Play to your strengths

Sally Bibb, Leader of the Strengths Practice at PA Consulting and author of three books on strengths discusses the strengths-based approach to employee upskilling and retention.

In 2023, over half of employees globally expressed some intent to leave their job, a clear majority admitted to ‘quiet quitting’, and employee stress reached record highs, according to research by Gallup. Whilst the Great Resignation may be over, HR and business leaders continue to grapple with serious challenges in creating and keeping a skilled workforce.

Humans are notorious for continuing to do the same thing, yet hoping for a different result. As the saying goes, nobody got fired for sticking to the same well-tried methods. Likewise, few would get sacked for keeping the same old HR processes, whether they work or not.

However, in the face of today’s persistently tight labour and workforce challenges, a lack of innovation in HR processes can seriously hold back employee engagement, upskilling, retention and satisfaction. That is why shifting the focus to a strengths-based approach – a method that is scientifically proven to work, but too often overlooked in HR – can be a game-changer where other methods have failed.

Tackling attrition, increasing customer service

Take one example: a manager responsible for the contact centre of a well-known financial services firm. The company had always enjoyed excellent customer service scores, but in recent years, staff departures had risen and with that the expertise and knowledge of experienced staff. Customer service, along with staff attrition and staff engagement, was tanking.

They’d tried everything to stem the turnover and had reached the conclusion that few people wanted to work in a contact centre, that local competition for a better known brand was insurmountable, and there was simply nothing they could do. Then they heard about Starbucks UK and the top NHS teaching hospitals seeing success in switching to a strengths approach and decided to try it for themselves.

What does ‘great’ look like?

They started in the toughest contact centre – their outbound one, where people ‘cold call’ customers all day to drum up business. Staff turnover was standing at more than 50%. They did a simple root-cause analysis and found that, at its heart, the problem was that the organisation didn’t understand what ‘great’ looked like. They were recruiting people with sales or customer service backgrounds. Some succeeded in the role, some didn’t. It was unclear why those who were successful did well and vice versa.

However, undertaking research into what exemplars look like – in other words, your top employees’ strengths – can make sense of this. Understanding people’s strong points, what energises them and what they’re naturally good at, means you can attract and select more people like them. This company went on to describe the kind of person who thrives in future job role adverts, which meant people who previously wouldn’t have considered the role recognised themselves in the description. This enabled the company to attract a new pool of previously unreached candidates.

In short, the new recruits were a good fit for the job, able to play to their strengths and therefore engaged – a lead indicator of performance. They completed the induction training quicker and were much more confident than their peers, outperforming colleagues hired using a competency approach in terms of numbers of calls made, sales and customer service scores.

Strength tests

Studies have shown that people who understand and use their strengths every day are 15% less likely to resign, 8% more productive, three times more likely to be successful, and six times more likely to engaged, happier and less stressed. Other research has found that choosing people based on strengths can lead to a 12% increase in customer satisfaction and 80% fewer complaints than traditional competency-based methods.

I’m sometimes asked why, in the face of evidence, relatively few organisations have adopted a strengths approach. The more pertinent question is perhaps why those who have switched to the strengths method have done so. In my experience, it’s down to the leaders. Leaders who preside over the introduction of strengths do so because they want an approach that radically improves things. They have often spoken to peers in other organisations who have seen a boost in engagement, upskilling and performance by introducing the approach, and won’t settle for the status quo if it’s not giving the results they want.

The consumer sector has long understood that gaining deep insight into customers is key to attracting and retaining them. It’s common sense – but has been slow to be applied to employment practises. So, what can HR leaders do to put a strengths-based approach into action?

Reasons for change

First, you need be clear about what you want to change and why. For example, do you want to retain workers in a certain role because of the cost and business disruption of high staff turnover? Or is your business being held back because you’re short of essential skills and strengths in your teams?

Secondly, HR leaders should start with a pilot area, just as the manager in the example did. He began by fixing the area with the highest staff turnover. Once they had implemented a strengths approach to selection there and seen the benefits, they knew what to do, had the support of broader management and the confidence to embrace strengths in other areas.

It’s also important to talk numbers. Few common HR practices are evidence-based, whereas the strengths approach is. It brings quantitative and qualitative results. When you embark on it, decide on the metrics you want to improve to create and keep a skilled workforce. Tracking improvement will give you and your colleagues confidence that things are improving the way you want them to.

Moreover, make sure you do it properly. Adding a few strengths questions to an interview won’t cut it. It’s necessary to really understand the strengths of those who are great at the role in question. Once you have a strengths profile, you can ‘speak’ to the right people in job adverts and ask the right questions at interview.

After the initiative has been rolled out, be sure to compare the results you get with strengths to previous approaches. Include in this comparison in the enthusiasm of the people who you train in the approach – they are normally excited, energised and committed to it once they understand it and see the impact.

Finally, keep it up. As with any change that makes a difference you have to stick at it. People have to know that it isn’t the latest fad. Gradually it becomes the fabric of how things are done. Before long people will wonder why they didn’t adopt a strengths approach sooner.