On Aon Podcast: Methodology to Predict Employee Performance for the LPGA

On Aon Podcast: Methodology to Predict Employee Performance for the LPGA
Workforce Resilience

07 of 09

This insight is part 07 of 09 in this Collection.

August 5, 2023 18 mins

On Aon Podcast: Methodology to Predict Employee Performance for the LPGA

Podcast

Episode 52: Our Aon experts and guests discuss how players’ personality traits, future potential and how high-performing employees can help increase an organization’s resilience – based on findings from Aon’s recent Epson Tour and LPGA Tour study.

Key Takeaways
  1. Aon’s assessments can help businesses across industries identify their potential for success.
  2. This episode discusses the value of taking a quantitative approach to making better workforce decisions.
  3. The key components of supporting athletes’ data-driven strengths are discussed during this episode.

Taylor Strick:

Hello, my name is Taylor Strick. I've been a colleague at Aon for seven years and currently serve as the firm's Global Partnerships Leader, bringing our partnerships with the LPGA Tour, PGA TOUR and Ryder Cup to life. As pressure and competition continue to mount for businesses across the globe, attracting and retaining the right talent continues to be a top priority. But how can leaders make the right recruitment and promotion decisions to future-proof their business? In today's podcast, we'll explore the correlations between personality traits and future potential and how high-performing employees can help increase an organization's resilience. Using findings from a recent case study conducted with our partners at the LPGA Tour, we'll shed some light on how companies can build a stronger talent pipeline by creating success profiles, personality traits and behaviors that are linked to high performance.

With me today are Michael Burke and Blake Henderson. Michael has been at Aon since 2004 and currently serves as Aon’s CEO of Human Capital Solutions, and Blake is a Senior Director of Athlete Policy and Development for the LPGA Tour. Welcome to you both and thank you so much for joining us. To start the discussion. I want to just take a moment to provide a little bit of background and color on why I think that today's session is going to be so exciting.

As you think about collaboration, this is a perfect example from my perspective of exactly what that means, where you had folks from marketing partnerships and our business solutions team at Aon coming together to deliver real impact for our partners at the LPGA, which I think is so exciting and I can't wait to get into some of the details. But Blake, I want to just start with you and level set the partnership to some extent. We've obviously been working on this case study, which is relatively recent, but our organizations have been working together really since 2019. So, if you wouldn't mind, I'd love to just take a moment to have you share a little bit of background on our partnership and, specifically, the Aon Risk Reward Challenge.

Blake Henderson:

Yeah, absolutely. As you mentioned, in 2019, we began to partner on the Aon Risk Reward Challenge, a season-long competition across both the LPGA Tour and PGA TOUR, which helps to highlight golf's best decision makers as they compete on the most challenging holes on tour. Each year, the player on both the PGA TOUR and LPGA with the lowest average score par over the course of the season wins the challenge and they take home the Aon Trophy and an equal $1 million prize. It's a really great opportunity for our players and really speaks to Aon's commitment to equity. Really exciting to see even now with the relationship with the Human Capital division of Aon, that we are now bringing that support off the course as well. So, we're now recognizing great performances on the course and supporting our athletes off the course.

Taylor Strick:

That's awesome. Thank you, Blake. And yeah, it's such a point of pride I think for our firm to partner with the LPGA. I think our colleagues across the world have really enjoyed following the challenge year over year and seeing which players from both tours take home that trophy on an annual basis and it's been so much fun to bring to life. Appreciate your background on that.

Michael, I want to just kick things off with you, actually. I briefly alluded to it, but can you talk a little bit about the case study that we recently conducted with the LPGA Tour team and the Epson Tour players, and give a little bit more color on how the idea of working together off the field, as Blake mentioned, really came to life?

