DataDome Blog

Here are the national and local (Atlanta) stats from the Hudson Employment Index. It looks to me as if the percentages of people who are “happy in their job” might be somehow inflated, especially considering that a large percentage of them are actively looking for another position. Perhaps the questions might be refined. Is there any demographic split between blue-collar and white color, for example? Some workers may be “happy” to have a job, period.

While the national Hudson Employment Index fell from 103.7 to 98.2 in August, the Atlanta Index dropped for the third consecutive month, falling 3.9 points from 99.5 to 95.6. Pessimism about personal finances and job satisfaction triggered the decline.

Among the 11 cities tracked, which include L.A., Boston, D.C., Chicago, Dallas, Minneapolis-St. Paul, New York and San Francisco, Atlanta came in among the weakest of the group. Tampa’s Index was again the highest at 113.1, and New York remained the lowest at 80.0.

Atlanta-area workers were more concerned this month about their personal finances. Just two-fifths (40%) rated their situation favorably in August, compared to 43% in July. Additionally, the percent reporting that they were happy in their current positions decreased this month, falling from 70% to 67%. However, workers in Atlanta were less concerned about job loss in August, with only 22% worried about losing their job, down from 26% last month.

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Bureau of Labor Statistics, US Dept. of Labor

Consumer prices have overtaken small average earnings increases.

Real average weekly earnings fell by 0.2% from June to July after seasonal adjustment. A 0.6% increase in the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W) more than offset a 0.4% increase in average hourly earnings.

Average weekly earnings rose by 2.7%, seasonally adjusted, from July 2004 to July 2005. After deflation by the CPI-W, average weekly earnings increased by 0.4%.

Before adjustment for seasonal change and inflation, average weekly earnings were $541.81 in July 2005, compared with $528.50 a year earlier.

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What’s more important to your organization’’s success – micromanaging the issue of the moment or strategic planning for the future? What’s the speed of vision for your leadership?

Executive leadership has had to speed up and become more responsive to daily demands. The down side of this is that many have become so focused on real-time speed that they have lost the art of long-term planning. Vision statements that don’t last out the year don”t instill confidence or motivate workforce engagement and productivity.

While short-term project goals are certainly important, leadership must re-develop the capacity to move into the future with informed long-range planning. A grasp of the immediate, no matter how important, is only one part of leadership strategy. Immediate or short-term strategic focus that becomes habitual and exclusive will almost inevitably result in poor decisions. Time will not have not been made to gather relevant information, analyze it, and make decisions for long-term goals.

Move forward bit by bit, rather than in sweeping, sometimes meaningless, changes. Form a long-range planning team of talented visionary leaders from different departments. A collaboration between colleagues will be easier to hammer out (and then to communicate and implement) than a “new plan” that hardly gets going before a new one is proposed.

Waste less. Move forward with clarity, and at a speed that is a little more deliberate and careful than real-time.

An organization can make short-term profits and still lose it all because no-one remembered to step back and look at the big picture. If you want the whole organization to move forward and to thrive, it simply isn’t enough for a few top leaders to be able to bail out with golden parachutes when the short-term gains runs out their course.

- Opinion by Dr. Heidi

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Corporate Training: CPBS Certification in DISC Behavioral Style Analysis

Participants will learn how to communicate using the DISC language as a way of understanding themselves and others. The CPBS training incorporates an advanced DISC behavioral assessment to give a more complete understanding of what DISC is and how to use it to interact with others and to appreciate others’ behavioral styles. Effective communication stems from the right combination of tone of voice, words, body language, and pace of speech and actions. These four areas are the components of a person’s behavioral style. You will acquire skill in adapting behavior to communicate effectively with others, even if they have an incompatible style. Understanding styles corrects misconceptions, miscommunications and misunderstandings. Using the techniques we will teach you, you will attain expertise in opening the different doors of communication to build win/win relationships for optimum effectiveness.

You”ll be trained by Art Schoeck, an expert in the field of behavioral strategy who has trained thousands of individuals in the concepts and applications of behavioral analysis. Upon successful completion of the program and the certification examination, you will receive your CPBS (Certified Professional Behavioral Strategist) Certificate.

