Faye Mell, HR Business Partner at Aspen Healthcare

The introduction of any new system to an organisation is often viewed with dread by those involved. The extra effort required, on top of the existing workload and administration, along with the potentially long wait for any benefits to kick in often means such projects go on the back burner.

This is a common complaint by people looking at introducing personality profiling into their HR practices too. However Aspen Healthcare is one company that has found that introducing it was simple, and the benefits were felt by people using it across the organisation immediately.

Aspen Healthcare is the owner and operator of four highly regarded private acute hospitals, one cancer centre and three ambulatory day surgery centres. Medical services provided range from outpatient clinics and diagnostic screening to complex surgery and specialised cancer treatments.

Faye Mell, HR Business Partner at Aspen Healthcare, was in charge of introducing the Profiles4Care profiling service to the expansive organisation and has already trialled the service in both a team building exercise and in a senior executive level recruitment project with great success.

“What has impressed me straight away is how simple it is to administer the system,” explained Faye Mell. “Once I send someone an email with the link to the profiler, it only takes someone eight minutes or less to complete the questionnaire and I have their profile report in the control room immediately. Even for people who are extremely busy, finding a maximum of eight minutes is possible and I can send them their report to read instantly.”

Initially Faye used the profiling tool at a teambuilding exercise to evaluate its accuracy and as an opportunity for the team to share their own thoughts on the reports.

“Everyone was impressed by how accurate the reports were and, interestingly, in some case where we thought someone’s report wasn’t a true representation of them, when we asked them they said it was. They explained how they had consciously adapted their approach to suit the requirements of their role, but the profiler had identified their natural preferences. We spent some very effective time sharing and discussing the details and I’m glad to say we had a very balanced team with people able to call on others’ individual strengths,” recounted Faye.Initially Faye used the profiling tool at a teambuilding exercise to evaluate its accuracy and as an opportunity for the team to share their own thoughts on the reports.

Faye also used the tool as part of senior level executive recruitment project and found similarly positive results in terms of the impact it had on the process.

“With the seniority of the posts we were interviewing for, the importance of getting it right means that we often have specialists who do not have an HR background involved in the interviews. As this is not their main job the addition of the profile reports, and in particular the questions provided in them for the interviews, were extremely helpful. They all found that little bit of additional information made a difference to them and gave them more confidence and less reliance on their ‘gut feel’.

With the success of both trials Fay has reported that requests to use the tool are starting to come in thick and fast; “word of mouth on the merits of the system are spreading fast,” explained Faye. “The managers in the teambuilding exercise are requesting it for their staff training, development and appraisals, and the company’s most senior management have also asked for the link to the profiler so they can have a peek too. It’s definitely something we’ll be taking forward as the speed and simplicity of use are matched by its accuracy and usefulness.”