Our days at work are often filled with a series of tasks that complete for our attention including e-mail, phone calls, cell phones, and instant messaging.  Not surprisingly, recent data indicate that people working at computers change tpiawindows or check their e-mail almost 37 times an hour. Indeed, there are growing concerns about how this may impact brain functioning as well as increase work stress levels.

A related issue is whether this is a productive way to work. Fortunately, psychologists have started turning their attention to this question. Researchers at Stanford University compared individuals who were heavy vs. light multi-taskers. From the outset, my expectations were that people who multi-task often would become quite adept at working in this fashion. To the contrary, it was found that frequent multi-taskers were more easily distracted by irrelevant stimuli and actually did worse at multi-tasking than were their peers who did it less often.

If you are curious about your own abilities to attend and multi-task, here are samples of the tools used in the study to assess attention and ability to shift between tasks. 

Reid Klion

The program for the 2010 IPAC Conference has been posted. To be held July 18-21 in Newport Beach, CA, the meeting provides a prime opportunity to learn about the applied uses of personnel assessment tools in a friendly and collegial atmosphere. pan is proud to be a conference sponsor and several of us, including Nate Studebaker, Jocelyn Hays, and me, will be presenting.  Conference registration is still open if you are interested in attending.

Reid Klion

When it comes to human capital assessment, the vast majority of the tests that we use employ some variant of a multiple choice format where candidates are asked to select from response options that we provide. However, there is another type of test, called constructed response, which is primarily used in educational settings where the test taker is asked to provide a written response to a prompt. This approach has even come to be used in many of the standardized tests that have become quite popular in K-12 settings with the advent of the No Child Left Behind Act.

Apparently, All Souls College at Oxford University in the UK had been using a similar approach for admissions testing. Here, candidates were provided with a single word prompt (like “water,” “novelty,” or “death”) and then asked to write about it for 3 hours. It was decided recently, though, that the data obtained from the test were not as useful as previously thought, and this particular test format was dropped as a result. However, in case there are concerns that All Souls is lowering its standards,  candidates still need to write essay questions on topics which include:
•    Why is a leather jacket more acceptable than a fur coat?
•    Can computers think?
•    How European was Chaucer?

Reid Klion

Likely as an early sign of improvement in the unemployment situation, organizations are seeing an uptick in the number of employees who are quitting on their own accord. Indeed, February 2010 saw more workers resign from positions than were laid off, the first time this has happened in 15 months. One contributing factor may be that workers are feeling less and less satisfied in their current jobs due to workforce reductions. However, it is also likely that individuals who are separating voluntarily either have new positions in the offing or are at least optimistic about their ability to find a new job in short order. On an anecdotal basis, friends who work in the recruiting industry report a very high level of pent-up demand of individuals who are quite anxious to enter the job market once they sense an upturn in hiring. Citing several months of very little job movement, they expect a groundswell of activity once things improve even marginally.

Reid Klion

I have blogged and presented several times on unproctored internet testing (UIT). As most are familiar, it can be a powerful tool but it also needs to be done in a way that mitigates the risks  inherent in having an individual complete a test without supervision. Here is a situation where Transport Canada wanted to ensure that powerboat operators were aware of the basics of watercraft safety. Apparently, anyone wanting to obtain the required “proof of competency” card needed to complete an unproctored online test. To facilitate access, a number of companies were sanctioned to provide the test but many didn’t follow prescribed guidelines in doing so. Unfortunately, there were also major security issues and answers to the questions were widely available on the internet. Additionally, while verification can always be an issue with UIT, matters were made worse from an enforcement perspective because photographs do not appear on the competency cards, and there is not a central registry of individuals who passed. As a result, a number of individuals have criticized the program as having little value. While officials do acknowledge the need for improvement, they also believe that the program has increased overall safety knowledge amongst boaters.

Reid Klion

I recently came across an interesting article about negative employee reactions to performance reviews (and some of the comments are a treat in and of themselves). On the one hand, when employee reviews are handled poorly, they can definitely have a negative effect. On the other, it is difficult for anyone to improve at what they do, no matter what the situation, if they don’t get accurate feedback—both positive and negative—on how they are doing.

