Singapore Human Resource Congress sponsored by PsyAsia International

PsyAsia International is pleased to once again be supporting Singapore’s Human Resource professionals as a sponsor of the Singapore Human Resources Institute’s Annual Human Resource Congress.

The Singapore HR Congress and Business-Connect Exposition 2010 will address the newly derived term of HR TransmutationTM and explore the topic in deeper context.  The current economic churning has made it explicitly clear that industry is not just facing another downturn but it is accompanied by impactful structural, demographic and mindset changes across industry and top management cannot afford to respond with anything less than a complete overhaul of the system to survive and sustain. Renowned speakers and leaders from the HR fraternity will share their experiences and provide useful insights on the know-how of managing paradoxes in a turbulent world.

PsyAsia’s clients are entitled to a 35% discount on the price of conference tickets.  Please contact us in the first instance to avail of this special offer.
“A strong and capable HR community can be the catalyst and change agents to initiate and implement people development efforts in organisations, and help build stronger capabilities amongst our business leaders and managers.”
 
PM Lee Hsien Loong
11th World HR Congress 2006 organised by SHRI

PsyAsia International is Asia’s leading independent distributor of Psychometric Tests of Personality and Aptitude. From offices across Asia, including Singapore and Hong Kong, our psychologists assist the world’s top organisations and local governments to recruit, select, assess and retain the best employees. Our services are only offered by fully registered organisational psychologists with years of experience in their field. PsyAsia also offers world-class training in Psychometric Testing in Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Online.

Assessment Centre & Development Centre Training in Singapore

Assessment Centre and Development Centre Training in Singapore

Register for the above course

View full course outline and previous delegate feedback

To avail of the 10% early-bird discount, simply enter code ACDCEARLY on page 3 of the course registration form – ensure you register by 18 March and pay within 14 days!

To avail of the 40% discount for the Behavior-Based Interview Course, simply click the additional option of this course on the final page of the booking form for the Assessment and Development Centre Course. 40% Discount only open to those who register for the Assessment & Development Centre training and may be used in conjunction with the early-bird discount.

PsyAsia’s three-day Assessment and Development Centre Course provides delegates with a grounding in the assessment centre methodology and ensures that by the end of the course delegates are able to:

• Evaluate whether or not their organisation is ready to implement assessment/development centres as a tool for effective selection and development.
• Assess and prepare the resources required to successfully run an assessment/development centre.
• Design and implement an effective assessment process within their organisation.
• Understand the role of the assessor and the skills necessary to be effective in this position and have a full appreciation of reliability and validity within the centre.
• Conduct an assessment/development centre – from logistics to design of exercises matched to job requirements, through to the proper and ethical use of information collected, writing reports and validating the centre.

Survey: Developing Successful Global Leaders

The American Management Association (AMA), in conjunction with the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp), is conducting a study to examine leadership initiatives that organizations have taken to coordinate actions across global locations. We’re looking for your input on the topic. In return, you’ll receive the preliminary results report once available. Please take this survey now.

Estimated survey length: 5 minutes

You’ll receive: Preliminary results report

Survey closes: Wednesday, March 17

Receive a complimentary results report

In exchange for completing the survey, you’ll receive a copy of these valuable results, which otherwise are exclusive to i4cp members. Thank you for your participation.
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 Sourced from: HRM Today Featured Posts

What Recruitment Consultants Need to Know – Online Training Session

Click the image to register!

This 90-minute webinar will cover some basic principles in recruitment and selection.  Despite being basic, the principles are essential in ensuring integrity in delivery of service to the client of a recruitment consultant.  In our work in Asia we come across many recruitment consultants each week.  We value them as clients and recognise from our interactions that much of what they are doing goes against best practice and wish to help!

This webinar aims to address some of these issues and will cover topics such as:

- What information do I need from my client?
- What questions should I be asking my client when I meet with them?
- How do I do a brief job analysis?
- What is a person specification? Why is it important?
- How do I produce a person specification if my client doesn’t give me one?
- How do I choose which psychometric test(s) to use?
- Basic Behavioural Interviewing skills
- What other assessments could I use?
- Is there an easy way to collate all of my data on multiple candidates and rank order it for presentation to my client?

The webinar is aimed primarily at recruitment consultants, however the material covered will be useful and applicable to anybody involved in employee recruitment/selection.

There is a small US$10 fee for the webinar to be paid by credit card at paypal.com* and you will receive details after registration. All paid registrants will receive a one-week access to a recorded version of the webinar at our online learning center. This will help you recap information and will be useful if you are unexpectedly unable to attend the live session.

*Fee waived for PsyAsia clients who have made any purchase in the past 3 months.

The session will be conducted by a fully registered organisational psychologist with years of experience in recruitment, selection and development for multi-nationals as well as governments in Asia.  There will be ample time for questions and answers – if more time is needed, an additional session can easily be arranged without further fee.

