Welcome to the May 25, 2005 issue of The Total View

Your resource for cutting-edge news, tips, and tools to help you hire, manage, and motivate top-performing employees.

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In This Issue
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1. The Truth About Employee Stress: Will It Bleed Bottom Lines Dry?
2. Perfect Labor Storm Alerts #403 to #405.
3. How Can You Change The Way You Deal With the Flood of Resumes in Just 7 Minutes?
4. Have You Checked Out Hiring Top Performers BLOG Yet?
5. Question of The Week: Is it Legal to Create Our Own Pre-hire Test?

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The Total View is written and published each Wednesday by Ira S. Wolfe, founder of Success Performance Solutions. (Yes, Ira writes every article, every week!) and is distributed with permission by The Chrysalis Corporation.

Ira S. Wolfe 2005 - All Rights Reserved. Reprints and other distribution by permission only.

To learn more about The Chrysalis Corporation or to read back issues of The Total View, visit our web site at http://www.chrysaliscorporation.com/cgi-bin/arp3/arp3-t.pl?l=12&c=10

Subscribe to our RSS (Real Simple Syndication) Feed. Get the latest HR news at the Hiring Top Performers Blog:
Click Here to visit the Hiring Top Performers Blog.

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1. The Truth About Employee Stress: Will It Bleed Bottom Lines Dry?
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Fess up. You know your employees complain about their jobs, their bosses, their co-workers. They gripe about being overworked and under-paid and working too hard for the recognition they receive. Or, maybe it's the guy three cubicles away who listens to music so loud that it grates on your nerves all day long.

Every employee feels work-related stress. That's normal. Complaining about it is normal too. So is that occasional outburst that just releases enough pressure to allow you to calm down and get back to work.

What is not normal is sustained and prolonged stress. If you read the news, you know more than half of all American workers say work leaves them "overtired and overwhelmed." That alone is not alarming until you dig a little deeper and realize these workers have developed chronic, often serious, stress-induced health problems. Taking two aspirins and calling the doctor won't cure this problem.

While management and human resource professionals wrestle with reigning in skyrocketing insurance and pension costs, workplace stress is adding over $300 billion each year to cover associated health care costs and absentee rates. That is like writing an extra paycheck exceeding over $600 to every "stressed" worker without getting anything in return.

Like stress, worker productivity is also in the news. Productivity increased more than 3 percent between 2000 and 2003, much of it now attributed to downsizings, outsourcing and rapid expansion. But according to a study published in the British Medical Journal, workers have been paying the price but employers may soon be paying the piper. Researchers found that the risk for a worker having a heart attack and hospitalization doubled after downsizings, along with a number of other conditions. The cost of insuring and taking care of these stressed and frazzled workers is beginning to exceed the gains made from increased output per worker.

The cost of stress in the workplace is not new. A Massachusetts-based study dating back to 1972 showed the surest predictor of heart disease was job dissatisfaction. But an aging workforce and global competition is bringing enlightened attention to the effect stress has on the bottom line and productivity. A recent study conducted by LLuminari® found that 54 percent of workers leave work fatigued. Ten percent of workers are too tired to enjoy their leisure time. The result? Nearly one out of five workers is at risk for stress-related health problems.

In addition to a threefold risk for heart and cardiovascular problems, stressed employees are two to three times more likely to suffer from anxiety, back pain, substance abuse, injuries, infections, cancers, and obesity.

All employers need to remember this: Chronic disease is expensive to treat. Prevention is a great investment. That's why it's to your advantage to de-stress your business and learn how to help your employees deal with the slings and arrows that fly every workday.

Three easy-to-use tests offered through The Chrysalis Corporation give any manager tools he or she can use to identify at-risk employees and, ultimately, manage employee health and well-being. The easiest to use is Managing for Success(r) DISC Style Analysis. The MFS DISC assessment uses a proprietary 2-graph system with one graph measuring how much energy an employee normally uses when dealing with problems, people, pace and procedures. The second graph measures how much energy this employee believes is required to be effective on the job. Research shows that adapted behavior changes greater than 25 percent means a potentially high stress job situation for that employee. Workers with gaps exceeding 40 percent almost always admit to experiencing changed in their health.

Now that you know which staff are feeling stressed at work, it's very important to know why and how they will cope with the stress. Many people who feel stress show no outward signs of their misery and, unlike the complainers, have no pressure valve.

Next, we move on to Personal Interests, Attitudes, and Values(tm) (PIAV), an assessment that measures what motivates an employee. If the job or company culture does not satisfy at least two motivational values, job dissatisfaction is inevitable. High risk employee stress occurs when a PIAV test showing job dissatisfaction is combined with graph gaps of 25 percent or more on DISC.

The TotalView Assessment System (TV) evaluates five personality traits including emotional stability, or how an individual copes with workplace stress; in other words, how long and how often can an employee adapt their behavior (DISC) without burning up or out.

Using these "stress" tests provides three pieces of mission critical information to every employer fighting the war on rising health care costs: how much energy it takes an employee to adapt his or her behavior to be successful at work (DISC); the degree of his or her satisfaction with the job (PIAV), and; how effectively that person copes with stress (TV).

A treadmill stress test doesn't stop heart disease, but it can identify people at risk for a heart attack. DISC, PIAV, and TV don't eliminate stress either, but they are reliable for predicting workers at risk for developing costly stress-related illness. From these assessments, employers can use the results to re-assign workers with better job matches, teach them skills to cope with job stress, and modify the work environment to reduce potential conflict. It's the best preventive workplace medicine to stop workplace stress from bleeding bottom lines dry.

