Psykologitoimisto Crescon uusi blogi löytyy nettisivuiltamme osoitteesta www.cresco.fi/fi/blogi. Lämpimästi tervetuloa!
Our new blog (mainly in Finnish) can be found from www.cresco.fi/fi/blogi. Welcome!
Psykologitoimisto Crescon uusi blogi löytyy nettisivuiltamme osoitteesta www.cresco.fi/fi/blogi. Lämpimästi tervetuloa!
Our new blog (mainly in Finnish) can be found from www.cresco.fi/fi/blogi. Welcome!
Posted in Miscellaneous | Leave a Comment »
We at Cresco Metrics (a spin off from Cresco Psychology Agency, Facebook: Cresco Metrics) have been exploring some personnel assessment methods that are intended to be more interactive, enable instant feedback, can be done on-line and hopefully are also more fun. We have been doing this because we want to know, if this type of method could function as a tool in personnel recruitment. With this new method we’ve attempted to measure different aspects of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and emotional stability in stressful situations
Why develop this kind of method even though the current ones are reliable and valid? Because we have been thinking about the younger generations, meaning generation Z and generation Y. They tend to choose employers that give them instant feedback, offer generous possibilities for learning and development, freedom regarding time and space and also the possibility to use latest technology. To invite the talents of generation Y and Z, assessment should have same qualities: It should enable learning by instant feedback, it should be done by sitting on your sofa at home, on-line and shouldn’t be time consuming. And furthermore an additional bonus would be if the tasks in the assessment take place in some unusual and exotic environment. The assessment process itself should mirror the values and culture of the future employee.
In two words, next generation recruitment and assessment should be fun and fast. Our traditional paradigm about personnel assessment is that by using quite serious and tedious assessment methods, we have a great way to measure the candidate’s motivation and tenure. Even though the relevance of this point can be understood, we have begun to suspect that it is outdated. Nowadays employers have to be attractive and fun and the assessment methods have to support the image of the employee.
The results of our experimentation with this new method have been encouraging. Compared to more traditional personnel assessment methods some areas can be assessed as well or even better with the new approach. Areas that could be measured well or better were for example conscientiousness, activity level and helpfulness. This suggests that some areas of organizational citizenship behavior can be measured in a novel way. Both traditional assessment methods and this new method showed similar patterns.
However, results with emotional stability were problematic to interpret. According to both methods – the traditional ones and the new one – all our test takers were very stable emotionally. In other, words, we didn’t get big enough differences between individuals. This might mean that both the traditional method and the new one have failed to measure this or simply that our test-takers all indeed were very stable. In this respect, we have to keep on experimenting.
Rethinking recruitment continues. If you want to stay tuned with the progress please follow us on Facebook: Cresco Metrics.
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Recruitment process is by nature such that it awakens expectations and hope in the candidates. Every step in the process of being applied, being interviewed and finally having a personnel assessment makes the candidate hoping of being recruited to the position of her dreams. It takes time for the candidate and for the HR-person or manager involved to run through this laborious process – and sometimes the not-so-fitting candidate is chosen.
Only one candidate experiences a positive outcome – she gets a new job. The rest of the candidates will be probably frustrated even if the recruitment process was excellently organized. They might already have imagined themselves in the new position – how they could get some new inspiration and motivation to their career, how they could proudly tell their neighbors and relatives about their new job, etc. This is the name of the game and we all know it, but still on an emotional level this disappointment can harm the image of the recruiting company. We cannot disguise our emotions, even though rationale tells us that this is just life.
So, what to do to lessen disappointment or even prevent it? Recruit all? Of course not, but give everyone something and make this tedious process more pleasant for both the company and the candidate. And remembering that pleasant can also mean more accurate.
Usually the process on the candidates part begins by sending an application and then waiting. And waiting. And waiting more, as the recruiting manager and HR are nearly overwhelmed by the incoming applications. So, why not let all the candidates do something while they wait. Something that would benefit them immediately and give them transparency (read also realism) about the process. The benefit would be immediate feedback about their competencies and how they are doing in the recruitment process: Is their fit good the company and position? Also general feedback about their competencies could be given.