Click the image to register!

Will HR Become More Effective?

HR has the unfortunate tendency to be inward focused; rather than collaboratively engaging cross functional colleagues in HR project design and implementation, they garner sources of information from other HR practitioners to inform their project process. Successful HR projects that drive business goals require the expertise, input and engagement of the rest of the organization. Therefore the CHRP should include a significant requirement to develop a high level of competency in cross functional collaboration, project management and systems thinking. Business acumen is all well and good but of little value if you are unable to discern the need to engage others appropriately.

Of all members of an organization, the HR practitioner should be the role model of collaborative effort and show leadership in the practice of engaging others in business oriented projects. Yet too often, HR is seen as a department that is somewhat isolated and out of touch from the rest of the organization.

If HR associations took a different approach to the surveys they send out regarding the value of services offered by association to practitioners, they would gather radically different input. Send out a survey regarding the effectiveness of HR in their organization, to the non-HR employees and you will gather a very different perception of what needs to be done if HR is ever to begin to garner the respect they claim to want. To get the ‘seat at the table’, a stated desire that gets tossed out there so often will be attained by radical change. Is HR up to that challenge?

 Sourced from: HRM Today Featured Posts

Podcast: Multi-Generational Workforce

A couple of weeks ago, my buddy Chris Ferdinandi over at Renegade HR and I talked about multi-generational workforces and what they mean to employers for his podcast (one of the few I actually listen to). Want to have a listen? Of course you do:

Listen Here

So what are always my main points about generations?

• There are differences between various generations.
• Sometimes these differences are blown out of proportion to their importance.
• Often these differences relate to career level rather than generations.
• Truly skilled managers rarely have issues dealing with a multi-generational workforce.
• Problems with managing certain generations often point to greater leadership issues.
• Generation Y can talk about whatever they want but businesses speak the language of action.

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 Sourced from: HRM Today Featured Posts

3 Reasons Virtual Teams Fail- and How To See it Coming

Ten years ago – heck, five years ago – few people worked on teams with geographically dispersed members. Today, this is very common. Every manager needs or will need to learn how to manage and inspire team members they regularly see “live.”

Pal and witty guy Wayne Turmel (a.k.a. The Crank Middle Manager) has written this helpful white paper: 3 Reasons Virtual Teams Fail- and How To See it Coming. You can down load it for free by clicking on the link. A couple interesting quotes from the paper:

• “70% of managers above 1st-level supervisor now have at least one team member who is not co-located with them.”
• “Technology and online tools are great but they are effective only if they are used to create context and human connections. Mere data transfer will result in short-term time savings and long term communication problems of the project.”
• “A good project requires a mix of synchronous (people can talk at the same time) and asynchronous (people use them at different times) tools to be truly effective.”

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 Sourced from: HRM Today Featured Posts

10 Reasons for Executive Failure

A derailed executive is an previously-named high-potential employee who has reached the middle management level, only to find that there is little chance of future advancement (as previously thought) due to a misfit between job requirements and personal skills. Thus, the executive either plateaus or leaves the organization altogether. That is the original CCL studies definition. Sometimes the term also refers to leaders who experience big failures after reaching the executive spot and, more recently, those involved in ethical scandals.

Whatever your definition of a bad leader is, most have several of the following 10 leadership shortcomings:

Lack of energy/enthusiasm: OK so some people are less visibly enthusiastic than others, thanks to a personality trait called introversion. But there’s an effort to be made, no matter what your personality style, to covey and inspire energy and enthusiasm in your team. And there is NEVER an excuse for complaining. Either do it, change it, or leave it.

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 Sourced from: HRM Today Featured Posts

Just-in-time Talent

Technology has made it so that I can email you much more easily than I can call you. We can communicate virtually just as well as we can connect face-to-face. With the recession cut-backs, many companies have taken advantage of that. Workers have been treated as disposable. Cost-containment is important. It’s the most important part, in fact, if your business is struggling financially. But what is creating disposable workers doing to your company?

Temps, freelancers, contractors, and interim executives are easy to get rid of. What kind of culture is having temporary workers creating? First, the bright side…

You get better talent.
The more ’stable’ jobs are the ones that are sought after by high potentials seeking the executive track. Since there are fewer of these positions available, competition is increased, and you can be more selective. Yet, the temps, the contractors and consultants feel the competition as well, because you are their ‘client.’ You can hire experts when experts are needed and generalists where generalists are needed. Consequentially, the bar is increased and you have your pick.

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 Sourced from: HRM Today Featured Posts

The Five Domains of High Performance

Pick a leader – any successful leader. Then search Amazon and see how many books and other publications come up on that person. Abraham Lincoln? 83,642. Gandhi? 61,923. Even Barack Obama, who was widely introduced to the world just five years ago, has 8,670. People love studying successful people.

