#haygroup

As Israel Berman, head of Hay Group in Europe, said in his opening remarks at this year’s Hay Group International Conference in Berlin, what differentiates the best companies from the rest is a powerful corporate culture that drives great performance, enabling teams and individuals to realise their strategy and their own potential.

Culture drives performance through three channels, explained Hay Group’s Jean-Marc Laouchez:

Shared purpose and values – the true heart of culture.

Organisational messages and reinforcements – role models, organisational design, management systems, brand language.

Actions and behaviours – clarity about desired behaviours, managing performance in line with these, reward programmes that reinforce them.

It is critical to have alignment between the organisation’s core values, the messages it sends to people and the behaviours it expects of them.

And alignment has proven results. Hay Group’s research finds that organisations with well-aligned cultures show consistently better results than other companies, with an average five-year return on investment that is twice as high and gross profit margins that are 27 per cent higher.

The changing face of reward examines how the business drivers of reward are changing due to the impact of the global downturn and other macroeconomic trends in the global economy. The study is based on face-to-face interviews with senior HR specialists from over 230 companies in 29 countries, which collectively manage more than 4.7 million people and generate annual revenue streams of approximately US$4.5 trillion.

Across all sectors and regions, organizations are struggling to re-build profitability following the recession. With revenue growth hard to come by, they are focusing on cost containment and performance improvement as the paths to profit growth. This requires them to balance four, often conflicting, challenges: cost containment, performance improvement, talent engagement and risk management.

In particular, the tension between cost containment and talent engagement was a very strong theme to come out of the research. Organizations are very concerned about retention and motivation, particularly for top performers, high potentials and those with scarce skills. However, the option of paying more for retention or performance is often no longer available and companies are focusing more on intangible rewards (such as motivational leadership, challenging work and career development) to boost engagement.

New Delhi/Mumbai, December 4, 2012: Hay Group, global management consultancy, today released the annual Top Executives Compensation Report 2012-13, revealing that the compensation of CEOs and their top executives is set to increase by a modest 9 per cent & 9.4 per cent respectively in the coming year. This exhibits a dip from the double-digit growth witnessed in previous years.

The Top Executive Compensation Report 2012-2013 features insights from about 158 organizations across the sectors of Auto, Chemicals, Basic Resources, Oil and Gas, FMCG, Retail, Construction and Materials, Telecommunication, Utilities, Industrial Goods, and Transportation. It is designed to enable organizations to understand prevailing compensation practices and trends in India.

Sridhar Ganesan, Rewards Practice Leader, Hay Group India explains, “Hay Group research has found that markets, strategy, culture, and ambitions are the four real drivers of modern-day executive compensation. This is important to keep in mind as data analytics on executive compensation have to be interpreted beyond just the stated numbers”.

Statistical analysis between the Hay Level (proxy for job contour in terms of scope, scale, size, complexity, etc.) and Total Cost to Company (CTC) found a co-relation of 0.26 – indicating that other factors, besides just the organization’s contour affect CEO compensation. 

Nothing stays the same–ever–and your current leaders won’t be around forever. So who are the people who will lead your organization in the future? Having identified them, how do you develop and retain them? Which critical activities will provide the right experience for the fastest growth and development? 

Talent Q Dimensions and Elements are unique, online, work-focused psychometric assessments for assessing large talent pools.

Developed by Roger Holdsworth, a pioneer in the field, they measure personality and ability using the latest adaptive testing technology. Talent Q assessments gather data quickly, efficiently and with minimum investment. And they report in ways which can inform a range of talent decisions:  screening and selection, matching people to jobs, coaching and development, identifying high potentials, leadership development and team building.

Talent Q’s Dimensions provides a cost-effective way to measure the capability of sales staff, especially when assessing large numbers in revenue-critical roles.

Selecting the best : 

Two recent studies demonstrate the contribution that a carefully chosen personality test can make to the tricky business of predicting performance – especially when in-depth assessments of behavior are too difficult or costly to carry out.

Talent Q ran assessments with employees
 in sales roles – 60 in telecoms and 29 in a pharmaceutical company – and compared the resulting predictions with employees’ actual performance against sales targets.

The test chosen was Dimensions, an online assessment that measures the key, work-related aspects of personality covered by a range 
of other personality measures. Participants undertook a single assessment that explored how they approached tasks, how they managed relationships and what motivated them.