Furthermore, though there are good IT-systems to help screening the applications and CVs, it is still has been nearly impossible to set criteria for prescreening that would really tell us about the potential of the candidates. It is a fair possibility that some of the most potential candidates are left out because they for example have not enough of work experience in a specific area.
Why not use assessment tools for all candidates that are interested and give them feedback. Feedback along with a possibility to learn are usually very rewarding on a personal level. Both feedback and transparency in the recruitment process would in the long run build good corporate image. Furthermore giving the candidates a possibility to show her talent already in the beginning of the process would give a fair chance to every applicant and prevent companies from errors due to irrelevant cutting criteria in the application phase. Besides this the whole process would be speeded to match the clock speed of modern business.
Give everyone a chance to show their talent, give everyone feedback, and ensure that your best candidate is in the process all the way through.
Posted in Assessment, Miscellaneous | 1 Comment »
Photo credit: ZeroOne, Flickr
According to a case study by Jarmo Suominen at MIT on campus mobility, creative thinking and new discovery does not solely happen in labs, meeting rooms or classes but all the more in leisurely and informal places like out at a park where people go out for picnic lunches. In general, a big theme in the explanation of innovative thinking and creative information intensive work is “encounter”. People seem to be at their most creative when around and in contact to others. New ideas come about in relaxed settings and in contact.
What does fruitful encounter require? As it seems, the surroundings matter. Although a work place may have designated rooms for interaction around work subjects, the most rewarding and rich places for coming up with new ideas are ones that are less obvious, or ones that do not deliberately try to direct people’s thinking towards work. These places include coffee shops, lunch restaurants or parks where colleagues can easily get to from the work place and that aren’t specifically built and designed for efficient working. They are also places where people across business areas and departments can meet, share information and create unusual connections. As work places and offices typically aim at getting cost-effective solutions from human beings as well as the office solutions, what people are mostly surrounded by may not be the most fruitful place for creative thinking.
What do the places that spur on creative thinking have in common? Coffee shops, parks, bars and restaurants are designed for recreation and pleasure. They aim at helping people enjoy themselves in each others’ company, have their needs met, making people feel relaxed, safe and at peace. These spaces are not designed for containing, controlling and streamlining the use of human resources, they are meant to produce good feeling. One way they do this is by supporting relaxation through a combination of thought-out choices and structure but at the same time freedom of choice for the customer. When entering a park of coffee shop, the person can freely choose where to sit, what to do although the surroundings obviously permit only a limited set of actions. Through relaxation, feeling of safety and satisfaction, people can enter into encounters through a positive and energetic mindset.
If a company wishes to support the creativity of its employees and coming up with innovative new products is a core function, it may be unwittingly be working against these goals through tightly set boundaries for work time and work place. Most employers may think that it is not their responsibility to be there for employees’ “recreation and pleasure”. Employers are however required to provide work tools and other requisites for completing the work they are asking employees to do. The main question here is: is the office a good tool for creative work?
The need to control processes and streamline human action as part of production may have lead to environments that stifle new thought. A process can be defined as repetition of a function that has been defined beforehand. If a company wishes to create something new, they need to free their employee minds from previously defined processes and environments that encourage repetition towards freer interaction and thought. Making offices more leisurely, personalized and relaxed may be one way to increase creativity at the workplace. At a minimum, it is essential to make sure that people are situated at the office so that are able to relax, concentrate and yet freely interact. This is something that sounds simple, but when you think about how offices are typically arranged, there are a lot of small things that could be changed with big results. For instance, the open office where people sit behind each other creates a, evolutionarily understandable feeling of insecurity – someone can be lurking behind your back.
Nevertheless, even though the office could be transformed to resemble a coffee shop, it will still not be as spontaneous as the outdoors. In the search for new ideas that produce new connections, chance and randomness are important. Allowing more choice about work places and supporting voluntary, undefined out-of-the -office encounters and engagements with other people is one way for companies to support creative thinking.
Posted in Leadership, Wellbeing | Tagged Creativity, ideas, Innovation, Knowledge intensive work, office, work place | 3 Comments »