In the same way that many people have an insatiable appetite to study successful leaders, we in the business world tend to be fascinated with high-performance organizations. What are they like? What do they do differently? Is there a secret recipe that allows them to outperform their competition?

Of course, many books have been dedicated to this subject. From Tom Peters’s and Bob Waterman’s early 80’s best seller In Search of Excellence to Jim Collins’ Built to Last and Good to Great, there has been a succession of books that leaders and managers across the globe have devoured. Programs such as GE’s Six Sigma have trained countless people in how to achieve top performance and consultants have built entire practices around elements of high-performing companies.

While business professionals want to learn more about high-performance organizations in the hopes that they can apply some of the secret sauce to their own organization, many of the companies profiled within the pages of the aforementioned books were unable to sustain high performance. In fact, the number is about half. While much has been written on the subject, the truth is that the ingredients to high performance remain something of a mystery.

Part of the reason is the definition – what exactly do we mean by high performance? Is there a difference between simply surviving (which was the fate of some of the companies profiled in Built to Last, for example) and performing well over a long period? Do we mean companies which outperform others in their own industry or across industries? Over how long a time period does an organization need to perform exceptionally well in order to be considered a “high performer”? And which measures, financial or otherwise, are the best ones to use?

Over the last three decades, i4cp researchers have looked at various ways to define high performance and the traits that separate the consistently top organizations from the rest. Through that time, we have come to recognize high-performing organizations as ones that consistently outperform most of their competitors in four primary areas:

• Revenue growth
• Market share
• Profitability
• Customer satisfaction

And, over the years, our research team has examined well over 100 different core human capital areas and tried to determine the differences between high-performing and low-performing organizations. The research has clearly shown that no single ingredient guarantees organizational success. Rather, high performance is like a delicate entrée – based on a staple of core ingredients any one of which, if left out or of inferior quality, will ruin the entire item.

The Five Domains of High Performance

Our research has shown that there are five basic ingredients which separate higher performers from their lower-performing counterparts:

1. Their strategies are more consistent, clearly communicated and well thought out. They are more likely than other companies to say that their philosophies are consistent with their strategies and their performance measurements mirror their strategies.
2. Leadership is clear, fair and talent-oriented. Those leaders are more likely to promote the best people for the job, to make sure performance expectations are well known and consistent with the strategy, and to be committed to developing their people.
3. There is a commitment to the right talent within the organization, and while employees are treated as unique individuals, the organization takes a holistic approach to managing and making decisions based on data-driven information. This begins with a strategic approach to workforce planning. It entails looking at the organization from an outside-in perspective that identifies the business model components and areas that drive value and then determines what the organization needs.
4. The culture is strong in all the right ways, and employees are more likely to think the organization is a good place to work. Employees not only adapt well to change, they embrace it. High performers also emphasize a readiness to meet new challenges and are committed to innovation.
5. They are more likely to have a strong market focus and go above and beyond for their customers. They are organized internally around what’s best for the customer, they think hard about customers’ future and long-term needs, and their strategy is based on customer data. And they are more likely to see customer information as the most important factor for developing new products and services.

While these five domains – Strategy, Leadership, Talent, Culture and Market – may seem a bit broad or even obvious, the separation our research has shown between high and low performers in these domains is startling. For example, in a just-released study on high performance by i4cp, the following graph depicts this separation:

These findings, along with previous studies, have convinced us to target our research on discovering the best ways for companies to boost their performance in these five domains and the numerous sub-domains within. We’re convinced that companies that focus on excelling in these areas are cooking up a surefire recipe for long-term success.

i4cp’s 4-Part Recommendation:

1. Take stock to determine where your organization stands in these five areas, and be honest – even the best performing companies aren’t always superb in each area. To get an objective view, survey the workforce on these domains as well as use other assessment tools.
2. Once you’ve determined your areas of strength and weakness, make sure senior management is involved in improving on the weak areas while not taking the eye off of the strengths; in tough economies it can be easy to stop focusing on core areas that the company has excelled in. Don’t forget to investigate the practices of other organizations that are excelling in your areas of weakness; it’s amazing how some very simple and inexpensive ideas can make a huge difference in closing the gap.
3. Although companies should focus on the specific tactics for boosting their performance in each of these five areas, it’s important to align the five areas as a whole. Each domain feeds off the others, and ignoring one is like leaving a key ingredient out of a culinary masterpiece.
4. Although these efforts should continue indefinitely to sustain performance over time, organizations should also do regular reevaluations of their progress so they can make course corrections as needed.

View a recording of Thursday’s webinar, The Five Domains of High-Performance Organizations.
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 Sourced from: HRM Today Featured Posts