Psychometric Testing - Saville Wave
Spotting talent and potential for greater productivity
With the credit crunch, and a recession looming large in the UK, ensuring your employees are fully motivated and productive is more important than ever before. Rising costs force more discerning decisions about expenditure, and thus an ever increasing focus on ROI – including the return on investment that your staff provide – which means that there is simply no room for those who aren’t fully pulling their weight.
But achieving high levels of employee productivity and motivation sometimes feels like a mysterious and elusive goal. In the fast-paced world in which we all live, with stiff competition and high customer expectations, there are multiple demands placed on our line leaders each and every day. So, amidst these demands exactly how can you ensure your people are energised and in roles that both draw on their motivations and talents, as well as providing the stretch and stimulation to keep your top performers fully engaged and achieving their potential? How do you:
- Spot leadership potential earlier
- Create customised development plans
- Improve your selection ‘hit rate’
- Identify talent who will thrive in your culture
There are a plethora of tools on the market that purport to help deliver an objective assessment of your talent. But how on earth does the busy line manager, untrained in the intricacies of these tools, distinguish between them?
A good fit between the employee’s proposition – that is their motivation, talent and potential – and the employer’s proposition – that is the job itself and the organisational culture - is critical to ensuring high productivity and motivation. Robust, objective assessment tools will give you the best chance of achieving this fit. And whilst there are many tools out there in the marketplace, it is important to select a tool which psychologists call ‘valid’ – that is, the test measures what it claims to measure. It does what it says on the tin. A tool which clearly links the individual measures from an assessment, to those competencies which are required for job success, allows for far greater precision in identifying, selecting and developing your talent to ensure the right employee/employer fit. And therefore it is also far more likely to help you achieve your ROI.
One of the newer tools to market in this area does just that. The Saville Consulting Wave® is an integrated suite of assessments which provides sophisticated individual and organisational diagnostics and is designed specifically to maximise prediction of performance and potential at work. The tools identify "best fit" environments based on an assessment of personal motives, talents and preferred culture. The interaction and alignment of these three crucial areas is a fundamental factor in maximising performance. The Wave questionnaire comes in two versions: the Wave Professional Styles, which measures 36 personality dimensions and takes approximately 35 minutes to complete, and the Wave Focus Styles, measuring 12 of the most important sections of personality. This assessment is effectively a subset of the longer questionnaire and takes approximately 15 minutes to complete. Both are completed online using an interactive questionnaire which is modified according to the responses of the participant.
A recent co-validation of 29 psychometric assessments found the questionnaire with the highest validity with overall job performance was Saville Consulting Wave Professional Styles, with over 50% better validity than questionnaires from any other publisher. This improvement in validity can also be expected to lead to over 50% better Return on Investment.
The unique feature of the Wave products is that they measure the interaction between motives and talents. That is what an individual likes doing, as well as what s/he is good at. By separating these aspects the tools are able to identify unfulfilled motives and latent talents and add a level of insight to feedback and development planning that other tools on the market are unable to provide.
Saville Consulting was founded by Peter Saville, the former co-founder of Saville Holdsworth Ltd, and regarded by some as the founder of the psychometrics assessment market in the UK. He is the first Industrial Psychologist to have received a lifetime achievement award from the British Psychological Society.
We believe that these latest tools from Saville Consulting represent a great step forward in the psychometrics market, and give employers and individuals access to assessments which have been designed specifically to maximise prediction of performance and potential at work - thus increasing your ROI. Please contact us for further information on how these tools can help you.
