What Makes a Great Employee?

“So complex is the human spirit that it can itself scarce discern the deep springs which impel it to action.” - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

It is human nature to think that we truly understand the world around us. This is especially true of our individual perceptions of human interactions. We believe that we understand what motivates our employees. Likewise, we think we understand what is important when placing an employee into a new position, trusting our intuition. But, it turns out that in many cases, the most important factors based upon behavioral science in employee selection are counter-intuitive.

Imagine we are in the human resources department at a large bank with many branches. Our bank has several positions which have a large number of employees: tellers, account managers, and accountants. Now, it has been determined that the bank doesn’t have enough tellers, but has too many account managers and accountants. Instead of firing our redundant employees and hiring new tellers, we would like to offer our existing employees the ability to become tellers and stay at the bank. We will assume that the bank tellers can be trained and so they don’t need any specific skills.

Our first step might be to do a behavioral science assessment so that we can understand what motivates each of our account managers and accountants. Once we know the motivations of our employees, the logical step would be to look for what we think motivates a good bank teller. Maybe we think that bank tellers are strongly motivated by the act of helping other people. That makes sense because the teller’s primary job is customer service all day long.

This is where our logical analysis might break down.

What if all the bank tellers who are motivated by helping people turn out to waste company time by talking to and making friends with their favorite customers, which doubles the wait times in lines and actually leads to many dissatisfied customers? Consider the possibility that our best bank tellers aren’t motivated by helping people at all, and are instead highly motivated by the money from their paycheck. This may sound like a negative because why would a company want employees who are simply working for a paycheck? Well maybe because they are strongly motivated by money, they actually do a fantastic job at helping customers respectfully and efficiently so that those customers will speak highly of them to their boss, which leads to promotions and raises.

Following our intuition, we might actually offer jobs to the worst possible people for the position.

If instead we use an advanced science-based system, like the Humantelligence^TM Internal Movement analysis, to determine which of our account managers and accountants would make great tellers, we have a much higher likelihood of success. By looking at our best bank tellers and our worst ones, Humantelligence can build an Ideal Position Profile of what makes a great employee and then calculate how well each of our other employees fit that profile. Humantelligence helps us to make smarter decisions, harnessing the power of proven behavioral science, without bogging us down in the minutiae of assessment scores, mathematics and statistical analysis.

But this sort of analysis isn’t limited just to large corporations, banks and the like. Our small and medium business product, Talent Scan, makes it drop-dead easy for any business owner or group leader to analyze their people and find ways to improve efficiency as well as foster communication and understanding among their workforce. Plus, it’s completely free during our public beta introductory time period!