According to the latest research from Gallup, Inc., companies with engaged employees continue to outperform the competition in productivity, customer loyalty and profitability.
Nothing new there, but what may surprise you is that workplace culture — with its significant impact on employee engagement — was identified as the number one challenge faced by companies worldwide in Deloitte's 2015 Human Capital Trends survey.
So, how do you ensure that you're hiring employees who will embrace and thrive in your company's culture?
Hiring challenges hitting insurance
Right now, with a hyper-competitive job market and retiring baby boomers, hiring challenges are hitting the insurance industry particularly hard. The industry faces a dated reputation that has in large part failed to attract millennials. In fact, The Hartford's Millennial Leadership Survey revealed that in 2015 only four percent of millennials were interested in entering the insurance industry.
According to Gallup CEO, Jim Clifton, employers need to take proactive steps to "place employees in positions that are well-matched to their strengths, have a boss who cares about their development, and a mission that gives them a feeling of purpose" — in other words, create a cultural fit.
By making culture and values organizational priorities, keeping everyone accountable behaviorally, and leveraging the information from targeted assessment tools and resources, there is a lot we can do to ensure that the people we hire will not only succeed but also become company champions.
Employees who believe in and exhibit their company's values are incredible ambassadors for customers and new hires. (Photo: Shutterstock)
Why culture is so important
A company's culture is the foundation of its brand and must be guarded like any other major asset. It cannot be dictated from the top, but must be co-created and re-created every day by all employees, including senior leadership.
People want to work for a company that cares about others, including its employees, customers and community. Customers want to buy from a company that will treat them with respect and work hard to advocate on their behalf. And millennials, in particular, rank a company's community involvement as one of the most important on their list of criteria when job hunting.
When employees are aligned with their employers' values, they become its most powerful brand ambassadors and can have a direct positive impact on recruitment of both employees and customers. Great people attract more great people, and employee referral programs are the most cost-effective means of filling open positions.
A Nielsen's Global Online Consumer Survey found that 90 percent of consumers surveyed trust recommendations from people they know. Top companies with the most appealing cultures are attracting as much as 40 to 60 percent of their new hires directly from employee referrals.
There are a number of assessment tools that can help a company determine whether or not a potential employee is a cultural match. (Photo: Shutterstock)
Selecting the right cultural fit for your company
Companies are often caught off guard when a need for new talent arises, and as a result, human resources professionals can find themselves in an ongoing state of reactive catch-up. Proactively building a talent pool is an effective way to ensure that a constant flow of candidates are available as needed. Developing a rich career page on your website, utilizing social media to create a sense of community, and charging all company leaders to be on the continuous lookout for talent is a good start.
But people are complex and it can be very difficult to find a cultural fit for your company through the standard interview process alone. Determining whether a candidate can do the job is typically done quite effectively through interview questions, testing, and a review of the resume. Assessing whether someone will do the job is more complicated and depends on how good you are at decoding what drives each person motivationally.
Personality assessment tools
Personality assessment tools, used in conjunction with a rigorous interview process, provide invaluable insight into how candidates will actually behave and perform once on the job. There are a number of effective personality assessment tools being used in the insurance industry today, including Caliper, Omniview, and The Predictive Index (PI), to name a few.
"The PI Behavioral Assessment describes, explains, and predicts day-to-day workplace behaviors," says Drew Fortin, vice president, The Predictive Index. "We've conducted hundreds of validity studies to ensure our science-based assessments can accurately predict the drives, needs and cognitive ability of people in any job function, in any industry, anywhere in the world," he says.
Personality assessments can help you determine with great accuracy whether someone is more goal or socially oriented, patient or intense, informal or rules focused, is open to change, and/or has high energy. These are important characteristics when you need the right talent to execute your sales, service, and underwriting business strategies.
Value of cultural fit
Although vital, personality is just one success factor to consider when seeking a cultural match. Companies that understand the full value of culture fit will give a candidate's personality, job-specific skills, and experience equal weight during the interview process. Making the right hiring decision for your company is enhanced by involving critical stakeholders throughout the interview and debriefing process, especially when filling key roles and leadership positions.
Gathering input on the fit of a candidate from a variety of perspectives will increase your success rate and provide an opportunity to discuss the strengths and development needs of each candidate before they join the team.
Retaining employees involves training, coaching and helping them develop key relationships inside and outside of the company. (Photo: Shutterstock)
Retaining your top talent for the future
It's a mistake to think that once hired the hard part of acquiring new talent is over, when actually the real work has just begun. Research shows that an employee's transition to a new company is the most important factor in their short- and long-term success. It's during those initial few months that first impressions are made by the employee, his/her new colleagues, and your customers, so a certain amount of handholding is essential to a smooth onboarding process.
Leveraging all the information gleaned from the interview process is crucial for coaching your new employees to success. Identifying early training and longer-term development needs are a must. Assign a mentor who will help all new employees navigate their first introductions and meetings, assist them in creating a strategy for understanding the needs of the organization, and help them develop key relationships, including with the new boss.
Utilizing personality assessment results, managers can adapt their style to best lead and motivate employees in ways that fit their employees' working styles. Going forward, those same personality assessment results used for hiring can be extremely useful when coaching employees both individually and for group effectiveness.
Your company's culture is a business issue. Ensuring its perpetuation will have a significant positive impact on the service you provide, the media attention you get, your employee satisfaction, and your bottom line results.
Make sure everyone in your organization understands what it is that makes your culture great and their role in bringing it alive every day. Hiring for cultural fit is one of the most important things you can do to protect the value of your culture and your brand.
Carla Lynch is the manager of talent acquisition for the Arbella Insurance Group. Arbella is consistently recognized as a top employer in New England and in 2016 was awarded the #1 Best Places to Work Award in Massachusetts by the Boston Business Journal. She can be reached at carla.lynch@arbella.com.
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