Total Rewards
5 Insidious Effects of a Mis-Hire
CEOs, business leaders and managers are acutely aware of the fiscal costs of a mis-hire, but there are some invisible—and potentially insidious—costs that can wreak havoc on your organization. Although it might not be top of mind, when you hire a person who does not fit with your organizational culture and operating philosophy, the effects are pervasive. By continuing to operate with outmoded hiring practices, you become susceptible to five specific hidden consequences of a mis-hire.
1. Fragmented Customer Service
Ensuring your team understands your product and service set and why customers use them is where excellent service begins. You can—and ought to—bridge the knowledge gap for new hires with comprehensive product and service training, however, you cannot train your workers to care about the customer. Behavioral and performance research shows that great service is delivered through a fundamental set of values, attitudes and beliefs that are in alignment with a service philosophy. When people are in a role in customer service for the wrong reasons, no training in the world will compensate for their lack of connection to the work itself.
This is a common experience when expecting one level of affinity from the place we spend our money and receiving service that is counter to that expectation. This leads to feeling disengaged, dissatisfied and even extreme anger. When you hire a person whose heart is not aligned with your mission and your service offerings, or they lack the basic service acumen to execute your customer service objectives, this same level of dissatisfaction is what your customers experience.
2. Reduction in Innovation
Companies arrive at a sustainable business model through innovation, creativity, and a keen awareness of how to bridge a gap in the market place. Once the product set is stable and customers are buying, continual improvement and innovation is required to stay ahead of the copycat curve. When some of your people cannot seem to get it together, miss basic deadlines, or don’t find problems until your customers do, innovation is not even an option.
When an employee is hired because their resumes list the right key words, yet the person behind the resume lacks conceptual thinking ability and theoretical problem solving, they lack the access within themselves to come up with creative and inventive solutions. Often this lack of ability shows up as excuses, finger pointing and roadblocks outside their control. It is important to be aware that a person who lacks these traits is unaware they lack them and that most often these traits and competencies are very difficult to teach. If time is not on your side, hire people for roles that need to innovate with these innovator competencies, behaviors and values.
3. Lowered Workforce Productivity
When you hire in a hurry, you experience unwanted turn over. If you are lucky, the turn over happens fast, yet in most cases it is months before the problem surfaces and the impact of the wrong person in the job wrong has already disseminated throughout the team, if not the department. In high-level roles, specifically for senior leadership, the impact is detrimental not only in the immediate area of influence; it permeates throughout the organization. In sales, for example, if you have two or three people continually not achieving quota and approaching the position with a poor attitude, it poisons the well for those who are producing and are aligned with the position requirements and level of activity required for success.
Tolerating people who are not engaged and thriving waters down the engagement and productivity of those who want to win. When any of these morale and engagement busters are happening within your culture, good people either leave or switch to autopilot until they can. The indirect and costly impacts are higher staffing costs to make up for the lack of employee and team productivity, institutional knowledge loss when good, trained people leave; and increased training costs to continually retrain new blood into the organization.
4. Time and Energy Losses
We have all heard the old adage that 80 percent of our time is spent with the bottom 20 percent of performers. As it happens, this statement may be closer to 30 percent of the underperformers. As the competition for talent increases and the fear of the empty chair blocks your good senses, you can feel pressured to fill the job with the first decent person who surfaces with a cogent resume. Hiring the wrong people because you are in a rush to fill a seat leads to more empty seats; or worse: full seats with empty payoffs.
5. Job Dissatisfaction
One of the hidden costs of unwanted turnover as reported in recent employee and manager engagement surveys is that 70 percent of managers surveyed reported that they are coping with burn out and a job misery rating that is detrimental to their overall happiness. When the workplace culture turns into one of micromanagement, correction, and reprimand rather than collaboration, creation and mentoring, the managers’ job becomes one of parent and babysitter.
Often we see managers and leaders looking to HR to fix people and situations that could have been avoided by demonstrating more consciousness and awareness before during and after hiring. It seems like; in many companies an admission of making a poor hire is a far worse offense than allowing and tolerating subpar performance. The cost of doing nothing about a bad hire far outweighs the cost of being proactive and creating high-impact hiring solutions. When you think about it in terms of bottom-line profitability and overall success, shifting your philosophy about people and hiring consciously just makes sense.
Originally posted by Magi Graziano on blog.hrps.org
