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Psychometrics is the field of study concerned with the theory and technique of psychological measurement. This includes the analysis of knowledge, abilities, attitudes, personality traits, and educational measurement. The field is primarily concerned with the construction and validation of measurement instruments such as questionnaires, tests, and personality assessments. Paul Gilbert at Thomas International tells us how this works and why it matters.
As business leaders and managers I am certain you will agree that your organisation is only as strong as the people you employ. The objective of this article is to give you a broader insight and overview into the often unknown and mysterious world of psychometrics. In other words: people assessment tools and how these tools can help you to grow your business.
Your biggest resource is your people! So how exactly can self-assessments aid you through the employee lifecycle, helping you to hire, manage, develop and retain the best people for your business?
A specific challenge within the engineering sector is how to differentiate between similarly qualified and highly specialised skilled workers:
- Who really stands out from the crowd?
- Who has greater development potential?
- Who will best fit into your organisation and team culturally?
- Who has the most potential to drive the organisation forward?
I shall address these questions and attempt to explain how a range of simple assessments can assist in identifying these important areas of consideration.
There are numerous providers of people assessments on the marketplace today; some have been around since the inception of psychometrics to the business market, others more recently formed. All claim to offer scientifically robust and reliable solutions to their prospective clients and all have the grand aim of helping organisations through the full employee lifecycle.
The right psychometric assessments will empower you to transform the performance of your teams and your individuals and deliver an immediate impact on your organisation.
The best psychometric assessments give you a high level of certainty in all of your people decisions.
Recruit
The right hiring decision can have a huge impact on the performance of your team, function or line of business. Get it wrong and you are looking at a cost of up to 2.5 times the individual’s salary, and the disruption to your business and your teams can be considerable. Get it right and you can develop teams that function well together so that the whole of the team is greater than the sum of its parts.
“Our people are the foundation of our business success. Recruiting the ‘right’ people and ensuring teams work together efficiently is crucial to maintaining our competitive edge and to the continuing growth of our company.”
HR manager, Martek Marine
The right assessments will help you to:
- Identify the candidates with an ideal fit
- Speed up your recruitment process
- Make your selection decisions clearer
Retain
With one in four employees stating they intend to leave their employer in the next year, retaining staff is critical to delivering success in any organisation.
Get it right and you are delivering consistently on your business targets with a happy, loyal workforce. Get it wrong and you are investing cash in new recruits and dealing with disruption to the business. With the present pressure on cost right across the industry this can be the difference between winning contracts or losing them.
“Three years after introducing psychometric profiling FedEx reported staff turnover had fallen from 29% to just 7%.”
Senior manager, FedEx
The right assessments will help you to:
- Motivate your people
- Ensure morale is high
- Create engagement
- Optimise performance
- Reduce attrition
Develop
Employers say they need to focus on leadership and front-line people management in order to meet their business objectives over the next two years.
With training budgets under more pressure than ever, how do you make sure your learning and development investment counts? How do you ensure that the training you provide is directed to the people best able to make use of it and best able to give you a return on money you dedicate to this?
“We wanted to use a tool within the department that would help the team understand each other better as well as identify their own personal opportunities. The team liked PPA, they found it very visual, and with no jargon or hefty terminology.”
Training & development manager, Virgin Trains
The right assessments will help you to:
- Identify each individual’s exact areas for development
- Give your training more impact
- Be a more effective people manager
- Transform the performance of your teams and individuals
Manage
On average, 80% of management time is spent on poor performers. But with so little attention directed at top and good performers, how do you ensure you are investing the right amount of effort to get the maximum results? How do you identify the causes of poor performance and how do you enhance the type of support that will best strengthen your strongest performers?
“By helping managers to understand themselves better and identify their strengths and limitations, we help them to perform better – this benefits their own careers and our business.” Head of Human Resources,
Willmott Dixon
The right assessments will help you to:
- Very quickly get an in-depth understanding of your people
- Pinpoint why your people do – and don’t – perform well
- Manage your people performance effectively
- Free you up to focus your time on adding real value to the business
What good psychometrics looks like
Firstly, you should not need to be an expert yourself. The information should be straightforward and easy to understand with no psychobabble. It should make sense in the real world as the focus is on you and your staff, not test subjects in a PhD research paper.
Clearly, results should be accurate and easy to use, and you should be able to have confidence in what you are being told. Thomas International itself has assessments validated by the British Psychological Society to help ensure that this is the case.
Psychometrics should also not be time consuming. An activity designed to help you strengthen your business performance should not take your valuable time away from other vital business activities. As such, results should be available quickly and the tests themselves should be quick to undertake.
Assessments should work collectively to give you a full insight into what makes people successful:
- Core strengths
- Motivations
- Potential for development
- Communication and relationships
- Skills and competencies
Understanding behaviour
“We hire people for their technical skills, however, we fire them for their behavioural faults”
PPA (Personal Profile Analysis) is underpinned by DISC theory, looking at Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Compliance and can provide an insight into how people behave at work by answering the following questions.
- What are this person’s strengths and limitations?
- How do they communicate?
- Are they self-starters?
- What motivates them?
- How will they behave under pressure?
- Will this person ‘fit’ with my organisation?
These four behavioural characteristics shape a person’s work style. PPA measures which mixture of these characteristics an individual has in their make-up, determining how the individual will potentially fit-in behaviourally into an organisation.
Ability and aptitude
“Identifying those with the most potential to lead and who can learn something differently requires a unique measurement – one that looks at learning agility”
A GIA test measures a person’s mental horsepower and gives you a prediction of their potential to grasp a new role or respond to training by answering questions such as:
- Can this person think on their feet?
- How adaptable is this person to change?
- Can they cope with the mental demands of the job?
- Could this person be a high flyer?
- Is this person a problem solver?
- To what extent can we develop this person using training?
To achieve this it assesses key areas of cognition covering reasoning, word meaning, spatial visualisation, perceptual speed, number, speed & accuracy.
With careful analysis of the areas of cognitive ability most appropriate for the specific roles within your organisation, you are able to recruit and develop much more effectively.
Emotional expression and control
“Experienced business leaders rank so-called ‘emotional intelligence’ capabilities as critical to the success of today’s leaders”
TEIQue tells you how well your people understand their emotions, react to pressure and manage relationships. It will answer questions such as:
- How aware is this person of their strengths and limitations?
- Do they modify their behaviour?
- How do they react to pressure?
- Can this person control their impulses when under stress?
- Do they excel at developing relationships?
- How self-motivated and adaptable is this person?
What internal values, beliefs and attitudes are required for specific roles within your organisation? Emotional intelligence allows you to understand what drives an individual and how they will cope with other people, pressures and changing environments.
As per the introduction to this viewpoint piece, the purpose of this article was to give you an insight into psychometrics in general. Thomas International, an experienced provider of the assessments outlined, is just one of many companies which provide effective assessment solutions to organisations.
Learn more about how people assessments can help your organisation. Contact Paul Gilbert on 02072572810 or paulg@thomas.co.uk for more information and a complimentary assessment. Or simply visit www.thomasinternational.net
Thomas International is a global leader in the field of behavioural and psychometric profiling, at the forefront of assessment innovation for 30 years. Thomas provides assessment solutions in over 60 countries, profiling in over 56 languages. Over 1.5 million Thomas assessments are completed annually.
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