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How Searchlight measures Working Styles
Searchlight’s four types of behavioral data give a 360-degree view of who candidates and employees are — and how they’ll do on the job. Working styles alignment is one of the four types of behavioral data. We leverage Working Styles to evaluate candidates and create Talent Models in Searchlight.
“Working Styles is how organizations ‘do things’” Working Styles is consistent, observable patterns of behavior in organizations. This view elevates repeated behavior or habits as the core of culture and deemphasizes what people feel, think or believe. It also focuses our attention on the forces that shape behavior in organizations.
For this reason, we measure Working Styles alignment, which is defined as the degree to which an individual’s values match the values of the organization. For instance, imagine an organization has working styles defined by collaboration, taking risks, and giving direct feedback. An employee that also values collaboration, taking risks, and giving direct feedback has high cultural alignment while an employee that values self-reliance, predictability, and aversion to direct feedback has low cultural alignment.
Working Style Traits
We measure Working Styles across six universal dimensions based on academic research. These dimensions are pervasive, such that all organizations have these cultural values, whether they recognize it or not. Some companies rate differently on these dimensions than others, resulting in differentiated working styles.
These six Working Style Traits are:
Risk Propensity: Is the individual willing to experiment, move fast, and take risks, or do they tend to prefer predictable working conditions, following rules, and being careful?
Approach to Feedback: Does the individual confront conflict and provide feedback directly or do they prefer to avoid conflict?
Team Orientation: Does the individual work in collaborations with others and exhibit a team orientation, or does the individual prefer to work alone and exhibit a competitive orientation?
Outcomes Orientation: Does the individual favor working for an organization with high expectations of performance and achievement, or do they favor working for an organization that offers security of employment and aims to maximize employee wellbeing?
Customer Orientation: Does the individual prefer work that benefits customers or work that is enjoyable or intrinsically rewarding for the self?
Operating Altitude: Does the individual pay attention to details or is the individual a "big picture" thinker?
The example below is from our Team Analytics that aggregates how individuals measure across theses six dimensions in your organization.
How Searchlight uses Working Styles to Assess Candidates and Employees
We leverage these six dimensions of Working Styles to measure working styles alignment in candidates and employees. Working Styles is an essential input into defining our Match Score to determine how likely an individual will align to the necessary skills and cultural values to thrive in your organization.
To get a reliable and accurate assessment of the alignment, we take two separate approaches for candidates and employees:
For Candidates: We ask the individual and their prior managers, peers, and colleagues to answer a series of questions that rate the individual on the six fundamental dimensions. This helps measure how a candidate aligns to the working styles across teams in your organization.
For Employees: We ask the individual and their current manager to answer a series of questions that rate the individual on the six fundamental dimensions. This helps measure the working styles across teams in your organization.
For each of our six Working Styles dimensions, individuals will answer slider questions across two poles. To learn more about what these poles are for each culture dimension, see Working Styles Library. Based on how they answer these questions, we map their Working Style preference.
While the question above represents how a single Working Style trait is measured for an individual. In the below example, you can see how an individual's own Working Style preferences map to the organization's Working Style across all six dimensions.
Working Styles Library
For each of our six Working Style dimensions, individuals will lean across two poles. These poles are described below:
Dimension | Trait | Description |
Risk Propensity | Innovative | Willing to experiment, moves fast, quick to take advantage of opportunities, avoids existing procedures, and takes risks |
Risk Propensity | Structured | Follows existing procedures, predictable, moves slow to be careful, and is rules-oriented |
Results Orientation | Results Oriented | Prioritizes achieving business goals |
Results Orientation | Supportive | Prioritizes team members' growth and wellbeing |
Customer Orientation | Customer Oriented | Market driven, works to make the customer experience better |
Customer Orientation | Self Oriented | Follows intrinsic passions, works on tasks that promote self-improvement and enjoyment |
Team Orientation | Collaborative | Team oriented, cooperative, invites others to work together |
Team Orientation | Self Reliant | Prefers to work alone, individualistic |
Approach to Feedback | Conflict Forward | Confronts conflict directly, is hard driving, feedback oriented, even if it's at odds with their team |
Approach to Feedback | Conflict Preventative | Avoids conflict and direct feedback |
Operating Altitude | Detail Oriented | Focuses on details and tasks to be done, emphasizes quality and being precise |
Operating Altitude | Vision Oriented | Focuses on the "big picture" impact of the work |
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is Working Styles Alignment Important for Quality-of-Hire?
When employees are culturally aligned, there are immediate psychological benefits that influence day-to-day interactions with co-workers. Research by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill showed that cultural alignment helps co-workers:
Communicate more effectively. When co-workers share the same values, there is a reduced chance of them misunderstanding each other.
Predict each other’s behavior. Co-workers who hold shared values have similar motives and goals, promoting confidence in how others will act.
Like each other more. People like others who are similar to ourselves, giving credence to the statement that ‘birds of a feather flock together.’ Because co-workers with aligned values are more similar, they like each other more.
Feel more trust in the team. Because value alignment leads co-workers to agree what is acceptable and unacceptable behavior in a given situation, employees feel more trust that their co-workers will have their back when needed.
All of these day-to-day psychological benefits of value alignment – communication, predictability, liking, trust – lead to better outcomes that HR and People leaders care about. Research which reviewed over 172 distinct employee datasets found that when employees’ values are aligned with their organizations’, they perform better and are less likely to leave their roles. Thus, when organizations hire for value alignment, they hire more effective performers (resulting in a higher Quality of Hire score).
How does Searchlight Working Styles impact diversity and inclusion?
Our cultural alignment measure represents “equal opportunity” cultural values that are completely independent of working styles that can harm DEI. Hiring for cultural alignment is problematic when the organization’s working styles embodies a particular type of societal working styles. If the organization’s working styles welcomes diverse perspectives and aims to foster an inclusive space, then hiring for cultural alignment will bring in more people that also value diversity and inclusion.
Moreover, Searchlight uses data and advanced statistical techniques to understand which cultural preferences are essential for success (making a high Quality of Hire) at your organization. By connecting the cultural preferences of applicants (measured through references, those outside at organization) with new hire’s effectiveness in their role (measured through our Quality of Hire formula), we can understand which cultural preferences lead to high quality new hires. As a result, Searchlight removes cognitive biases from decision making, making it less likely that your organization evolves into an echo chamber of people only hiring those they like.
What are the benefits of using a standardized approach to measuring Working Styles?
The impact of using a standardized (versus non-standardized) Working Styles assessment is that standardization:
Enables benchmarking across organizations
Ensures survey questions are scientifically vetted with no adverse impact
Puts the responsibility on us (the software provider) to conduct the research to know which Working Styles questions to ask