HR TECH TALKS...

Siân Harrington, editorial director and co-founder of The People Space, talks to Martin Goodwill, head of Great People Inside, about the move to homeworking accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, why not every employee is suited to remote working and how HR teams and employers can discover which employees will flourish in, and embrace, a hybrid working world

The challenge

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the number of people working from home in what many are calling the greatest work experiment of our time. In 2019 only around one in 20 people employed in the European Union worked from home – a figure that has remained constant for a decade. The International Labour Organisation estimates that 7.9% of the world’s workforce, some 260 million workers, worked from home on a permanent basis before the pandemic, but many of these were self-employed or artisans rather than employees. Globally, among employees, only 2.9% were working exclusively or mainly from their home before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since the coronavirus outbreak, the numbers have mushroomed. The UK’s government said in April 2020 that 46.6% of people were working at least some of the time at home – 86% as a result of the pandemic. COVID-19 has shown that working from home works, and employees are at least as productive, if not more so. No wonder some finance directors are rubbing their hands with glee as to the workplace cost savings they could make by continuing with a work-from-home policy, at least some of the time.

But the problem is that lockdown and long-term are not the same thing. Once people feel safe to go back into the office, their motivation for homeworking may change. And while there has been a lot of guidance on the ‘how’ of remote working, how do you know who are the types of people suited to working from home? How do you make this work for your business long-term? And how do you know, when you are recruiting new people, that they have the skills and behaviours to be productive working from home if that is the policy you pursue?

A psychometric assessment is one tool that can help but many organisations only use assessments for senior roles because of the complexity and cost, despite the greatest people cost for businesses being in more junior roles. Plus, what’s the point in using an assessment if the decision is based on cost rather than functionality? If, for example, you want to understand who will flourish when working remotely in the longer term, you need to ensure that is what your assessment is validated for. But there are hundreds of assessments available in the UK and many have been around for decades, still measuring the same things they did when they were first created, despite the seismic changes in the world of work. They are usually fixed in terms of length, content, complexity and cost, factors determined by the provider not the customer. In addition, such assessments can often only be used/interpreted/fed back by accredited users, with accreditation gained at great expense to the organisation. So, in other words, assessments can be too long, too expensive and too complex.

Why this tech is different

Great People Inside’s assessment tool tackles all this head on. The business is built around the assessment needs of its customers and uses up-to-the minute technology combined with proven psychology, adapted to measure today’s work behaviours. So want to know what traits a successful homeworking employee should demonstrate versus a successful manager? Or how about what will make someone successful as a team member in this new hybrid world of work? Great People Inside has the answers and you can customise this to your organisation’s needs.

Indeed, the platform is fully customisable and there’s no cost to customise these assessments, however often you want to do it. The company has a menu of almost 100 different measures (behaviours, cognitive traits and interests) that enables you to create psychometric assessments and 360 surveys specific to the competencies, values or objectives of any role, department or geography in your organisation. So you, not Great People Inside, decide what you measure and what you don’t, and you can decide how simple or complex your assessments need to be. It’s simple and cost-effective.

Great People Inside is responding quickly to changes in the workplace. So, yes, like all assessment companies it offers the usual recruitment, learning and talent tests. But it has also put some real thinking into the potential long term move to at least some employees homeworking some of the time, as well as looking at the traits of a successful VUCA (volatile, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) manager and leader on the back of feedback that the pandemic has shown that some leaders expected to step up had just not been responsive to change.

Benefits to HR

The clear benefit for HR is customisation and simplicity. By creating reports in plain language and that are easy to read, users do not need to be qualified in any way, reducing or eliminating the reliance on HR or ‘accredited users’ – and the resulting workload/bottleneck.

Being on the cloud, the platform is designed to be used on any device at any time and location and the platform can be integrated into your existing applicant tracking system or HR information system. It is also suitable for any size organisation, from the smallest group of employees through to multinational corporations.

Great People Inside offers 'Pay As You Go’ prices for occasional (and small volume) users and Unlimited Use pricing for regular recruitment and learning and development users. And, despite its many customisation features, its assessments meet the standards set by the British Psychological Society for reliability and validity. As the ‘new kid on the block’ Great People Inside is offering ‘trial before you buy’ so just click on the link at the bottom of the page to get in touch.

But don't just take our word for it...

Signature Flight Support

The world's largest fixed based operation for essential support services for business and private aviation, Signature Flight Support selected Great People Inside to provide behavioural assessment and 360 survey tools in EMEA and the United States for its recruitment and development work, identifying, selecting and developing the best candidates for its roles.

Says Lillie Sorensen, senior manager, talent acquisition: "The GPI assessment tool is very easy to set up and use and our candidates have not experienced any challenges completing their assessments. Our operational managers find the GPI reports easy to use. We have customised GPI’s assessments to our specific needs, which has helped us weed out candidates who would not have been a good fit for the positions we are seeking to fill. We have received superb support and service from the GPI team – their high sense of urgency to address our concerns and answer our questions has been commendable.

"We have found great success utilising the GPI behavioural assessments and plan to create specific assessments for every position in our worldwide organisation."

What the company says

Little has changed in the assessment world for many years. Some assessment tools are measuring the same, pre-set package of measures they were using 40 years ago.
Technology has only been used, in the main, to automate manual processes, not improve the assessment and customer/candidate experience. As a result, users have had limited choice and have been forced to use assessments that don’t really meet their needs – or not use assessments at all.

Our goal at Great People Inside is to provide cost-effective, customer-friendly, candidate-friendly assessments that meet the exact needs of our customers. We offer a simple end-to-end process and exceptional user-experience, enhancing our customers’ employer brands. Despite this, we still adhere to the highest validity and reliability standards for this type of assessment.

By applying modern technology, and proven psychology, we offer flexible assessment solutions that enable our customers to employ the right people, reduce the cost of employee turnover, increase the ROI on their recruitment and learning & development expenditure and make better-informed people decisions with minimum effort and cost. FIND OUT MORE HERE