Michael Burke:

Sure, thank you for having me here today. The connections and the differences I think between sport and business are really fascinating for me, and I think fascinating for most people. Motivating a team where you know everybody intimately is very different for a large-scale organization, but there are many things that each can learn from one another, and we were really trying to explore some of those areas. So, as Blake had mentioned, we were already working with the LPGA on the Risk Reward initiative, but we wanted to really go a little deeper to try and help the LPGA and the athletes that it represents to partner and learn from each other.

And we knew that there was a focus on elite performance, and there's a lot of effort on that last 5 percent in elite sport, but what perhaps there's a little less focus on is around things like mental resilience, around dropout rates, diversity. So, we managed to put together a program with Blake and the team's help, which actually explored, how can we think about our performance, but how can we also take into account the mental strain that that puts on people? What are they going to do post their career? What are they going to do if they don't make the cut? These kind of questions I think are probably a little less explored than perhaps some of the last 5 percent questions. So, it was great to be able to cover both of those areas.

Taylor Strick:

Yeah, perfect. And Blake, anything additional to add from your side?

Blake Henderson:

I think immediately preceding our partnership and work in this space, we were actively looking for a data-driven solution to bring those analytics and insights to our players to drive their development programming. And that's exactly what's been provided to us. We're super fortunate to be able to provide this super engaging program associated resources and findings to our players to help expedite their development process.

Taylor Strick:

And I remember, Blake, I remember you saying that in one of our first conversations, you said, intuitively, we kind of know what we need to be doing, or we know where we want to go, but it would be really instrumental for us to have some of that data-backed information to basically justify some of the decisions and some of the thinking that you guys already had.

Blake Henderson:

Exactly. And this really helps to validate a lot of our previous assumptions that we had in this space about the key components of athlete development, how to best support our players. What's also reassuring for our players is this helps for them to have a firm understanding of their true strengths and areas of improvement. Doing some additional research in this space, we often find that players, and people in general, they have some kind of idea of what their strengths are, but they have really no idea what their true weaknesses are. These assumptions in both cases are often a little off base. So, it really allows us to be able to narrow in and focus on their true strengths, abilities and areas of development, and for us to be able to really provide the specific resources for them to help close gaps in those areas.

Taylor Strick:

Perfect. Michael, I want to come back to you for just a second. I mean, obviously we're talking today about utilizing these assessments for a professional sports organization in the LPGA, but it feels like this approach could be applied successfully across a variety of industries and organizations. Can you just explain a little bit more about Aon's assessments and how they can help businesses identify employee's potential for success?

Michael Burke:

Sure. I'd probably start by saying sometimes, these assessment tests have got a dark past. They have advanced significantly in the last few years. They can feel a little intrusive and a little binary sometimes, but we have a world-class suite of assessments, and they're supported by data. They're mobile-enabled, they're gamified, they're very flexible, they're quick. And in this case, the first step was to use a combination of these gamified tests to understand the skills and the behaviors that each of us exhibit.

Yeah, we've worked with millions of participants over many years to build this really extensive database of skills. We work with sports companies and small startup firms, and you can apply these in different ways across the full spectrum of types of organizations and bodies. You'll be glad to know that if you ever got on an airplane and you look left, it's highly likely that the pilot that's sitting there was assessed by us for suitability.

And that suitability is not just their technical ability; it's how they cope with stress and strain, how they deal with customers. So, there are lots of things that we can test for, and its combinations of those with outcomes and trying to get the correlation, the causal correlations, between them. And we use those tests along with other data. So, there's a lot of data already that exists in the LPGA around physical performance, background history, success profiles that we build. So, we work collaboratively to try and build up those success profiles. And this is just one extra element of data. I want to kind of stress that. This is one piece in the puzzle. It's not a silver bullet answer for everything. It's one important piece.

And these success profiles are really helpful, and not just in terms of thinking about our performance. As I said, we can look for things like wellbeing and resilience and try and make sure that we're not putting undue pressure. I mean, I'm sure Blake, you'd observe many times the difference between the win and the loss in those tournaments is one or two shots, and they're always pressure shots when you're under huge strain and stress. So, it's infrequently the actual physical attributes, and quite often the mental attributes that'll make the difference. So, trying to bring that to bear for corporations and for sports bodies I think is really exciting.

