By Nabanita De, founder of Nabanita De Foundation, helping caregivers to return to the workforce after a career gap through free course, forum, community, podcast and book.
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Hogwarts – the school from the Harry Potter fiction universe, is renowned for sorting their incoming freshmen into one of the 4 houses: Gryffindor (signifying courage, strength, bravery, nerve, chivalry and leadership), Hufflepuff (signifying loyalty, inclusivity, fairness, justice), Ravenclaw (signifying wit, learning, logic, artistic, creative, intelligence, thirst for information) and Slytherin (signifying Ambition, Resourcefulness, Power, Determination, Self-Preservation and Cleverness). The sorting system achieves this classification by taking into account the individual’s primal values, motivation, potential, preferred learning/reward system and big life goals, determining the individual's day-to-day decision making. Once aligned to the right clique, the individual feels the sense of belonging, is better supported/understood by their peers and equipped with unique environments to support their core persona. For example, the house Ravenclaw’s common room requires a riddle instead of passwords to enter, supporting the house’s theme of inquisitive minds for learning and logical thinking. The popular fan-fiction characters rose to fame, on being sorted into the right houses. It's often a talked about topic, on how misclassification would have deterred these individuals from reaching their true potential and feeling lost at the organization.
Yet when it comes to joining new schools, organizations or looking for jobs in the real (muggle) world, people from different personality types, mental capacities (neurodiversity) and value systems, are pushed to fit into a generic system, evaluated solely on their education/work-experience strengths and are expected to figure it out on their own and thrive. According to Workingnation and Special Olympics, “6.5 million people in the US have autism, intellectual and/or development differences, with about 81 percent of this population working unpaid jobs or unemployed. 1–3 percent of the global population has an intellectual disability—as many as 200 million people.” A generalized metric for hiring and retention doesn’t work neither in wizarding, nor muggle worlds.
Here are some of the ways, a value-based evaluation system like “Hogwarts House sorting system” can help your organization, attract and retain talent:
1. Assign employees a potential values-based cliques (“houses”)
- Assigning new employees “a house” at their new employee orientation: Conducting an evaluation, to sort new employees into potential values-based cliques (houses), instantly gives them access to a targeted community and dedicated mentors, who share their intrinsic motivation, morals & strengths. Finding an instant fit within the company & house-specific insights, can boost employee morale and make it easier to navigate a career in the organization.
- Mapping houses to potential career paths early in career or people returning to workforce: Each career path requires unique strengths to succeed. For folks early in their careers or returning to the workforce, there is a lot of wiggle room as they are still figuring out the right fit. Based on previous organization employee success data, Implementing a values-based categorization can help suggest/place employees in careers, where they may actually feel fulfilled. For example, someone with Hufflepuff-like traits can be an excellent addition to Human Resources to attract & retain employees for their alignment for people-focused values vs someone with Slytherin-like traits may find fundraising or running a startup-like team a great fit.
- Using houses for team matching: Job roles with the same title can vastly differ based on the teams & its requirements in organizations. For example - a Software Engineer in a startup-like team would require someone who is willing to take bold bets, be ambitious/self-sufficient, wear multiple & move fast vs a Software Engineer in a team, maintaining legacy code would require someone, good with the details and prefers perfecting & maintaining a routine legacy system. Identifying the values-based clique of a potential employee, can be highly instrumental in the team matching process, thus reducing turnover costs & improving employee retention.
2. Creating more targeted common areas or morale/company events: Pre-pandemic, several tech companies have invested in common employee spaces and morale events, based on popular hobbies and interests. As the pandemic hit, it has been a challenge to engage various employees into generic virtual morale events, as it's an easy choice to rather spend time with close friends or family who share the same inculcated values system. Instead of enforcing employees to work from the office post-pandemic, “for better collaboration or company feel,” virtual dedicated morale events in intra-value-based cliques could be an alternative to boost participation & better alignment of employees with the organization, at the comfort of their homes.
3. Performance reviews & career growth catering more to the employee’s personal values: Performance reviews or criterions to be successful in a role can become more fulfilling and personal if the employee’s values and core beliefs are also met at the end of the year. For example, someone with a “Ravenclaw house like traits,” can find learning new tools, technologies and an increased learning curve more fulfilling in their role vs. someone with “Gryffindor house like traits” can find having a say on proposing and undertaking an ambitious project, a much more fulfilling year. Being able to incorporate more individualized performance benchmarks, identified from their “value-based cliques,” to be achieved and evaluated by the end of the year can help employees feel that employers are more invested in employee’s personal success and fulfillment.
4. Allowing employees to change houses or evaluate them every year: People grow and change based on timing, priorities and self-awareness. Being able to re-group into a different value based clique every year, just like how people are able to elect different benefits each year, could be the way this entire structure gets productionalized.
“18.9 million Americans exit the labor force each year with an average of 20% turnover. The cost of employee turnovers can be 1.5-2 times an employee salary”, says Financesonline turnover stats and Builtin. 4.4 million people quit their jobs in September and about 6.3 million people are currently unemployed in the US, according to the Dec Census.gov report and CNBC. An initial solid investment in devising new ways for employee satisfaction, retainment and good team matching, will save money in the long term.
To learn more on how Nabanita De Foundation is helping people in 93 countries, return to the workforce after a career gap & employers to attract talent, checkout our website, free course, (trainings, explore careers guide, mental health resources and more), podcast, forum, members site, upcoming cohort and book. Tell us what value based system or houses you would like to see/implement in your organizations, by sharing this article and tagging our social media pages : Linkedin, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
Reach out to the article writer and foundation founder, Nabanita De on her Website, Linkedin, Twitter and Instagram Page, to add your resources and voice to this nonprofit effort. Find all our volunteering opportunities here. Subscribe to our newsletter here.
This is a content marketing post from a Forbes EQ participant. Forbes brand contributors’ opinions are their own.
