Feature insight - talent management
“others deem the whole workforce to be talent and adopt an ‘inclusive’ approach to development, engagement, career paths, retention and deployment for all employees.” The stages and processes When combined with a succession planning exercise, talent management will identify business critical roles and people within the organisation. The early identification of people with potential to fill these roles, should they become vacant, will help to mitigate the risk of leaving these roles unfilled for too long, insists Weeks. “Consideration should be given to skills and knowledge required of talented people to meet future strategic plans and how individuals can be developed over the short- and long-term to close the gaps in experience”, she says. According to Weeks, the stages of talent management should include: ● understanding strategy and future business needs ● identifying business critical positions ● analysing the gaps, people and positions ● defining capabilities ● identifying internal potentially talented individuals, and ● providing focused development for these individuals. Hoover agrees that the process is about engaging the employee across the full life cycle, from the moment a candidate is sourced to the time they retire. “Talent management is about managing talent at each of the touchpoints an employee has – the candidate experience, on-boarding, developing, assessing, rewarding and growing”, she adds. Developing a strategy When developing a strategy, Hoover advises starting with the question: what does the organisation need to achieve from its people to achieve the business priorities? “If it’s about growth through innovation, you look at each touchpoint along the lifecycle to determine what is in place and what needs to be adjusted to enable more ‘growth through innovation’”, she says. “HR can do this brilliantly – we translate business strategy into people strategy.” Weeks believes HR professionals have a central role to play in providing support and guidance in the design, development and implementation of a talent management strategy. “The strategy should be aligned to meet future and immediate strategic
objectives but should also consider challenges in attracting, recruiting, developing and retaining talented people. Fairness and consistency must be applied to all talent management processes to encompass diversity and inclusion considerations”, she adds. ...must carefully consider succession plans for themselves and key roles... Leaders must also remember the importance of working to identify and develop talent in the first place and must carefully consider succession plans for themselves and key roles in their team. “In this way talent management is multi-faceted and something that must be carefully planned for at every stage of the employee journey”, Jones says. To train and develop their workforce, employers are increasingly looking to initiatives such as the apprenticeship levy as a key opportunity to invest in their people. With a wide range of apprenticeships now available for people of every level, and a suite of management apprenticeships spanning from team leader to senior leaders’ masters apprenticeships, Woodman describes them as “a key route to boost productivity and fill the UK’s productivity gap”. Key challenges Businesses that are keen to develop their strategies should be mindful that they may need to re-position the mind-sets of any managers involved so that they understand that talent is owned by the business, rather than individuals. It is also vital that organisations ensure they have a clear and unified definition of what ‘potential’ means for their business. “If this isn’t clearly outlined, subjective definitions will be assumed subject to own definitions and will skew the results of any data capture”, warns Weeks. She further believes that, with organisations adopting flatter structures, the opportunity to develop career paths vertically is in decline. Weeks adds: “The challenge is for talent practitioners to creatively construct opportunities that offer different learning capability via lateral or horizontal moves that build on knowledge and experiences across
the business.” Additionally, if your talent management strategy and programmes are not focused on outcomes such as business performance, senior leaders will have a difficult time buying into it. “As HR practitioners, we need to start using our analytical capabilities to more effectively measure what we deliver, and the return on investment that this brings to the organisation in the form of better business performance”, advises Hoover. She further warns that programme redesigns are ‘just a fad’ if employers don’t think through the design principles and how the new design will be integrated. They must determine what end or objective needs to be achieved – so often, they just want to implement best practice. “Well, that’s nice but how does that truly fit with what your organisation’s needs? And what is ‘best practice’? Just because one organisation is doing something, it shouldn’t mean you should do that same, exact thing”, she says. “Design your talent management programmes to deliver to a focused, disciplined objective and be sure that there is an integrated story or ‘red thread’ that ties all programmes of each touchpoint together. Otherwise, it’s just a set of programmes you have and the opportunity to influence engagement and retention become less clear and a lot less effective.” The role of technology In an ideal world you would have a multi- faceted and integrated talent management system driven by the business plan, goals and strategies, according to Weeks. “The system should be able to draw on HR processes such as recruiting, on-boarding, remuneration packages, job grading and performance management which tracks the talent pipeline skill and leadership training and development with timely and meaningful metrics and analytics. The key here is to spend time designing a system that incorporates all HR practices and incorporates change management”, she explains. Hoover believes employees need to have an experience at work similar to their experience outside of work. She advises employers to think about how they would do things at home, as they are designing their programmes. “Would you ask Siri, Google or Alexa for help with simple things? Would you use a mobile app to purchase your office supplies like you do your groceries? It’s disengaging when employees come to work
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| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward |
Issue 41 | June 2018
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