Taylor Strick:

It is. Michael, correct me if I'm maybe over oversimplifying, but in my mind, I mean essentially what we're talking about is using a more kind of quantitative approach to making better workforce decisions and perhaps eliminating for some of our clients the risk that inherently just exists when you're thinking about talent acquisition.

Michael Burke:

Yeah, I mean, in many cases, people have gone to historic practices, which means you advertise in the same place, you look for certain backgrounds of experience and education, et cetera. Whereas if you use assessments, you can open the aperture much wider, you can get a much more diverse pool. We've been looking at how do we get people from different backgrounds into golf? How do we get them into corporations? How do we match young people with roles that perhaps they don't even know exist at this point, the way they've been teaching at school? They don't even know what those roles are. So, trying to use matching technology with assessments, there are some really exciting changes in this space that I think people would be surprised, pleasantly surprised, at how they're being applied in a very positive way.

Taylor Strick:

Absolutely agree. And Blake, I want to just come back to you for a moment. You mentioned that the insights from the assessments supported that the LPGA's kind of initial thinking about where you should take the player development and how you should be thinking about this. Can you share just a little bit more about how you guys are currently leveraging the results of the insights that you've gotten from the study today?

Blake Henderson:

Yeah, the Aon Player Performance Program, if you talk to anybody I work with they say I talk about this all the time because it's our best program that we have because it not only presents that data-driven approach that we talked about, but it helps to connect all of our associated programs and resources within our athlete development program. What we do is we have, at the LPGA through our athlete development program, we have a holistic data-driven and personalized approach to athlete development. And the Aon Player Performance Program is now integral to our entire program. It's really helped us to streamline our program and enhance our overall athlete experience. As soon as a player earns her status on either the Epson or LPGA Tour, she completes this assessment and quickly meets with our development team to review the results found in the personalized player report.

This report contains an explanation of the success profile and compares this player's results against our top performers in each one of the success characteristics. The ones that have been particularly identified for our top female professional athletes include ambition, awareness, big picture thinking, composure, consistent, independent and positivity. And the report provides suggestions to these resources that we have within our development program to enhance these areas of improvement. And we worked really hard to match our existing program with each one of those characteristics that I just mentioned.

The player then works with our team to craft this personalized athlete development action plan, which really helps to drive their development programming both on and off the golf course. Aon's really assisted players and helped to identify their strengths and areas of improvement. It's ultimately going to lead to expediting their transition process to the LPGA and just to professional golf in general and will help to allow players to capitalize on their peak earnings.

Taylor Strick:

It's so interesting, and I think for me, I feel like the most compelling maybe element of this whole thing is there seems to be really definitive benefits for both the players obviously, but also for the LPGA as an organization. And I think just keeping with that theme, we know that high-performing employees and strong talent pipelines increase an organization's resilience. Blake, how would you say this program has helped increase the LPGA's resilience maybe more holistically?

Blake Henderson:

For sure. I think going through it and really taking a step back and looking at this question and thinking about it more in depth, it's helping our players to get the most out of their talents and abilities. It is our main focus at the LPGA and specifically our development team. And often when we sometimes look at our new players that are coming to our tour, whether it be new professionals, new touring professionals, rookies on either the Epson Tour or the LPGA, I think sometimes the results on course can lag based on their capacity that they have as a player. And by better understanding their strengths and areas and improvements of players, we can really better equip them to achieve success, which is ultimately going to help the tour create a really much stronger and more robust pipeline of talent to better serve the LPGA and the Epson Tour. The more stories we can tell on a daily basis, on a weekly basis outside, of our just top five players in the world, that benefits everybody, the players and the tour as a whole.