Overview

• What is DISC? (and what it is NOT)
• Benefits of Behavioral Analysis
• BriefHistory of the Language
• Defining and Learning the Language
• Reading the Graphs
• Recognizing BehavioralStyles
• Reading the Language
• Blending the Language
• Selling to Style
• Understanding BehavioralAdjustments to the Job / Work Environment
• Identifying Potential Stress Problems
• Aligning Behavioral Expectations with theBoss
• Seeing Everyday Events in a New Light
• Applications of the Language

Become the Expert

• Discover why the key to performance optimization is an understanding of self, others, and the job
• Gain specific communication strategies to use with each of the different behavioral tendencies
• Attain self knowledge with personalized behavioral style assessment
• Identify and recognize major tendencies of different behavioral styles
• Accept and appreciate the value of different styles
• Understand the relative compatibilities of each style
• Recognize the needs of others and learn which communication behaviors cause misunderstanding, frustration and reduced performance
• Understand how others process information, what is needed to thrive and be motivated, and how different styles respond to change
• Understand how style influences the way individuals experience stress
• Motivate others toward greater productivity
• Capitalize on talent and integrate specific strengths into organizational and team roles
• Appreciate the impact of style differences on the conflict management process
• Learn aboutthe six basic hidden motivators and the drive behind each one
• Become an expert in position benchmarking using the style of the job itself
• Learn how to use the most advanced behavioral style analysis model for your specific purposes

Apply What You Learn to Specific Situations

Communication Skills * Leadership * Team Building * Productivity * * Engagement and Commitment * Coaching * Sales * Conflict Resolution * Productivity * Motivation * Change Management * Job Selection * Career Planning * Time Management * Goal Setting

Call Art Schoeck at 404-814-0739 to schedule your certification training. Small groups can arrange for their training to be held on-site.

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Behavioral Interviewing is Not Enough

One hiring technique that has recently become very popular is the structured behavioral interview. The principle behind the technique is the belief that the best indicator of future behavior is past behavior. Behavioral interviewing involves asking a series of questions designed to get the candidate to talk about how he or she handled certain situations in the past.

Many formalize this into a formula, such as “STAR” (ask about a past Situation/Task related to a trait – such as flexibility, then elicit the candidate’’s past Action, and the Results of that action). While this style of interviewing is a good start for new managers, there are a few problems with it.

• The trait that is used as the basis for behavioral interviewing is often not specific to success in the job itself. Narratives about previous experiences are without a contextual basis in the success predictors for your specific position. In other words, it tells you what a candidate has done in the past (assuming that the narrative is to some degree even based on their own experience), but not about what he or she can do or is motivated to do.
• Ungrounded behavioral interviewing doesn’t measure contextual performance. It does not give any indication of the fit between the candidate, the performance indicators for success in that position, and the environment within which the candidate must be able to function.
• A simple search on your favorite search engine will show you the thousands of pages that tell candidates how to prepare for general behavioral interviewing. Experienced, practiced candidates can often present a strong “front appearance” that in no way predicts success in any endeavor other than interviewing.

Harvard Business Review estimates that 80% of costly turnover is caused by bad hiring decisions. More costly still may be maintaining a “C-player” (which may include mistakes, missed opportunities, and disruption) where there could have been active contribution from an “A-Player.” The fact is, you only have a 14% chance of accurately predicting the future performance of a job candidate from an interview alone. There is also a very good chance that some of the information you collect from the application, resume or even from references will be false or misleading. Research shows that different elements of the hiring process improve the odds of effective job success prediction.

We Can Help You Do Better, Much Better

We will help you to select and implement assessments that target strengths and weaknesses in comparision to those of the position itself rather than to an intangible ideal. Critical areas with scores that deviate from pre-established norms define the appropriate questions to ask. The questions are specific to that individual’’s characteristics as they relate to the traits of the specific position and the context of that position in the working environment of the department or team. We can even indicate what specific questions you should ask their references. When you apply our assessments to your pre-employment process, you will greatly increase your odds of finding and hiring successful, productive and competent employees.

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Successful install and customization of our new WordPress blog! Woo-hoo!

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What Kind of Organizational Change is Needed?

Organizations today continually need to optimize in order to gain competitive advantage, address critical situations and opportunities, and become more streamlined and effective.

Organizational change – correctly managed and implemented – can be exciting and motivating for all involved.

Organizational change has become constant – ubiquitous – permanent. However, “busywork” changes made simply for the sake of change itself will not further your goals. Change at the organizational level has to be smart change, leveraging your people and your processes to achieve competitive advantage.

One of our nation’s greatest accomplishments, the Apollo moon mission, succeeded despite the fact that we were off course 97% of the time. The same principle applies to guided missiles and jet airlines – they are off course most of the time, but their paths are corrected as necessary along the way in order to reach the intended destination at the right time. If you understand your starting point and your destination, and you know your position, you can correct your course as you go.

