It’s made up of the patterns of behaviour and ways of thinking that shape how things get done. In essence, your culture is the habits of your organisation.

In most companies, culture has grown organically out of the founders’ personal behavioural preferences. If they love(d) collaboration, then collaboration will be baked into the organisation’s DNA.

But equally, the founders’ less than desirable traits are also likely to be part of the culture. Traits like procrastination or authoritarianism can become ingrained behaviours of the whole organisation.

It is however, possible to design the culture you want. The best culture is one that serves your organisation’s purpose. If you can clearly link having a ping-pong table and offering free beer to your purpose – go right ahead. But becoming clear about the values that serve your purpose and the behaviours that operationalise those values will have a greater impact on leveraging culture to achieve your business goals.

This can by done by co-creating a Culture Code for your organisation.

Salple takes an integrated, data-informed approach to organisational culture

A Culture of Innovation - Silicon Valley Style

glenn@salple.com (Glenn Brien) — Tue, 04 Jun 2019 04:32:59 GMT

Surprisingly, in Silicon Valley, innovation culture is not all about technology. Recently, Jasna Sims, Group Head of Innovation Culture at Lendlease spoke about her visit to Silicon Valley as part of the “Discover the secrets of Silicon Valley’s Tech Giants” tour.

She visited Salesforce, Airbnb, Tesla and Slack amongst others.

Her take-home message about innovation in the Valley is that it’s about:

Talent
Customer
Culture

Talent - Jasna was told that talent today want to “change the world”. So, your job as a business is to figure out how you’re “changing the world” (your why) so employees can connect with you in a deeper and more authentic way – and will therefore commit and stay.

Customer - The focus of the companies she visited was intensely on the customer. The customer’s voice is impregnated into every touch point of the business and every step of the innovation process, from ideation to implementation.

Culture – Culture is king – but always, through the lens of customer success. One company even had a Head of Story-Telling role to draw out a continual stream of customer success stories to enrich and inform their culture.

Is innovation through talent, customer and culture part of your strategy?

Salple takes an integrated, data-informed approach to organisational culture

Culture Through the Eyes of the Banking Royal Commission

glenn@salple.com (Glenn Brien) — Tue, 19 Mar 2019 03:16:00 GMT

Directors, take note!

The Hayne Royal Commission - Recommendation 5.6:

“All financial services entities should, as often as reasonably possible, take proper steps to:

assess the entity’s culture and its governance;
identify any problems with that culture and governance;
deal with those problems; and
determine whether the changes it has made have been effective.”

Directors have a responsibility to care about the culture of the companies they steward.

Hayne points out that directors have a responsibility for culture. A director’s duty “demands consideration of more than the financial returns that will be available to shareholders in any particular period”. He goes on to state that the long-term financial advantage of a corporation is likely to include “the interests of shareholders, customers, employees and all associated with any corporation”.

This brings to mind a conversation I had last year with someone from an organisation representing company directors where I asked if they’d like us to deliver a talk about culture. I was informed that “culture is not one of a director’s responsibilities – It’s an operational matter”.

Well, I think the Royal Commission is telling us that directors should very much care about culture. One way directors can take positive action on culture is to commission a Culture Code for their organisation.

Salple takes an integrated, data-informed approach to organisational culture

Can Gamification be Applied to HR?

glenn@salple.com (Glenn Brien) — Tue, 12 Feb 2019 03:12:33 GMT

At #hackingHR recently, Tom Goldenberg spoke about gamification in Human Resources.

Tom said that HR is renowned for delivering flat, one-way content. In practice this looks like: “Here are our values, now go and implement them”. But human centred design has taught us that this approach results in poor engagement with the content and very little change in behaviour.

Gamification is the idea of designing for human motivation, not just usability. Tom talked about the importance of adding 2-way conversations and fun into the process of creating and consuming content. I’ve seen this in the work we do helping companies build Culture Codes. When we start with a company, they often have a set of values that were delivered to the organisation by HR (or the CEO) in a flat, one-way manner. They are “dead posters on a wall” – not lived or well known.

Values should be defined through a fun, 2-way process, which should be memorable and trigger strong belonging cues. This co-creation allows everyone to buy into the results and gives you the behaviour change you’re looking for. One of the gamification techniques we use in our Culture Code workshops is LEGO serious play. Here’s an example:

Salple takes an integrated, data-informed approach to organisational culture