Can You Predict Employee Performance?

I arrived in Johannesburg in late August and made my way to the Garden Court Sandton City. The hotel was located adjacent to the Sandton Convention Centre, Sandton City and Nelson Mandela Square shopping centres making it a fabulous base to enjoy the city. With numerous amenities for guests, I was sure I will wake up feeling refreshed every day during my time in the City of Gold. As all the beautiful sights beckoned, I wished I was a tourist. Unfortunately, I was not here to see the sights. I opened my laptop and continued working on my pre-course assignment. I was here to attend the Predictive Index Management Workshop.

The Predictive Index (PI) is a comprehensive programme which provides tools, training and consulting support to improve the effectiveness of managers in developing and focusing energy of their people to meet the needs of the business. Since it was first made available for industrial use, thousands of professionals have been trained as PI analysts and managers. The checklist is currently available in 62 languages. PI is used to assess the potential of an individual. Using behaviourial data as the backbone, PI provides easy-to-use tools for understanding anyone, building teams, aligning strategies and achieving goals. PI works with patterns. The three patterns are:

1. Self: doing what comes naturally

2. Self-Concept: how an individual perceives the work-related environment requires them to behave.

3. Synthesis: How an individual behaves in his/her current job. This is a combination of Self and Self-Concept.

PI works with factors. People are motivated by certain fundamental needs or drives which lead to certain behaviours being displayed. The four primary factors measuring motivating needs are:

A. Dominance- measures the drive to exert one’s influence on people and events

B. Extraversion - measures the drive for social interaction within other people

C. Patience - measures the intensity of a person’s tension and pace

D. Formality - measures the drive to conform to formal rules and structure.

We all have these four factors expressed in varying degrees. Jobs like marketing manager, communications manager and trade marketing development managers require high A factor. General ledger clerks and accountants require low A factor. Jobs like marketing manager, communications manager, trade development managers, market research manager, hotel concierge require high B factor. Payroll manager, general ledger clerks and accountants require low B factor. While jobs like payroll manager, accounts payable manager and general ledger clerks require high C factor, jobs like marketing manager, communications manager and brand manager, chief security officer require low C factor. While jobs like tax manager, logistics manager, internal auditors, imports manager, payroll manager, accounts payable manager and general ledger clerks require high D factor, jobs like fashion designer, marketing manager and entrepreneurs require low D factor. Your job is to match people whose natural profile match the job profile you have created in PI.

With PI, you can:

1. Build high performing teams

2. Empower managers

3. Analyse employee engagement and take bespoke action

4. Uncover and grow leadership potential

5. Increase organisational awareness

6. Achieve job fit for employees and candidates

By using PI to develop our people, we built our organisation. PI gives you the tools to create the high performing team you dream about because by understanding the needs and behaviors of your people, you will be able to:

a. Understand what makes employees and teammates tick

b. Compare work and communication styles of anyone in your organization

c. Develop and coach employees to reach their full potential

d. Better understand how your own management style can adapt to get the most out of your team

e. Proactively design winning teams

Predictive Index can help you isolate the cause of low employee engagement and take action to fix it. Data collated by PI showed that the average 250-person company loses more than $3 million annually due to employee disengagement, according to Forbes. With PI, you can uncover why your employees are disengaged, drill down into results by team and identify organizational blind spots.

PI helps your leadership team understand and align on your business strategy. You can then design your talent strategy to match. The PI analysis will uncover strategic misalignment on your leadership team, measure confidence in your strategic direction, identify behavioural and skill gaps on your team, build a cohesive strategy that aligns through your organization and quickly identify where talent can better align with business objectives. Job fit is one of the primary causes of disengagement in the workplace. Whether you are looking to navigate requirements and expectations for existing employees or hire the perfect fit for any open role, PI can help you:

1. Make objective, informed decisions in your talent management process with people data

2. Easily determine the behavioral and cognitive requirements for any job type

3. See which candidates or current employees are a match for a role

4. Generate custom interview questions that help objectively review candidates

Over time, PI helped me and my organisation to: 

a. Define jobs that reflect the actual demands of the job

b. Attract candidates who are motivated to do the work

c. Select and hire the right people

d. Plan strategy that achieves our business objectives

e. Build teams that are focused and motivated

f. Communicate successfully with diverse individuals and groups

g. Coach and mentor to positively impact performance

h. Deal with conflict productively

i. Promote the right people

j. Plan succession that works

k. Deliver appropriate skills development

l. Achieve productivity improvement

Can you predict employee performance? With Predictive Index, you have a proven tool that does that and more!