Question

How would you suggested lisa try to confirm that it is indeed the testing and not some other change that accounts for the improved performance.

Senario

Improving Performance at the Hotel Paris: The New Employee Testing Program The Hotel Paris's competitive strategy is "To use superior guest service to differentiate the Hotel Paris properties, and to thereby increase the length of stay and return rate of guests. and thus boost revenues and profitability.HR manaser Lisa Cruz must now formulate functional policies and activities that support this competitive strategy and boost performance by cliciting the required employee behaviors and competencies. As she considered what to do next, Lisa Cruz, the Hotel Paris's HR director, knew that employee selection had to play a role. The Hotel Paris currently had an informal screening process in which local hotel managers obtained application forms, interviewed applicants, and checked their references However, a pilot project using an employment test for service people at the Chicago hotel had produced startling results Lisa found consistent, significant relationships between test performance and a range of employee competencies and behaviors such as speed of check-in/out, employee turnover. and percentage of calls answered with the required greeting She knew that such employee capabilities and behaviors translated into the improved guest service performance the Hotel Paris needed to execute its strategy. She therefore had to decide what selection procedures would be best. Lisa's team, working with an industrial psychologist, designs a test hattery that they believe will produce the sorts of high- morale, patient, people-oriented employees they are looking for. It includes a preliminary, computerized test in which applicants for the positions of front desk clerk, door person, assistant manager, and security guard must deal with an apparently irate guest; a work sample in which front desk clerk candidates spend 10 minutes processing an incoming "guest", a personality test aimed at weeding out applicants who lack emotional stability, the Wonderlic test of mental ability: and the Phase Il Profile for assessing candidate honesty. Their subsequent validity analysis shows that scores on the test batteries predict scores on the hotel's employee capabilities and behavior metrics. A second analysis confirmed that, as the percentage of employees hired after testing rose, so too did the hotel's employee capabilities and behaviors scores, for instance (see the strategy map), in terms or speed of check-in/out, and the percent of guests receiving the Hotel Paris required greeting Lisa and the CFO also found other measurable improvements apparently resulting from the new testing process. For example, it took less time to fill an open position, and cost per hire diminished, so the HR department became more efficient. The new testing program thus did not only contribute to the hotel's performance by improving employee capabilities and behaviors. It also did so by directly improving profit margins and profits.

Answer 1

To confirm that it is indeed the testing and not some other change that accounts for the improved performance, Lisa needs to conduct a comparative analysis. In the comparative analysis, the performance of the employees as well as different departments before the tests were implemented and after the tests were incorporated in the business model. This will give a clear detection of whether the changes were an attribute of the incorporation of tests or not. Lisa can also assess the overall company performance before and after the tests were incorporated. This way, Lisa can come up with conclusive results of the overall impact of the incorporation of tests in the company.