Cogniphany

I have to admit, I’m damned proud to be a SIOP member today. The president of the organization wrote a letter to President-elect Obama about how people like us can help the economy. If you want to read it, it’s here.  

But, this is the part that I really like… 

“Arguably one of the administration’s most important challenges is creating a strong organizational culture with a “high purpose” that reigns in selfish motives and fosters organizational citizenship behavior. Such cultures have internal governance and learning systems that enable “truth to speak to power.” SIOP members have completed research and models for corporate culture, decision making, and knowledge transfer, to name a few.”

It’s not often that I get to really explain what I do, or what I want to do in the future. But, that’s the differentiator between “us” and “them.” The “them” are the people who work in HR who just got business degrees. Straight business degrees usually just teach people how to do what’s best for the company in the short term, and usually that just involves dealing with the symptoms of a problem, and not the problem itself. We’re trained to start digging and go after the problem. 

To use a medical model, HR people with straight business degrees are like general practitioner doctors. They’re the ones who prescribe something for you when you have a cold or the flu. We’re the surgeons who work to eradicate cancer in a patient. 

One really telling experience is when we were in our first year and taking an organizational behavior class with a bunch of MBA students. We were 6 of about 25 or 30 students, so we were totally in the minority. We had to do projects as a team of 3, where we dealt with some sort of organizational problem. The one that my team had was a problem employee on a team. We talked about using methods of communication, conflict resolution, and trying to find out if the employee had a problem that was affecting his work life (since it had been noted that his abrasiveness had increased over the last year). When it came time for Q&A, one of the MBA students lit into me about how “you just can’t deal with people like that,” and that “you just have to fire them and get a new person in there,” and how “all that psychology just takes too much time and money.” When I looked around, a lot of the other MBAs were just nodding their heads in agreement. I really just wanted to hand her a business card and tell her to call me in about 6 years, so that I could buy a new Ferrari on what I’d make off of her screw-ups. 

But, that’s the difference. “They” are the people who will ignore your past performance and fire you with a “what have you done for me lately” attitude; we’re the ones who will look deeper to see what lies beneath the surface, because not only is it the ethical thing to do, it’s also best for the company in the long run.

Today we’re going to look at one or two of the most powerful tools in an HR executive’s arsenal. I have a hard time seeing these as two totally separate tools. It’s a bit like saying that a flat-head and a phillp’s-head screwdriver are completely different tools. They’re at least from the same family.

An RJP (Realistic Job Preview) is a selection device that you give to a person in the selection process that gives them an idea of the job that they’re trying out for. Many times (and especially so in this job climate), a recruit is really just interested in getting into the job. It’s a paycheck and it represents stability and the ability to provide for their family. That doesn’t mean that they’re not interested in doing a good job for you, but it’s not at the forefront of their mind.

The best RJPs are the ones where you let an employee come in and spend some time with an existing employee, and even let them do the job some. “This job requires the ability to lift 45 pounds over one’s head” doesn’t have quite the impact of actually lifting a customer’s purchase into their car in the August heat. An RJP is designed to give as realistic picture of the job as possible to the potential employee.

However, sometimes it’s just not feasible to have an employee work in the actual situation. A simulation is another possibility. If you’re unable to do that, videos work well, but there are important considerations there. Don’t use actors. Use your employees and let them be as candid as possible. If working in the heat wears on them, have them be truthful about it. You can also use a written RJP, but these should really be reserved as a supplement to another RJP or as a last resort.

A lot of times, companies think that they need to sell the job to an employee. But this attitude can really be counterproductive. When you’re selling a product to a consumer, that’s a different sort of relationship that you’re forging. The power differential isn’t in the same direction, so you need to make things look a little brighter and shinier than they might be. When you’re hiring someone for a job, that person needs to know that every day isn’t going to be roses and sunshine.

That’s how an ELP (Expectation Lowering Procedure) works. Researchers took a lead from the RJP literature and designed a study where they gave people a short presentation outlining how a lot of people come into new jobs with unrealistic expectations of how the new job will be. They didn’t give any specific information, just that explanation and some ideas of how one can enter into a new situation and have realistic expectations. The results of the study showed that those people entered into their new job performing better, and over time had significantly lower levels of turnover.

An RJP and an ELP impacts3 major areas and research has shown they’re really powerful in those areas.

• More trust for the employer – New employees are used to being “sold” on a new job. When you’re honest and up front with them, they appreciate it.
• Lower long-term turnover rates – When an employee knows what they’re getting into, they’re less likely to leave.
• Fewer rapid-term turnovers – RJPs allow people to more often self-select out of a new job, that’s why it’s critical that they’re given before an offer is made. After the offer is made, a person may feel unable to leave, or they’ll leave as soon as they realize the job isn’t for them.

This is a fairly hot-button topic for me, especially considering my field of expertise. The author of this article is right, HR people used to just be the people who handled payroll or on-boarding, but now HR is becoming a field that has a position with the executives. How can you be sure that you’re hiring someone who really knows what they’re doing? There is the possibility as he points out that you can ask for some sort of certification like what SHRM has, but depending on how test design and the training/experience of the test-taker line up, you can’t be really sure that you’re getting what you pay for.

As a part of this article, the author brings up the topic of attorneys and lawyers being licensed. An interesting twist of laws exists that makes it technically illegal for someone trained in I-O Psychology use the words “psychology,” “psychologist,” or “psychometrics” when describing and advertising their services unless they’re licensed. However, the licensing procedure is heavily skewed to those people who have Clinical psychology training, and makes it nearly impossible for someone with an I-O degree to get a “license.”

