Welcome to the September 15, 2004 issue of The Total View

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

If you are receiving this issue as a forward, and want your own subscription, visit
http://www.chrysaliscorporation.com/newsletter.htm

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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 #241 to #245.

3. Hire High Motivation Employees like the Experts.

4. What Side of The Generation Gap Are You ON? Take The Age Test and Find Out.

5. Stop Hiring Headaches and Prescreen Candidates Quickly, Easily and Inexpensively.

6. Announcing a Hassle-Free Solution for Surveying Your Employees, Customers and Members.

7. Checklist for Setting Performance Objectives.

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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 2004 - 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/totalview_backissues.htm

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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:
http://www.chrysaliscorporation.com/disc.htm

To learn more about the Personal Interests, Attitudes, and Values (tm) Assessment, follow this link:
http://www.chrysaliscorporation.com/piav.htm

To learn more about the TotalView Assessment, follow this link:
http://www.chrysaliscorporation.com/totalview.htm

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2. Perfect Labor Storm Alerts #241 to #245.
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Fact #241: 53 percent of American workers say work leaves them “overtired and overwhelmed”. (Source: Kronos, Inc.)

Fact #242: 30 percent of workers say they are “always” or “often” under stress at work. (Source: National Opinion Research Center )

Fact #243: 1 out of 5 workers are at risk for stress related health problems. (Source: LLuminari® Landmark Study)

Fact #244: 1 in 10 are so tired at the end of the work day that they do not enjoy their non-work time. (Source: LLuminari® Landmark Study)

Fact #245: Workplace stress costs the nation more than $300 billion each year in health care, missed work and stress reduction efforts. (Source: American Institute of Stress)

Don't be caught in storm without all the facts. "The Perfect Labor Storm Fact Book: Why Worker Shortages Won't Go Away" is a must-read leading edge forecast that predicts workforce trends for decades to come. Order your copy today - $7.95 includes no shipping costs for limited time only.
http://www.kickstartcart.com/app/netcart.asp?MerchantID=37174&ProductID=1717642

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3. The TotalView Self Study Course is Here.
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It is finally here. After three years and hundreds of hours, The How to Hire The High Motivation Employee audio series is complete. Six 30-minute CDs - more than three hours of interviews - guide a manager through each section of the TotalView(tm) Assessment System, complete with examples and stories you can use to hire the right employee and build the best teams. Why TotalView? It is simply the best job matching and employee evaluation system on the market today.

The first CD begins with an overview of the TotalView(tm) Assessment System and explanations of each of the Abilities scales. The second CD focuses on Motivations and Interests. And CDs three through six discuss the four major personality traits and eight sub-scales in detail.

Order How to Hire The High Motivation Employee here:
http://www.kickstartcart.com/app/javanof.asp?MerchantID=37174&ProductID=1969461

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4. What Side of The Generation Gap Are You ON? Take The Age Test and Find Out.
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Take your best shot at answering the following questions, then follow the link below to see how many you got correct.

1. Name the four Beatles.
2. Finish the line: "lions and Tigers and Bears, ____ ____!"
3. Hey Kids, what time is it?
4. What do M & M's do?
5. What helps build strong bodies 12 ways?
6. Long before he was Mohammed Ali, we knew him as ________ _____.
7. You'll wonder where the yellow went, ______ ____ _______ ______ ______ ____ ____________.
8. Before his role as Skipper's little buddy, we knew Bob Denver as Dobie's best friend __________ __ _______.
9. Brylcream, _____ _____ _____ ___ ___.
10. Bob Dylan advised us to never trust anyone over __.

Follow this link for the answers to the Age Test and see what side of the generation gap you land on:
http://www.chrysaliscorporation.com/age_test_results.htm

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5. Stop Hiring Headaches and Prescreen Candidates Quickly, Easily and Inexpensively.
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FirstView Job Fit assesses a candidate's performance and compares his/her behavior mostly effective behaviors in 15 job categories.

FirstView is designed to measure an individual's cognitive and interpersonal competencies such as:

--Rules - consistency, ability to deal with change, need for structure, ability to follow rules and policies.
--Extroversion - need to work with others, communication of enthusiasm, ability to talk or listen.
--Assertiveness - decision making, selling and closing abilities, ability to handle confrontation, willingness to take direction from other.
--Teaming - teamwork, collaboration with others, competitiveness Sensitivity - emotional stability, handling of criticism and feedback, dealing with stress.
--Organization - planning, spontaneity, time management attitudes, ability to handle details.
--Social Desirability - an internal validity scale to determine if the candidate is being frank with their answers.
--Cognitive Ability - an overall aggregate measure of cognitive skills.

A hiring manager can then select from 15 primary job-type reports to quickly get a basic picture of an applicants likely suitability for a position. You can select for the following job-types.

--Persuasive Sales
--Management
--Financial
--Healthcare
--Production
--Telemarketing
--Sales
--Customer Service
--Information Technology
--Food Service
--Warehouse
--Retail Sales
--Administrative
--Engineering
--Hospitality
--Driver

Each report contains specific Behavioral Interview Questions Driven by Advanced Psychometric Measurements.

FirstView provides state of the art behavioral interview questions automatically. FirstView questions are selected by advanced psychometric measurements and probe only those areas that target an individual's weaknesses in the prospective job.

To learn more about, FirstView, view sample reports, and request a complimentary demo link for a personalized FirstView report Follow This Link:
http://www.chrysaliscorporation.com/first_view_jf.htm

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6. Announcing a Hassle-Free Solution for Surveying Your Employees, Customers and Members.
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Is your company or association planning to conduct a survey in Q4 2004? Hate the hassle of inputting survey results? Not enough time to query the data and create reports? Are you putting off getting much needed feedback from customers, employees and members?

Contact us today to learn about about real-time e-mail and web based surveys. No more hassles with entering results and creating presentations. Let us do the work for you. We can help you write, set-up, distribute (electronically), process and present in less time for less cost.

For more information about the survey solutions we can provide you with, including our Rapid Survey Option, follow the link below and type "Surveys" in the comment box. You can also contact us by phone at: 229-257-0665:
http://www.chrysaliscorporation.com/contact_us_surveys.htm

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7. Checklist for Setting Performance Objectives.
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Setting performance objectives can be a tricky endeavor. If objectives are incorrectly formulated, results will be minuscule at best. Follow the link below for a checklist to assist managers setting performance objectives.

"Checklist for Setting Performance Objectives" is just one of hundreds of pages of reproducible facts, tips and sample evaluation forms included in Janus Performance Management System Volume 2.

For additional about the Janus Performance Management System, follow this link: <http://www.chrysaliscorporation.com/janus.htm> or contact The Chrysalis Corporation at 229-257-0665 or e-mail us at: info@chrysaliscorporation.com

Begin to improve your employee appraisal process today with the Janus Performance Management System. Order Volume 1, 2 and 3 and save $200.

Follow the link below to to download "Checklist for Setting Performance Objectives", a one page excerpt from the Janus Performance Management System:
<http://www.chrysaliscorporation.com/pdf/Janus_Samples/105_Checklist_for_Setting_Performance_Objectives.pdf>

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Contact Information:

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

To learn more about The Chrysalis Corporation, visit:
http://www.chrysaliscorporation.com