photo by sflovestory
We’ve written a lot about why we think chemistry matters. RoundPegg, after all, is all about finding people who will fit on your team without creating a cloud of chaos around them. The better people fit into the team, the more energy they can spend driving the team forward instead of playing politics.
Kevin Millar, former Boston Red Sox, was recently signed by the Chicago Cubs. While he plays a position at which the Cubs need a backup, the odds of him making the big league team are incredibly slim. He’s fourth on the depth chart where only two will play with the big club. Plus, he’s advancing in his career and hasn’t hit much in the past few years. He was signed strictly to set the team’s mood in the clubhouse over the six-week stretch of spring training.
Millar’s take: chemistry matters.
“People ask me all the time, ‘Is team chemistry overrated?’ Well, you tell me. You’re with 25 guys more than your family from basically end of February to October. That’s not overrated. You try to bring a team and a group together. When you get everyone pulling on the same rope, it’s exciting.”
Last year, the Cubbies signed notorious clubhouse cancer Milton Bradley and paid the price. He’s the epitome of how companies often hire. An ‘A’ player by all statistical measurements, but little mind was paid to whether he’d fit in with the rest of the guys in the clubhouse. While impossible to attribute Bradley’s antics to the Cubs 14-game decline from 2007 to 2008, it’s obvious the front office has gotten the message and is determined not to repeat that mistake. Clearly, they lay some of the blame on a chemistry experiment gone bad.
Baseball is a unique sport where every play is a series of one on one battles. Between the lines, I’d go so far to argue that chemistry matters less in baseball than in other sports. Or your company. But as Millar points out, you live with these guys. If you don’t like being around them it’s going to be harder to bring your best every day.
The Cubs are willing to spend potentially up to a million dollars to set the right mood in the clubhouse. Meanwhile, your company is probably more dependent upon teamwork than any baseball team. How much time, effort and money are spent aligning your culture, your team and getting the most out of your employees?
photo by orphanjones
Scott Adams of Dilbert fame brings us some insight into how he would improve employee satisfaction.
I’ve been meaning to post this for some time so you may have already encountered it. Regardless, it’s worthy of a chuckle as you coast into the holidays and think about how you’ll get everyone to walk back through the door come January 4th.
He concludes his post with the following advice:
“…the best way to make your employees feel a false sense of job satisfaction is to somehow convince them that there are much better jobs elsewhere. For example, you could subscribe all employees to entrepreneur magazines that are full of stories about people who left their unsatisfying jobs to become zillionaires. If you instill the false belief that better careers are obtainable, cognitive dissonance will cause the employees that have high self-esteem to believe they must enjoy their current jobs.”
Best of luck in 2010!
photo by dbking
Hiring is a headache.
Dr. John Sullivan’s latest post at ERE pulls together a ton of shocking numbers that should convince you we need to find a better way.
50% new executive turnover — nearly half of new executive hires quit or are fired within the first 18 months at a new employer (Source: Corporate Leadership Council).
50% of the processes users (both managers and new hires) later regret their “buying” decision (Source: The Recruiting Roundtable). In addition, 25% of new hires later regret taking their new job within one year (Source: Challenger, Gray)
66% regret hiring decisions — Nearly two-thirds of hiring managers come to regret their interview-based hiring decisions (Source: DDI)
Hiring and retaining below or even average performers have real opportunity costs because top performers can increase productivity, revenue, and profit by between 40% and 67% over average performers (Source: McKinsey & Co.)
Only a 19% success rate — only one out of five of the process output can be classified as unequivocal successes (Source: Leadership IQ).
Basically, we’re not good at hiring, we regret most of the decisions we make, there’s a big difference in contribution between average and good people and the people we hire are often unhappy we choose them. That’s pretty damning.
A good hire requires finding someone with the skills to do the job AND the right person who can thrive in your company’s work environment. Our guts don’t adequately assess the latter because inevitably we revert to deciding whether the candidate is one we can imagine having a beer with after work.
Again, why we created RoundPegg. RoundPegg will objectively and rigorously identify which candidates will function best with your company’s culture, with the work team and the hiring manager. We just released the first version of the application. If you’d like to learn more please drop us a line at employers [at] roundpegg [dot] com.
photo by antkriz
Dueling philosophies on hiring and employee retention at the latest Web2.0 conference (via WSJ Blog).
Mark Zuckerberg touted the Facebook culture of hiring entrepreneurially inclined people who burn brilliantly and then fade away (presumably of their own volition). Tony Hsieh of Zappos provided the counter philosophy of finding the folks who fit the culture and aspire to stick with the company for 10 years or more.
Who is right?
Both. The key that makes both of them right is that everyone is aware of the culture. Each CEO knows exactly what they’re looking for and how to identify it. Success is achieved by aligning the culture/working philosophy and getting everyone pulling in the same direction.
Corporate success comes from recognizing what you want to achieve and defining the culture accordingly.
Facebook is about changing our relationship with each other and the Internet. Thus, they need people who can conceptualize a radically different world and execute to get everyone there.
Meanwhile, Zappos is about customer service. So it makes sense that Zappos creates a very cultivative company. How employees are treated is how they’ll in turn treat customers.
There aren’t necessarily good or bad cultures. But there are good or bad cultures for you.
The ability to explicitly describe what each company is looking for enables people to opt-in or out of the application process. And that same explicitness enables everyone hiring at the company to hold all applicants up to the same light and identify the ones who will be successful by honoring the company’s philosophy.
Unfortunately, most companies can’t state their cultural philosophy as passionately or clearly as Zuckerberg and Hsieh. And, it’s not much of a surprise there aren’t many companies doing as well as these two either.
photo by photomish dan
A sobering article from the Economist illustrates how unhappy people currently are with their jobs. When the economy turns expect to see a massive surge in voluntary turnover. The article included some alarming numbers from the US-based Center for Work-Life Policy:
Between June 2007 and December 2008 the proportion of employees who professed loyalty to their employers slumped from 95% to 39%; the number voicing trust in them fell from 79% to 22%.
Employers have the upper hand these days, but what good is that if nobody is willing to bring their best? Quality work doesn’t flow from mistrust.
The employment process is a two-way street. Employers need to get quality ideas and execution. The employees, however, are trickier. They all need something different. Each is motivated differently, has different goals and needs to be communicated with in a certain manner.
There is no magic bullet to engaging people except by taking the time to know what makes them tick. Clearly, these economic times are tough. And companies are taking the opportunity to pare back and let loose the dead wood.
This requires doubling down on the efforts to learn about the others in order to make sure they don’t all check out as well.
Better yet, build this into your process. Don’t wait for dire economic times to trim the workforce. Frankly, people who aren’t engaged and aren’t fitting in with the culture are a drag on your time and bring others down with them.
Start with who you hire and remember it.
Times are dire. Not just for the unemployed, but for the employers as well.
The job market is far more fluid these days and once companies start hiring again we’re guaranteed to see that fluidity in action. Protect your most valuable assets and get the most out of them as you can.
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