Understanding the "Core Values" of Honesty and Integrity

Often I hear that Honesty and Integrity are core values - as they should be. Would you ever Hire someone who wasn't honest or exhibited Integrity? How often though have you employed someone to be disappointed on these values.

The challenge is that you need to go to a deeper level so your people can understand what it really means in your organisation. The words are like the outer layer of an onion and you need to peel back the layers until you get to the real "core" of the definition for your company.

In our company "Live what we teach" defines Integrity for me. We have a client who is a painting contractor that has "3 coats means 3 coats". Isn't this a lot easier for his staff to understand than Integrity.

The difinitions are different for every company. What does the inside of your onion look like for Honesty and Integrity in your company.

The Perfect Employee 100%-Yeh Right!

One of the absolute bottlenecks we tend to find when working with Business Owners are the inevitable and sometimes ongoing issues they have with staff. Reality is issues relating to staff performance are usually time consuming, not pleasant or avoided totally. At best this means inefficiencies and at worst it means money straight off the bottom line for the business in question and lets face it things are tight across all industries in this economic climate.

I'm not going to go into the necessity for living company values, clear goals, well written and measurable job descriptions in this blog because each of these are important in their own right. What I do want to put across are the benefits of using a profiling tool as part of the recruitment process. If you are not using a tool of some kind then you are flying blind. The changes in the market now mean that as opposed to 12 months ago when good applicants were hard to find, now there are many more looking for work so getting someone good should be easy right? Well in many cases we get it wrong!!

Most employers in small & medium sized businesses tend to be the owners (and doing many roles). Time restraints mean one, perhaps two interviews are the norm. If you get an applicant to spend an additional 15 minutes completing an online profile then you can quickly get a wealth of information that will outline suitability for the job. There are many such tools available however the best we have found are the EDisc Profiling tool. 

Put simply if you throw one of these into the selection process you will greatly improve your chances of getting the right person for the job! Do some research and ask those that use such tools for feedback.

Karl (see our website)