As it stands, most I-O psychologists simply are very creative with the language they use to talk about what they do, and the laws that exist appear to be very difficult to enforce. Additionally, these laws were initially put in place to protect clients from disreputable people claiming to be psychological therapists. However, the power differential that exists in that relationship is flipped when one considers how an I-O psychologist functions. There’s really little in common between a client seeking psychological intervention and a business seeking to improve its selection of new employees. One has a great deal of power to sue a disreputable psychologist and the other is on the other end of the power spectrum.

So, how do you gauge for HR proficiency? Another article shows that many businesses are beginning to rely less on specific degrees and more on assessing for the abilities needed. Other companies are using custom-built cognitive ability tests to determine if executives are suited for positions. While a license for HR and I-O psychology professionals might be useful, there are a lot of questions and issues that would need to be addressed before it would be possible to successfully implement that process.

On to another PersonnelToday.com post.

I like what they’ve done with the psychometrics theme. I’m a big psychometrics geek. I like statistics and math, but I really think that test construction and application is really fun.

That’s why I really like this article from them.

Psychometric testing… how to prepare for a test

While the last post was really good advice for an employer, this is really good info for someone who’s looking for a job. As frustrating as it may be, these really aren’t the kinds of tests that you want to try to “pass” just to get the job. As bad a rap as consultants can get these days over how they herald a layoff, these are the kinds of tests that HR pros use to try to make sure that people get into jobs that they’ll enjoy and succeed at, what I-O psychologists call good person-job/person-organization/person-environment fit.

So, how do you prepare for these tests? This article really has the best advice I’ve seen.

• Learn as much as you can about the test beforehand – Just learn enough so that you know what to expect. Is it filling in dots? or an interview? or short answer? You don’t want nuts and bolts, just enough so that you’re not totally surprised.
• Give your mind regular workouts – Do a crossword puzzle. Play some Bookworm. Play Sodoku. This is a really good idea in general anyway. Research has show that keeping your mind and brain active help to ward off Alzheimer’s disease.
• Prepare for the day ahead with a good night’s rest – Sometimes when you’re trying to get hired somewhere, you’re going to be nervous, but simply getting a good night’s sleep and being rested for the next day can make all the difference in your performance. And you want your performance on any test to be representative of what you’ll be like on the job, not what you’ll be like after staying up all night worrying.
• Always be honest in your responses – This is key. All psychometrically designed assessments are constructed to eek out those pieces of your personality or whatever construct they’re designed to measure. They also have lie/attention scales built in. If you trigger those, you could invalidate your whole test. So, it’s really better to just pay attention and answer every question as honestly as you can.
• Make sure you seek feedback – If you’re able to (especially in the case of a performance based test) ask if you can see how you did. Research shows that with feedback, you’re able to learn from mistakes and do better the next time you take a test. Research also shows that without feedback, you’re likely to remember incorrect responses, as correct, just based on familiarity with the response. Feedback can really help to avoid that problem.

So, there you go. This isn’t a checklist of how to beat the tests. I’d be a really irresponsible purveyor of tests and the like if I let you see behind the curtain. But, if you follow the steps that are here, you’ll be able to give the best and most accurate picture of who you are to any potential employer.

There was an excellent survey conducted by Adecco recently, and the results are really compelling.

To summarize the findings, diversity is something that a number of companies are giving lip service to. They talk about it, but employees are still feeling like they’re being discriminated against. In particular, age discrimination seems to be the one that many people are feeling the most prevalent.

The really nice finding? More diversity = More productive

“Not only do the majority of workers think that a diverse workforce makes their organization more successful, half of respondents (53 percent) felt that the more diverse their company, the more productive a worker they’d become.”

What I personally find really interesting are the methods that they mention as ways to improve diversity in your organization. Each one has some powerful I-O psychological concepts in them.

1) Gain senior management commitment – Training research has presented evidence that when you’re going to have a program, people are more likely to engage if they feel that upper management is invested in the success of the program. If you’ve got senior management buy-in, you’ll get more trainees to buy-in as well.

2) Engage employees in the process – This really is a no-brainer, but it’s been proven through research. If you want employees to disengage with and torpedo a program, force it down their throats and make them feel like they don’t have any say in it. You want success? Let them be involved.

3) Support local/community diversity groups - This is a really good way to help gain your employees’ trust, especially in terms of a diversity training program. Organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) can really drive a diversity program. Additionally there are concepts in social psychology and in particular, the work of Robert Cialdini, that apply here. When employees see that you’re really dedicated to diversity, they’re much more likely to do the same thing.

4) Provide diversity training – You can’t just talk about something and expect change. If you want to change behaviors, you have to apply all of the other methods in social and cognitive psychology for creating behavior change. But you also have to give your employees the tools and the methods to learn how to do it. There’s also a bit more here from Cialdini about social proof. When you get a group of people in a room to agree that diversity is important and needs to be given attention, they’ll have a hard time going back on that.

5) Promote open communication - This really goes back to what I mentioned about including your employees in the decisions. If they’re engaged and involved in the decisions, making sure that you have honest, open communication is going to feed that engagement. This also allows you to eradicate a society where discrimination is tolerated. If people feel comfortable coming forward with a complaint, they’re probably going to come to you, before they go visit with the EEOC.

This is a really nicely presented research report and I love the psychology imbedded in it. Excellent work, Adecco. Bravo!