Taylor Strick:

Totally agree. And I think, selfishly as a fan, that's one of my biggest takeaways is it's obviously great to see this program helping to strengthen the LPGA and kind of future-proof for the long term, but maybe more importantly, just exciting to see that as a fan and someone who watches the LPGA on a regular basis, we're going to continue to see really strong, really competitive talent continue to kind of rise through the ranks. And I think part of that is because of the approach that you are taking and that kind of innovative approach to making sure that you have the right talent and they're set up appropriately within your organization. So, huge kudos to you and the team. And Michael, from your perspective, what can businesses learn from this kind of innovative approach that the LPGA is taking in the space?

Michael Burke:

So, I think just going back to the basics. On performance, over the course of the season on that Epson Tour, we’re able to predict the players who would score better, and hence, as Blake was saying, optimize their earnings. But way beyond that, I think it's important to know is that note that it's just not one size fits all in the way that we put these programs together. A data-driven approach to understand and develop and attract and retain and maintain and sustain a workforce is really important. And making better decisions around that can have a profound impact on an organization and the individuals within that organization. So, while some of those personality traits appear to be good and bad, they're really not. There are team dynamics where you need to mix different combinations together and the combinations have a compounding impact. So, it's really trying to think about this in a much more holistic way than just an intrusive, good or bad test.

It's really trying to think about combining these components together to give you proper data to try and make more informed decisions. And I'm passionate about us helping not just those elite players, but also there are some fantastic talents on that tour that may not make the cut that would make incredible leaders in organizations and those organizations would be desperate to get their arms around that kind of talent. So, I think there's much more that we can do with Blake and the team really to try and connect and help people understand what are the options for them, what are those career paths.

Increasingly, Taylor, we're seeing people not go into one role, be that I am a golfer, I am a leader, I am a salesperson, and stay there for the rest of their career. They're changing much more frequently, and some of these tools just make that transition much easier. And we find when people really find their slot, that's when they're happy, resilient and they're more likely to outperform. So, it is really using these and embracing them much more than the very binary way that I think maybe individual components were used in the past.

Taylor Strick:

Yeah, absolutely. I think it's that type of broader thinking that I think could apply to any industry or any organization because it kind of underpins that the LPGA has proven that this is a framework that can work, but the application and how it can be applied, it's kind of agnostic of industry. It feels like it could work for a lot of different folks if they're open to maybe thinking about making talent decisions a bit differently than they have historically.

Michael Burke:

And as I say, it could make or break individuals and organizations. So, it's really crucial that we educate people on the potential that's there to use these in a different way, these tools, than they perhaps have been used in the past.

Taylor Strick:

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I feel like this is a topic that I think the three of us could chat for a long while, but I'm just conscious of the time and I know we need to wrap up relatively soon. But before we do, just a friendly reminder that the new season of the LPGA Tour is fully underway, as is the Aon Risk Reward Challenge. So, I encourage everybody to tune in. And Blake, before I let you go, anything in particular from your standpoint that we should be on the lookout for this season?

Blake Henderson:

There's never been a better time to get involved in women's professional golf. We are having so many great storylines. Just last week had a rookie win on our tour out in Hawaii. Again, when we talk about predicting player performance, she was one of those top players that performed very well on our Epson Tour assessment and case study that we did last year. So, again, very early indicator of great success. As we're recording, we're starting our first round of the Chevron Championship. We're creating new history in a new venue, new city. Over the course of the season, we're going to play for a record-breaking over a hundred million dollar in total proceeds. We're going to go to some traditional and classic venues such as Pebble Beach and Baltusrol and bringing back some really exciting team events such as International Crown. And we have a Solheim Cup this year at USA versus Europe. So, really exciting schedule and really, really excited to see how it unfolds.

Taylor Strick:

Awesome. Thank you so much, Blake. I appreciate it. That is our show for today. Blake, Michael, thank you so much for being here. We appreciate you taking the time to share some really important and really interesting insights. For those of us who are listening, thank you so much and please be on the lookout for the next episode of On Aon, which is coming soon.

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