This issue of not having good performance data often becomes evident when we are asked to validate an assessment. The basic strategy that we use is usually one of trying to see how well various test scores can predict how employees do on the job. However, a frequent situation is that organizations may only use overall performance ratings which provide no information about an individual’s specific strengths and weakness. Furthermore, it is often the case that employee performance data provide little basis to differentiate between employees either. (The prototypic “bad” scenario is one in which 15% of employees are rated as “exceed expectations,” 85% are seen as “meets expectations, and 5% “need improvement”-- and this is the only employee performance data that exists.) If this is the case, unless we ask supervisors to complete a more comprehensive evaluation that looks at several aspects of job performance, it is virtually impossible to learn how well an assessment program is working. In a similar vein, if employers fail to provide specific and meaningful performance evaluations, it is difficult for employees to know what they need to do in order to get better at doing their jobs.

Reid Klion

Most everyone who works in HR is aware that under the Americans with Disabilities Act, employers need to make reasonable accommodations for individuals who happen to have a disability. For example, I once had a blind co-worker who had a “reader” provided by our employer to help him with work tasks that required sight. In the world of testing, providing reasonable accommodations often involves things such as permitting extended testing time for persons with a  learning disability or attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. In these and most other cases, the accommodations can be relatively simple to identify and provide.

Unfortunately, things don’t always go as planned. Here is an interesting case about a workplace accommodation for an individual who developed a food allergy to paprika. Her reaction is sufficiently severe to induce anaphylactic shock and can even be triggered by the aroma of co-workers’ food. As a safeguard, the employee obtained a service dog at her own expense that was specially trained to detect paprika. Unfortunately, upon bringing the dog to work, one of her co-workers had an asthma attack due to dog allergies. There is now a dispute with the city about how it handled the situation involving the needs of both employees.

Reid Klion

A while ago, I blogged about the growth of “boot camps” for pre-school admissions tests but there now seems a growing backlash against the use of standardized testing programs for the kindergarten set. While the agency which sponsors the exam indicates that test scores have stayed stable, there are concerns about the validity of the test due to the growth in popularity of prep classes.  Also, some schools have become concerned about the importance which has been placed on the testing program itself. However, it seems that these issues will continue for some time given the competition for placement in prestigious elementary schools in Manhattan and the overall social and cultural atmosphere. As one mother says: “We’re in a competitive city,” she said. “People want their kids to excel, and this is a differentiating factor. You can help.”

Reid Klion

Virtually anyone who has been in the position of interviewing job applicants is aware of the importance of not asking questions that may lead to discrimination on the basis of factors such race, age, and national origin. Additionally, like any sort of pre-employment assessment, interviews must pertain to job requirements and the applicant’s ability to do the job. As such, I was surprised to hear recent  reports about NFL teams asking one potential players if he was gay and another if his mother (who had been arrested previously on drug charges) was a prostitute.

Here is a recent article by a sports attorney on this very issue who makes a number of interesting points. One is that pre-draft interviews technically might not be considered to be pre-employment interviews because drafting a player only gives a team the right to negotiate to hire him. As a result, the rules regarding pre-employment interviews may not pertain. Also, while some states do prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, it is not forbidden by federal law. Thus, not hiring someone because of sexual orientation may be illegal in some states but not others.

Reid Klion

Emotional intelligence (EI) is a topic that has garnered substantial interest over the past several years, especially in the business literature. It should be noted that EI has not been without its critics due to concerns about how the concept itself has not been well-defined and the fact that several measures which purport to measure it are not necessarily well-correlated with each other.

A recent study looked at how well measures of EI might be able to predict work functioning. Some of the interesting findings were that personality and performance-based measures of EI are not highly correlated with each other, that EI is more highly correlated with measures of personality than overall intellectual functioning (which argues against the proposition that EI is actually a form of intelligence), and that measures of EI contribute little new information in terms of predicting job performance after personality and intelligence are accounted for. This is not necessarily to say that measures of EI are not useful, especially in coaching or in a developmental context. However, since EI tends to have such a substantial overlap with measures of personality, it often adds little new information in selection settings. Additionally, since the pattern of personality traits which predict job success typically will vary from position to position, measures of EI, which are comprised of an agglomeration of personality traits, may not be particularly useful when applied across a diverse set of jobs simply because the requirements for those jobs may differ rather substantially. Thus, a high level of EI may predict performance in one job type but not another.

Reid Klion