Poor team performance, identified mainly through below-standard business KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), invariably corrupts critical customer experience (CX) touchpoints, thus creating unwanted churn and dissolving brand loyalty.
If this sounds familiar, it’s important to dive deeper into your teams’ strengths and weaknesses to better identify skill gaps. The best way to do so? Employee assessments!
Employee assessments can help you build a stronger workforce by:
- Detecting missing roles in your team framework
- Raising the “skill bar” in the current employee ranks
- Adjusting training and development initiatives to address high-need areas
Employee assessments can help unearth the skills and talents your employees are missing, relating them to your company’s priority needs, and initiating a training and hiring action plan to fill the gaps.
What are the 5 benefits of assessments?
Assessments can help in several aspects of CX and EX. Here are the five strategic benefits of an assessment:
- Minimize employee and customer churn
By helping employees develop their professional skillset and contribute better, you will improve employee engagement, and waylay churn. Engaged employees are more productive, improving the customer experience they provide, thereby minimizing customer churn. - Boost productivity
By providing employees with the tools and skills they need to perform their task better, you can optimize processes and help employees achieve more. Offering such organizational support empowers employees to perform their best, improving productivity. - Optimize crisis management
By upgrading your employees’ skillset based not only on current demands but long term goals, you can help them tackle more complex situations, as and when they arise, more effectively. - Help nurture a competitive edge
The global talent shortage has left many companies scrambling to find the right fit for their needs. This talent shortage is only projected to increase. By helping your team build the skills required, you will help your business gain a competitive edge. - Staying ahead of the curve with proactive learning and development
One of the worst mistakes you can make is complacency. Customer expectations are rapidly evolving, as is the bar for customer experience. By ensuring a process of constant learning and development, you can create a team that is always in the know, ensuring you keep up with the times and continue to deliver the best in every aspect of your business.
Assessments help you gain critical data to inform several aspects of your business strategy. In doing so, assessments will contribute to several aspects of your customer and employee experience, assisting in nurturing a loyal and proficient workforce that will help your business stay ahead of the curve.
How can assessments help bridge the skill gap?
The core benefit of an assessment is to identify skill gaps, so you know the right trainings and professional development plans to chart out for your employees.
But are skill gaps that prevalent? As it turns out, yes. 43% employers report more than enough applicants, but too few reflect the right skills for the job.
The global talent shortage is currently increasing. A recent study finds that left unchecked, the global talent shortage could amount to a lack of 85 million people by 2030, or $8.5 trillion in unrealized revenue!
The reason is the lack of skilled employees, especially those in key skill areas such as STEM.
That’s why it has become imperative for organizations to take matters into their own hands. By helping employees along their professional development journey, you can create a team of skilled employees to ensure your organization is always one step ahead.
How can you get started? Understand employee strengths and weaknesses. Identify skill areas that are needed for your business, and link them to employees with the right aptitude.
Instead of only looking for the right people, help your people step up.
Creating effective assessments
It’s one thing to know that assessment benefits are sitting in the wings, but quite another to actually create and leverage the power of assessments.
You can get started pinpointing team skill gaps by recognizing that even individual contributions are all a part of the overall impact a team makes. So, the assessment strategy should embrace detecting group gaps yet be granular enough to cover project participants one by one.
Ready to get started? Assess your employees today!
The more systematic your approach, the better the results.
I strongly recommend that your assessment program covers executive suite stakeholders and project leaders while drilling down to staff-level employees. The common thread is communicating at all tiers engagingly and non-threateningly.
Step 1 – Define your company’s strategic goals
Let me put it this way: a management team without goals puts the cart before the horse and, as a result, will drift to wherever their compendium of skills takes them. With a 20/20 vision, it’s unlikely to be satisfactory. In other words, if you don’t know where you’re going, how do you know what resources you need to get there?
That’s why, before you create the assessment, here are the goals you will need to define:
- Your 12-month expectations as a minimum
- What your current workforce must do to achieve the above.
- The essential skills required to to succeed
- Based on this, understanding
- which skills are missing but trainable in enough time
- which skills need external hires owing to more complex training needs or experience
In fact, with the machine learning (ML) and AI revolution invading processes left, right, and center, it can be anticipated that mainstream skill gaps will emerge in this arena as well. In short, new technologies don’t just happen. Their power relies on trained employees to leverage them. This brings us to the next juncture.
Step 2: Catch up on where and how technology is driving your business in the future
Every company must get down to going through every job description and analyze:
- Those ready for automation
- The skill adjustments required to initiate the above
- New job descriptions currently not in the team framework
To get you going along this channel, look at 100 jobs of the future, although things are moving so fast that some of these may already be disappearing in the rearview mirror. Another interesting read focuses on the benefits and dangers of leveraging AI to improve efficiency.
When you’re looking to hire the right talent, one of the biggest missteps to avoid is being reactive and trying to fill gaps at a moment’s notice. Instead, assessment protocols prescribe being proactive and anticipating the shortfalls before the defective touchpoints show themselves.
Step 3: Measure the current skill inventory
This involves getting down to the underlying topics of assessment types and deciding on the right assessments for employee training. Key performance indicators (KPIs) are the open sesame to this aspect – determining how each employee contributes to the business.
There’s no other way. Conduct skills assessments starting with the KPIs merging with employee surveys and interviews. The secret to the success of such an assignment depends on:
- Establishing a transparent 360-degree feedback process
- Drawing information from the relevant individuals under the spotlight, their team leaders, and peers
For line staff members under management supervision, you want their view on the leadership quality affecting their performance. In other words, this overview goes up, down, and sideways.
Unfortunately, skill gap analysis goes hand in hand with personality traits, where the skills may be on the mark, but communication lapses and management style could be obstructions. However, in the broader scope of the evaluation, skills connect to all of that and, as such, should pull everything under the microscope.
Initiate improvements
Consider the following unsurprising data reflections: In 2022, moving into 2023, more than 50% of current workforce employees urgently need upgraded training to maximize the skills needed to continue doing their job effectively.
In fact, nearly 60% of HR directors believe that employees will need to upskill and reskill at least annually to maintain a competitive advantage. Thus, while assessments will help you highlight this gap within your organization, it’s important for you to put programs in motion to help bridge the skill gaps. Doing so reduces employee churn as the team realizes you are investing in their careers, helping them grow and contribute better to corporate success.
Conclusion
As crucial as assessments are, they open the conversation to critical topics such as skill gaps, the need to upskill, and more. It can reveal the impact of technology on the workforce, encouraging transparency to promote innovative and growth-oriented environments, and creating a culture of mutual advancement.
The skill gap analysis is only the beginning of a comprehensive strategic process that goes to the heart of your organization’s employee experience, employee journeys, and the differences it can make to your success.
Have you identified the key skill gaps in your organization? Assess your employees today to get started! Not sure where to start? Let’s get on a call, and our team would love to show you just how SogoEX can benefit your organization!