To Learn more about DISC follow this link.

To learn more about the Personal Interests, Attitudes, and Values (tm) Assessment, follow this link.

To learn more about the TotalView Assessment System, follow this link.

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2. Perfect Labor Storm Alerts #403 to #405
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Fact #403: As noted in the 2002 State of Aging & Health in America and other sources, older adults use more health care services than any other age group. Americans over age 65 today are only 13% of the population, but account for half of physicians' visits and half of all hospital stays. The average 75 year old has three chronic conditions and uses five different prescription drugs.

Fact #404: Only a small proportion of practicing health care providers have had any formal training in geriatrics. Out of 650,000 practicing physicians in the U.S., less than 9,000 are geriatricians, or about 2.5 geriatricians per 10,000 elderly, and that number is expected to fall to about 6,000 in the near future. Fewer than 3% of current medical students take any elective geriatric courses. (Source: 2002 State of Aging & Health in America)

Fact #405: Only 720 pharmacists, out of 200,000, have geriatric certification. (Source: 2002 State of Aging & Health in America)

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3. How Can You Change The Way You Deal With the Flood of Resumes in Just 7 Minutes?
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The Resu-mess is back! If piles of resumes and crowded e-mail in-boxes have got you frustrated, you NEED to preview Total APS in action.

What is Total APS? It is an applicant tracking and assessment system that puts your recruiting and selection efforts on auto pilot. Total APS even provides you assess to the TotalView assessment (see the first article in this newsletter).

Total APS frees up your time to communicate with only QUALIFIED candidates and helps you ensure a good job fit between a person and the job. Total APS can save your company is to experience the system in action. View our online 7-minute, no-obligation video demonstration of the Total APS system here.

Can't view it online? Contact us today for a Free CD-ROM on How to Screen and Interview Candidates Online. Follow this link and type APS in the comment box:

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4. Have You Checked Out Hiring Top Performers BLOG Yet?
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We would like to invite you visit our new blog, Hiring Top Performers. It can be found here:
http://www.chrysaliscorporation.com/cgi-bin/arp3/arp3-t.pl?l=31&c=10

We created this blog to provide our readers and subscribers with a place to comment on our articles, situations that are happening within your company, or anything else related to selection and retaining top-performing employees.

Check our blog today at http://www.chrysaliscorporation.com/cgi-bin/arp3/arp3-t.pl?l=31&c=10 and please forward this information to your colleagues, clients, boss, or anyone else who might find it helpful.

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5. Question of The Week: Is it Legal to Create Our Own Pre-hire Test?
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One manager writes: For several months, I have been reviewing different pre-hire assessments to use in our organization. During this week's managers meeting, one of the managers announced he was creating his own test and the rest of management bought into the idea. His arguments were convincing. First he outlined how it would save money if they didn't have to purchase a system. Second he felt that he and the other managers knew what it took for an individual to succeed in their organization.

Is is safe for us to use a manager's do-it-yourself test?

Answer: The Internet is now clogged with dozens of inexpensive, easy to administer, quick to score personality tests. So it seems logical that you too can create your own assessments. But how do you know which tests have the proven validity to protect you against EEOC law suits and which ones should be restricted to validate your weekly horoscope?

Creating your own test to save money is like buying vitamins instead of buying health insurance because you are young. As long as you don't get in trouble, you save money. Get challenged by a disgruntled employee even one time and what you saved by doing it yourself is a drop in the bucket to the cost of defending it in court.

The U.S. Department of Labor (See above for a complimentary copy of the of Testing and Assessments) and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission clearly states that any assessment used for selecting employees must meet the guidelines. Developing your own list of questions or creating a test, especially for non-technical skills or soft skills, may seem like a good idea until someone challenges you on the grounds of the test or interview.

What is important for any manager responsible for selecting employees is not to let ego get in the way. It's amazing how many times a manager rejects a proven test because he or she didn't score as well as they thought they might or they didn't like what it said about them even if everyone else agreed it was accurate. The same goes for interview questions - they reject questions they find difficult to answer or deem as silly despite the fact that they are proven successful in predicting performance. For a test to meet defensible psychometric guidelines, a test must be valid (accurate) and reliable (predictable). To be valid a test must be proven to test what is says it is testing. Its accuracy is dependent on the type of questions or choices, the type of response items (true/false, Likert scales), the number of questions as well as the number of response items, and well, much more technical detail than most of our readers really care to know. Suffice it to say that constructing an employment test that can be proven valid and reliable and legally defensible should be left up to the professionals.

As I learned over twenty-five years ago on my anesthesia rotation during my residency, it is easy for anyone to put another person to sleep. The real skill of an anesthesiologist is being able to wake up the patient when it counts. When it comes to creating test, it is easy to come up with a list of questions to ask on a test or during an interview. The real skill is identifying which questions can actually predict job performance and asking them in a way that is legal and defensible.

To learn more about building a valid, reliable and legally defensible selection and promotion process, go here to read about CriteriaOne: The Whole Person Approach.

CriteriaOne is based on the criterion validity, a blueprint for selecting, promoting and retaining employees based on job-related competencies, behaviors and attitudes.

Got questions about testing and assessment? E-mail them to questions@chrysaliscorporation.com. We'll address them in a future issue of The Total View.

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Contact Information:

The Chrysalis Corporation
2001 Hammock Drive
Valdosta, GA 31602
229-257-0665