Behavioral Assessments: Saving Time in an Over-Zoomed World
Workplace dynamics has evolved immensely over the last decades. Workforce — a key component of every business organization — has also changed a lot during that period. Today’s employees are no more content with the workplace culture of yesterday. Extrinsic motivators that propelled productivity decades ago is no more enough to motivate today’s employees. Perhaps even more critical is the fact that there’s always a competitor a step behind, aggressive, and waiting to take advantage of even the tiniest of slip-ups from your workforce.
To get the best from their employees, modern businesses must be able to determine the core behavioral competencies of individual employees and assign them roles that best fit their behavioral profile and can best drive their productivity. But how exactly can business organizations do this? The answer is a behavioral assessment.
What Are Behavioral Assessments
Behavioral Assessments aim at identifying an individual’s actions. In a corporate context, a behavioral assessment represents an effective tool for gauging how someone works without going through hours of interviews or actually spending days working with them. It is very effective for identifying an employee’s communication style, result orientation, team spirit, conflict management, goal setting and decision-making styles. They are highly outcome-oriented and can accurately match an employee’s behavioral dispositions with job demands. Depending on the organization’s requirement, the survey could be based on specific job functions. They can simulate the realities of that particular role and pose questions that reflect actual workplace situations.
But how does this all add up? How exactly can a behavioral assessment help your organization’s workforce?
How Behavioral Assessment Can Help Your Organization’s Workforce
Wondering how a Behavioral Assessment can help your workforce grow? Here’s how:
Recruiting The Best For The Job
One bad hire can ignite serious problems in an organization. Several bad hires can run it aground. This is precisely why the method for recruiting new employees is very critical to an organization’s success. Unfortunately, traditional recruitment processes are mostly instinctive, nonobjective and could be particularly time-consuming. Educational qualification and a few professional traits are usually weighted heavily, neglecting how well a candidate will fit into an organization’s work culture at large.
A behavioral assessment is a powerful tool for evaluating how professionally and emotionally fit an individual is for a particular role. While recruiters have grown smarter, role suitability indicators can’t be accurately assessed by traditional interviewing processes. It doesn’t just provide enough information to make objective hiring decisions. With behavioral assessments, teams can ground hiring decisions on hard facts and reliable data rather than instinct. Since a behavioral assessment focuses on how someone behaves in their professional context, it can provide incredibly practical insights into how a candidate will behave in a particular situation, even before they are faced with it.
Identifying Training and Development Needs
Behavioral assessments provide an in-depth analysis of an employee’s behavioral profile. This usually includes their strength as well gaps to the target roles. Business organizations can harness this information to provide training and take targeted development actions to improve their employees. If your employees are exhibiting problematic behaviors, behavioral assessments can help you understand the “why” behind their actions. It is a very effective tool for identifying skill gaps based on objective performance data. You can then customize development to help individual employees work on their areas of weakness.
That’s not all. Behavioral assessments can reduce bias in a 9-box process and help organizations identify high-potential employees that can be groomed for critical roles, thereby creating a reliable pipeline for manning core company positions. The objective alignment that this offers can help reduce turnover costs and spur efficiency and productivity.
Giving Employees Reliable Insights About Their Job Roles
While a behavioral assessment is a great tool for decision makers, it is also important in helping employees gain an insight into their own abilities. Also, because it is data-driven at the core, candidates who are applying for jobs and employees vying for leadership positions usually have a realistic preview of the job before their first day on the role. Additionally, when employees know how they respond to specific triggers, they’re better able to prepare for it.
Identifying The Right Leaders
Leadership is just as critical to a company’s success as its recruitment practices — perhaps even more critical. If an organization is going to grow or make progress, the people calling the shots must be good at their jobs. When it comes to leadership, an employee’s behavioral profile is usually the strongest predictor of job performance. With a behavioral assessment, candidates will know how they’ll potentially act rather than merely how they think they’ll act. Also, behavioral assessments will also help decision makers understand an employee’s big-picture thinking, team spirit, work delegation and conflict management, all of which are critical to the role of a leader. Behavioral assessments remain an indispensable tool for filling in leadership positions and identifying development needs especially for first time leaders.
Your employees’ behavioral has a huge impact on your business trajectory. That’s why high performing organizations leverage tools to drive decisions – based on data, and not instincts. Learn how the Aptology behavioral assessment works and why it’s different.