How to Illuminate People Risks in Critical Changes and M&A?

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 12:25:00 +0200
Economics, Working life, Science, Business / economics, Finance

"To avoid people-related failures in transformations, M&A, and critical projects, those risks should be analyzed and false beliefs about the existing surveys should be corrected," writes Timo Järvinen, the founder of NayaDaya Analytics Inc.

According to McKinsey, "European talent is ready to walk out the door".

During this post-pandemic era, high levels of employee turnover and lack of skilled people are a fundamental risk for growth, competitiveness, and even survival. During transformations, post-merger integrations, and critical projects, companies become even more vulnerable to these people-related risks.

The worst thing companies can do is to keep on doing what they have always done. To be content with old habits can be deceiving. One of these old ways is the misunderstanding that employee experiences and behavior could be understood, and the people-related risks identified by only asking questions with the traditional one-dimensional response scales.

Comfort Zone Means Disengagement

To face the reality with their employees, there are three things companies should do: 1) identify the people risk levels, 2) reveal their root causes, and 3) find out the action points to minimize the employee turnover, quiet quitting, and decrease in productivity – and to engage and inspire people.

To unfold these crucial insights, one should not rely on the traditional tools and metrics. And why is that? Because in order to predict the people risk levels and their root causes, you need to be able to understand employee behavior, especially engagement and disengagement.

But wait a minute! Aren’t companies measuring engagement, for example with employee surveys and pulses? They have done that for years and...

My point exactly. Everyone has executed those surveys and pulses for years – and many believe that they are measuring engagement.

A glimpse of science: emotional and behavioral science tells us that the traditional survey scales, such as satisfaction, do not correlate with engagement and disengagement. If companies want to find out what is engaging or disengaging people, the traditional surveys are useless.

Employee engagement is not the same as feeling contentment – continuing as before and staying in the comfort zone. Engagement means dynamic actions, participating, and rolling up the sleeves when facing changes and challenges.

Unfortunately, satisfaction or even tendency to recommend one's employer do not indicate engagement. On the contrary, they correlate with passivity and even unwillingness to engage in anything new. This is particularly problematic during changes.

Power of Science: Visualizing Only Those Things that Have an Impact on Behavior

I have good news: new people risk analytics, which is based on a scientific emotional and behavioral intelligence and a Finnish-Swiss innovation, is able to build the deepest insight into people risks with the smallest effort one can imagine.

Traditionally, employers have executed long employee surveys 1-2 times a year or short pulse surveys quarterly, monthly, or even weekly. With the scientific method based on long-term emotions, companies can run very short surveys only 1-4 times a year, depending on the intensity of the change. For example, three times a year is enough during the post-merger integrations.

The process is agile. Only three intuitive questions produce the needed input for the analytics. These three questions cover emotions, their strength, and the reasons behind the emotions in the context of an employer, a transformation, an integration, or a project.

Thanks to the amazing power of emotions and science, and our unique algorithm, the output reveals things that have not been even asked for. The analytics visualizes exactly those fundamental things companies need to find out: 1) people risk levels, 2) their root causes, and 3) the action points to minimize the people-related risks, e.g. talent walking out their door or the quiet quitting.

Instead of merely knowing the levels of contentment, companies now will see where to focus actions to engage, motivate, and inspire people to not only stay in their jobs but to go the extra mile, to even become change-makers.

Intuitive Risk Maps for Multiple Group Companies, Integrations, and Projects

If a group has several, even tens or hundreds of companies, it can easily uncover and compare the people risk levels and their root causes in those business entities. Or if a company executes many acquisitions every year, it can compare the success of the different post-merger integrations based on their engaging or disengaging influence. The same applies for multiple projects.

This way companies are able to point out the business entities, integrations, or projects that are in crisis as well as to see the reasons behind each situation. They will also find out the entities, integrations, or projects with the high levels of positive employee engagement – and identify the reasons behind those successes.

As always, the coin has two sides: the people risk analytics helps companies 1) to avoid financial losses and losing growth opportunities, and 2) to take care of people and to build social sustainability. Both these aspects should be on focus if companies want to be among the winners in an ever-increasing competition for the best talent.

The writer of the blog post is CEO of NayaDaya Analytics Inc. Timo Järvinen.

Please Contact

Timo Järvinen, CEO, Co-founder
NayaDaya Analytics Inc.
Tel. +358 40 505 7745
timo.jarvinen@nayadaya.com

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