most companies mistake the talent acquisition process as incidential in the hurry of filling in urgent vacancies A deeper insight and analysis is the hallmark of a talent driven company DR WILFRED MONTEIRO OPINES

T A L E N T    S E L E C T I O N

are the workplace values matching ???

Your newest recruit, Brijesh, has been working with your team for several weeks now, and you're wondering if you made a mistake in recruiting him. His workplace values are very different from those of your team, and from the values of your organization as a whole.

Your core team members care passionately about doing work that helps others. They value teamwork, and they're always willing to pitch in or stay late if someone is behind on an important deadline. This has led to a culture of trust, friendliness, and mutual respect within the team.   

Brijesh, on the other hand, wants to climb the corporate ladder. He's ambitious and ruthless, and he wants to focus on projects that will either build his expert status or achieve a public win. The problem is that his core career values clash with the core values of your team. This is causing infighting and bad feeling within the group.


WORKPLACE VALUES: Pillars of your corporate culture

Employer brand is about capturing the spirit of an organization in a way that engages talent across its life cycle (join-stay-exit) within the organization. It articulates an organization’s ‘value proposition’—the entirety of its ethos, processes, values and employee relationships, providing a new focal point for the organization.

Your employer brand would be just a glossy exterior if they are not reinforced with workplace values… which are the pillars of your corporate culture. As companies become great, the division between management and labour fades. The workplace becomes a community. Employees take pride in their job, their team, and their company. They feel that they can be themselves at work. They celebrate the successes of their peers and cooperate with others throughout the organization. People take pleasure in their work - and in the people they work with - in a deep and lasting way. They want to stay around for their careers.

At the heart of of a model workplace is where employees "trust the people they work for, have pride in what they do, and enjoy the people they work with" –

¨     The relationship between employees and management.

¨     The relationship between employees and their jobs/company.

¨     The relationship between employees and other employees.

Your organization's workplace values set the tone for your company's culture, and they identify what your organization, as a whole, cares about. It's important that your people's values align with these.

The starting point for a culture turnaround is by is developing the "5 Rs":Right match,Relationship,Recognition,Right expectations & Respect …and these workplace values should be  the guiding principles that are most important to you about the way that the company people across the lenth and breath really work. You use these deeply held principles to choose between right and wrong ways of working, and they help you make important decisions and career choices.

Interpreting these five WORKPLACE VALUES some (possibly conflicting) behaviours include:

·  Being accountable.

·  Making a difference.

·  Focusing on detail.

·  Delivering quality.

·  Being completely honest.

·  Keeping promises.

·  Being reliable.

·  Being positive.

·  Meeting deadlines.

·  Helping others.

·  Being a great team member.

·  Respecting company policy and rules, and respecting others.

·  Showing tolerance.

Take the case of GE  which since 1930 is the only surving member in the Fortune500 Global List. The  company GE’s relationships with employees, customers, suppliers, shareowners and governments are subject to a dynamic system of legal and regulatory requirements—all of which must be first interpreted and then applied according to GE’s Company-wide standards. Its all contained in a book called “The Spirit & The Letter” which  is a guide to help employees understand the standards of conduct that the Company sees as fundamental to honoring its commitment to performance with integrity. “The Spirit & The Letter” helps GE achieve compliance by establishing a common standard of behavior required of all employees—everyone, everywhere, every day. As the title suggests, GE’s approach to compliance is founded on a commitment to perform with integrity according to both the spirit and the letter of the law everywhere GE does business. The booklet contains GE’s core compliance policies and is made available to employees globally in 31 languages. When the the spirit and the letter of your workplace values really happen, people understand one another, everyone does the right things for the right reasons, and this common purpose and understanding helps people build great working relationships. Values alignment helps the organization as a whole to achieve its core mission.


TALENT SELECTION : How to Understand People's Workplace Values

The most important thing that you need to do when interviewing someone is understand his or her workplace values. After all, you can train people to cover skills gaps, and you can help people gain experience. But it's really hard to get people to change their values; and they will be "problem workers" until they do.
To create a cohesive team, you need to identify people who will fit best with its culture and values. When you're interviewing potential team members, do what you can to identify their workplace values - this is usually the most important thing that you need to explore at interview.

There are several ways to do this…..First, ask questions focused around your own organization's workplace values. For instance, imagine that you want to find a team member who, among other values, is highly tolerant of other cultures.You could ask questions like these:

·        "Describe a time when you had to work with a wide variety of people. How did you go about identifying and understanding their points of view? How did you adapt your own working style to work more effectively with these people? What was the outcome?"

·        "Has there ever been a time when your beliefs clashed with someone else's on your team? If so, how did you overcome these differences?"

These questions encourage interviewees to open up about how they approach these issues. You also need to look at the potential recruit's past work history. Examine the organization that they worked at previously to identify any possible clash in values (this might be most obvious if they've worked with a well-known competitor).Keep in mind that while most people can be coached to adapt to a new working culture, some professionals will find it hard to shift their priorities. Deeper values may be very hard to change.

KEY POINTS

Workplace values drive the attitudes and behaviors that you want to see within your team. These values might include respecting others, keeping promises, showing personal accountability, or providing excellent customer service.It's important to identify and understand the workplace values of successful team members, so that you can select new recruits who share these values.

When values are out of alignment, people work towards different goals, with different intentions, and with different outcomes. This can damage work relationships, productivity, job satisfaction, and creative potential.


When interviewing new recruits, ask focused interview questions, use role-playing scenarios and tools, look at past history, and use psychometric tests to find the recruits with the best cultural fit. And most important make sure your managers interviewing the candidate are committed to  projecting  your company’s cultural values… I have often said…people join a company and resign from its workplace culture

Best wishes

                  Dr Wilfred Monteiro