What to Change

Employees are all too aware of today’s trends toward downsizing, reorganization, doing more with less – and many companies seem to have made it as painful as possible. How can you manage change and help workers to cope with change? One way to find out what to change – and how best to change – is to make your workforce part of the visioning team.

Managing change works better and is more effective when it is not accomplished via a top-down totalitarian method. The worst-case scenario is when circumstances require a move from current point A to future point B, and then one of the organizational leaders sends down the ”law” that has been decided upon – rigid, inflexible, uninformed – thinking that this is decisive vision and good leadership. However, without comprehensive and accurate information, many of these decisions will not be the best ones.

Survey your own employees (and customers) for their opinions! You will get better solutions and less resistance. It is disconcerting that in this day and age, with an educated and aware workforce, that so few companies actually ask the people who really know:

• What could we be doing better for our company R.O.I.?
• What could we be doing better for our customers?
• What could we be doing to make our teams work better together?
• What could we be doing better to make your team work better?
• Would you take a comparable offer from another company? Why would you leave?
• Where would you prioritize differently in your area?
• What are your solutions?

Some of our best workers, though they are supportive and loyal, may have a hard time sharing criticisms. They have valuable information that needs to be brought to the table. Likewise, surveying customers is not only crucial, it is also a form of advertising.

You have nothing to lose and everything to gain by asking the people who spend most of their waking hours working for you. You just can’t get better information.

Most importantly, if you do ask, the changes are our changes. If you do not ask, they are your changes. Changes that are perceived as “yours” rather than “ours” (especially if they seem soft-headed to the people who actually have to live them) will almost always provoke disengagement, passive resistance and even outright hostility.

Data Dome Inc. offers customized packages to improve organizational vitality, which include an anonymous survey administered by us. Anonymous and confidential surveys administered by an outside entity enable open and honest feedback.

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So if change is inevitable, do you have the right crew for the journey? As has been repeated often, you need to “get the right people on the bus and in the right seats” – and the wrong people off the bus.

Unfortunately, deciding who gets off too often relies on hunches, emotions, scattered opinions, and flawed processes. There are user-friendly tools and simple processes that assist in objective decision-making, but most corporate leaders are still unaware of these tools and how they can best be applied.

The biggest advancements in HR tools over the past few years have been in the area of objectively identifying the optimum behaviors and motivations for each position. This is information that goes well beyond simply the technical requirements of the position covered by a traditional job description.

The most effective process will include these assessments to:

• Examine what it is needed to get to the next level
• Use assessments to find the exact talents needed.
• Objectively apply existing talent
• Identify the missing competencies to be acquired

Effective and ethical application of validated assessments at all four stages of this process is proven to increase productivity, build working teams, encourage effective communication, reduce conflict, promote mutual understanding, and develop an environment for self-motivation even during times of organizational change.

But then, what is the best way to help those leaving to discover they are “on the wrong bus”?

Best practices include not only getting the “wrong people off the bus,” but getting those very people to really understand why they would not be happy where this bus is going. If the position and the person are incompatible, it is a lose-lose situation for both. If that is properly understood, they can choose – voluntarily – to walk “off the bus” with respect and dignity. That is a win-win result.

Outstanding organizations require a variety of styles to accomplish all that needs to be done. Effective communication between different styles requires a common understanding of what value and competencies each member brings to the table. Communication is also very important to understand how to introduce and implement change, especially for those in the workforce who do not tolerate change very well. We provide assessments and seminars to facilitate such communications.

It’s all about vision, expectations and communications.

Over the years, we’ve learned a great deal about what works and what doesn’t, and we’ve translated that experience into processes involving assessment tools, training programs, and improvement initiatives. Our approach is to partner with our clients in diagnosing problems, designing solutions, implementing programs, and measuring improvement in their organizations. We will work with you to target the assessments and tools that are most effective for the context and situation. Each package is designed for the specific requirements and needs of the individual organization, and can be as focused or as comprehensive as you need it to be.

Possibilities include the following:

• Free initial needs assessment (call us at 404-814-0739 or use our online contact form).
• Consultation with Art Schoeck, Behavioral Style Strategist
• Culture vitality, satisfaction and 360-degree surveys as needed.
• Redefinition of job positions using the working environment tool, behavioral style profiles, and other assessments as needed
• A customized “Coping With Change” Seminar – based on your actual context and needs – to facilitate the transition
• Other seminars and assessments for performance improvement, time management, better communication, sales, customer service, and team engineering.

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