By Sean C. Orr, M.D. and Drew Edwards, EdD, MS
November 7, 2020
Workforce Support: Brain Science and Your Business
How to improve your company with Neuroscience
Behind the curtain of hiring talent.
In this day of uncertainty, businesses are challenged more than ever to stay afloat and remain competitive. Having the right workforce has never been more important, and now that so many are unemployed, an opportunity has emerged to attain the talent to grow your business.
What are you hiring?
In truth, you are hiring a mind, equipped with the necessary experience, training and know-how to perform specific functions within the organization. This, however, is just the tip of the iceberg. Attached to every mind (brain) is a body that should be optimally energized to initiate and freely engage in the execution of his or her position. This, of course plays out amid a culture of other brains and bodies with different skill sets, temperaments, and life experiences who are expected to form productive, cohesive teams. As you can see, "talent acquisition" is more nuanced and complex than it used to be. The truth is... You need to know much, much more.
But how?
Traditionally we trusted Human Resource executives and a manager’s common sense to discern credentials, experience, skill set and how they feel the applicant would “fit” into the organization. Today’s business climate demands a more nuanced approach. One that views a new hire as an investment that will pay large dividends to the organization—not just the bottom line, or be a total bust and loss of valuable time and operating capital, as the cost of recruiting, hiring and onboarding is high. Accordingly, selecting an individual with the right skill set and the temperament for an organization’s culture is indeed a weighty investment. Getting it right the first time is critical, considering the cost associated with getting it wrong.
Even more challenging, once you make that hire, how do you track performance and the individual’s adaptability to your business culture? Remember it’s always a two way street. You may hire an individual with incredible skills, yet they remain uncomfortable with some aspects or necessary interactions within the business. Some new hires are reluctant to rock the boat by asking hard questions for fear they will be perceived as a malcontent. The truly talented in this category will unceremoniously find another job and resign. Others will rock the boat, and some within this category will create unnecessary disruption.
Typically, adjustment and assimilation into a new organization usually ends when they walk out of the human resource office and start working. So the hiring and onboarding process must also look beyond skill set and performance metrics, to include temperament and assimilation process. Getting this right improves hiring decisions and retention of talent. Both of these metrics impact business performance.
The first ninety—120 days are essential in determining whether a new hire is a “fit” for the organization, yet as mentioned very little resources are dedicated to this critical decision-making period. So guiding and tracking both performance and assimilation are vital tools for improving the quality of the workplace.
Research has revealed that employees engage and excel when they truly embrace an organization’s core values and ethical culture and posses a clear understanding of their role. Marcus Buckingham from The Gallup Corporation performed extensive research regarding why some employees engage and become high producers or disengage and disrupt. He found 12 critical metrics that were highly predictive of outcomes. Of these 12, two questions stood out as the most predictive in the hiring and onboarding phase of employment.
Make no mistake, this is a lot to keep up, and it's easy for these crucial onboarding tasks to slip through the cracks. Crucially, new employees who feel neglected or marginalized from the beginning are more likely to nurse grudges and resentments that can later turn into disengagement, sabotage, and even litigation. You don’t have much time to get your new hire accustomed to your environment, and it’s crucial to assess and course-correction early and often in order to make for a smooth transition.
The good news is that Neuroscience can help for you before and after you make a hire. Today, our understanding of human brain function and behavior gives us amazing insights into personality traits and can predict patterns of behavior that can be both beneficial or damaging to your company. A deep understanding of your candidates for hire and for existing employees gives you much-needed insight to make sure that you not only select the best employees for your group but also give them the right tools that enable them to be their best version possible.
Pre-employment Screening for Cognitive-Behavioral Aptitude
Interviewing a new candidate for employment can be a daunting task. After sorting through countless applicants, it can be hard to know whether the person you’re interviewing is projecting their true nature. Wouldn’t it be good to know objectively their true strengths and weaknesses? Would it affect your decision if you could predict how they would respond during moments of stress? Or under what circumstances they are at their best? Today, employers benefit most when they select for employees with higher cognitive capacity, emotional intelligence, and a temperament that ensures the company’s brand is protected and upheld.
Using an advanced hybrid of subjective interview techniques and objective computerized testing, we build a profile of your employment candidate that gives you extra insights into these very aspects of their brain function. Cognition is the new currency, and our ability to measure cognitive capacity gives you an advantage in deciding whether employment candidates are a good fit for the demands of the job. Knowing certain aspects of personality can prepare you for those crucial questions that can help you make that hard decision between two “equally” qualified candidates. Objective testing also helps to identify and reduce the effects of bias, ensuring a more fair and defensible selection process.
Benefits
Better employee selection.
Decreased misunderstanding and injured feelings.
Reduction in bias during the selection process.
Reduced mental fatigue on the part of interviewers.
Improved brand perception by candidate employees.
Ongoing Employee NeuroCoaching
You want your new hire to succeed. Predictive analytics can help position him or her accordingly. By revealing crucial aspects of personality and cognitive capacity, you will be empowered to integrate your new employee into the company more seamlessly. You’ll also be in a better position to anticipate and head off potential interpersonal conflicts before they happen. It’s important to have a good understanding of the people who work for you so you can make the most of their capabilities and experience. Work done on the Pre-employment Cognitive-Behavioral Aptitude Screening can carry over seamlessly to the post-hire experience.
NeuroCoaching takes the best practices of high-performance coaching and expands upon them by incorporating insights from the field of Behavioral Neuroscience. Our understanding of brain function today introduces a whole new spectrum of possible strategies that improve performance in life inside and outside the job.
Employees of all calibers can experience performance benefits through ongoing NeuroCoaching. New hires will find that the process will help smooth their transition and make their onboarding process more effective. For your existing employees, NeuroCoaching can identify and fix those behavioral hot-spots that are holding your company back. Our proprietary approach identifies psychological and physiological limits that your employee can work on to improve cognition and enhance personality. We serve as an external accountability partner to you. As you identify areas of needed improvement, we provide and reinforce strategies that help your employee to overcome obstacles, championing their progress and growth.
Benefits
Reduction in turnover.
Improved workplace harmony.
Reduction in burnout.
Improved metrics for success.
Better customer experience.
Improved employee engagement and mental health.
Performance in the NeuroEconomy
In 2020, things suddenly changed. We now live in a NeuroEconomy. In reality, the change really started in 2012. As with many changes, it has simply just taken time for everyone to notice. Today, more than half the world’s workforce makes its living sitting behind a desk and tapping into technology that alters our lives dramatically by unlocking new levels of power. The Internet and the World Wide Web have emerged as a global nervous system, an external repository of knowledge and information that serves as an extension of the brain, an “exocortex,” so to speak.
In the NeuroEconomy, the margins in life are thinner than ever before. The COVID-19 Pandemic has exposed this reality in the most raw way. It has revealed what some saw a decade ago, that systems and institutions were not able to continue to operate with the old CardioEconomy orientation because the new infrastructure was demanding a new way of doing business.
Whether you are selecting and onboarding new job applicants, or nurturing your existing employees, The NeuroGenesis Project will be there to help you navigate the new normal using applied Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience.
Takeaways:
Pre-employment Screening: Selecting the proper job candidate can be made easier and more predictive of long-term success by using applied Neuroscience.
Post-hire NeuroCoaching: Successfully onboarding new employees and cultivating existing ones reduces turnover and is good for the company.
Technological advances have enabled the world to transition from the CardioEconomy to the NeuroEconomy.
Success in the NeuroEconomy will require close attention to and cultivation of high-level Brain Function.
To get started or to learn more, schedule a meeting with us today!
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