How To Communicate Your Assessment Strategy

Assessments are an important part of any HR toolkit. The challenge with assessments though it that the value we get from them varies to a huge degree based on how well they are used. A big part of fully implementing any assessment tool is communication across the organization. HR can’t be the only one who holds the assessment process if we want to get full value from these tools. The tricky part of this is that we need to educate and involve different people in the organization in different ways. Below, I’m going to give you some tips and resources to help you more effectively implement and imbed McQuaig assessments within your organization. There are 4 main groups of people we need to educate and inform:

#1: Senior Management and the Executive Team

Why they need to get involved: Assessments are used to make important people decisions throughout an organization. As such, it’s essential that buy-in is created through education.

What do they need to know?: We can’t get too granular with this group usually. It’s usually best to keep it high level. This group cares about ROI. They need the business case for assessments. Your executive team needs to know why assessments are important, how they are used, and how they add value. McQuaig recently publish a great ebook on just this topic! Get it here

# 2: The HR and Recruitment Team

Why they need to get involved: This one seems pretty obvious – HR, usually, holds this process. They need to be involved.

What they need to know: These people need to be your company’s resident experts in regards to the assessment tool you are using. At McQuaig, your dedicated Success Manager will always be happy to assist you, but you need some experts on site. We highly recommend that you have an implementation meeting with your Success Manager to determine the best strategy for educating this group. Even organizations who have been using our tools for years often find value in an implementation meeting. It is also highly recommended that your resident McQuaig experts attend our McQuaig Certification workshop. These workshops are held both publically and privately. We also host free webinars on a regular basis that your resident experts would likely find helpful. You can find more information on these events here

#3: People Leaders

Why they need to get involved: If you think about how McQuaig can add value to your organization, it starts with job profiling and recruitment. These are usually activities that HR is involved in, which is great because you’ve got your resident experts guiding the process! But what happens once an offer is made? What about existing staff? If your people leaders aren’t involved, you’re missing out on a lot of value that assessment tools can provide. Once we hire someone, it would be a real shame if their Word Survey was filed away, never to be looked at again.

What they need to know: Your McQuaig resource consultant can help you build your customized strategy to involve your people leaders. In some cases, it makes sense for some of them to attend out Certification workshops. In other cases a different approach makes more sense. All McQuaig memberships include webinar support. Often a good first step is to host an introductory webinar to cover the basics. What are assessments? Why are we using them? How do they add value? And how do I use them? These are some of the questions we’ll answer in that introduction. A team effectiveness workshop with people managers can also be quite impactful. Not only will they learn more about themselves and their colleagues, but they will be given practical strategies to use McQuaig with their teams to manage, coach and develop. McQuaig offers 2 private workshops targeted at people leaders: Team Effectiveness and Interviewing and selecting Winning Talent.

#4: All employees

Why they need to get involved: The involvement of most other employees is less than the other 3 groups we covered. What is important for this group is communication. To make the most out of assessment tools, we need to make sure that all employees feel comfortable with the tools. They need to know that the assessments are not used as an evaluation tool, but rather as a tool to aid their productivity, development and success.

What they need to know: This can vary from organization to organization – get in touch with your resource consultant if you would like assistance developing a customized communication strategy. What is important here is that we communicate early on why assessments are used and how they will be impacted (for example, we might be requesting that they all take a Word Survey so we can start using the Self Development tool). McQuaig has a number of email communication templates available to you that might help you get the word out. Employees need to know that there is no right or wrong when it comes to personality. We all have what we have and the point of using assessments is to aid in self awareness and development – so we can develop our strengths and mitigate our weaknesses. Sharing Word Survey results internally can also have a huge impact on team performance. Understanding ourselves is important, but once we also understand those around us, productivity can really soar. I have some clients, in fact, that make all employee results accessible to anyone and they have seen huge success with this. If this is the sort of thing you might consider, be sure to check in with your resource consultant for advice on how to guide the process.

We all know that assessments can add great value to our organizations. But there is an important caveat – they must be used properly! Communication throughout the organization is integral to gaining maximum value so make sure you have a plan of attack regarding your communication strategy, and let us know how we can help!