Talent Management is the process of managing your workforce to recruit and retain staff with a skillset that’s best suited to your business goals and your business culture. It’s no use having talented staff on the payroll who aren’t best suited for the job roles, this only creates tension and inefficiencies that lead to losses and failure. Instead manage your workforce talent suitably.
To manage talent effectively you need to know the key components of talent management and implement them in your workforce. These include things like Strategic Employee Planning, Talent Acquisition and Retations, and Employee Performance. The better you understand these components in tandem with your business goals and culture the stronger and more successful your company will become.
Strategic Employee Planning
Different employees have different qualities they can bring to your business or project. Not every employee will be suited to the task in hand. A big part of talent management is being able to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your employees and utilising them in a more efficient and pragmatic way.
The first step is to identify the goals and outcomes of your project. This is the same as business goal planning. Next, consider how you will reach those goals using the resources at your disposal. Identify key roles and employees who will bring value to the project and help you to achieve outcomes.
Talent Acquisition and Retention
There are times when you need to search the marketplace for the right talent. You might need to network and follow leads to find the personnel with the right skills to reach project goals. This is fine, but it does have its drawbacks. It takes time to search and hire external employees, and there is added risk.
The best practice is to acquire and retain quality talent then hire from within. Hiring talent in-house is more cost effective and efficient. That is why you should consider the long term potential of your employee when hiring. It is also why you should invest in training strategies for existing staff.
Performance Management
You might have heard the saying ‘fish can’t climb trees,’ but they can swim in water, and much better than a land based animal. This analogy serves us well when it comes to thinking about performance management within our employee talent field. It’s always best to understand employee strengths and to deploy them in the right way.
This is why it’s so important to align people with the roles they work on best, you will not only achieve better results in your business but staff morale will be higher as people are doing what they do best. Conversely, if you have an underperforming employee it could be that you don’t yet know their strengths or best position in the business.
Learning and Motivating
When you have acquired the staff you think will bring value to your business it’s not the end of the story. Unless these staff members are valued and challenged they will quickly become jaded and begin to underperform. Furthermore, you need to add value to their experience and career journey at your company.
You can create a satisfied workforce by finding the balance between leading and training. Many people don’t know the difference, but there is one. Training is the process of upswing an employee for a task or project. On the other hand, learning is about acquiring the skills and experience that helps them grow as valued company employees.
Compensation
If your workforce doesn’t receive gratitude for their work, or if they think that their salary is the only valid compensation for their efforts, they might grow disillusioned. Although there is an argument for basic salary compensation, employees need more than that to feel they are doing work valued by the company.
You can motivate your talent pool more effectively when you align your strategic goals with incentives that recognise important employee contributions. This not only incentivises workers to perform better and show that the company values performance, it also adds an element of healthy competition to the workforce.
Career Development
Ideally you want to hire staff that will engage with your training programs and climb the ladder at the company. It’s a sign of a successful recruiting program when employees stay for many years and obtain higher roles and statuses within the organisation. Time served is also excellent for experience.
The talent you hire might be on the way to becoming the rounded employee you might struggle to find in the open market. Conversely, they might only be the raw ingredients of the person you need. Either way you need to offer a tangible career path with plenty of options for promotion and further training.
Succession Planning
The key to running an organization smoothly is to keep it both consistent and profitable. Achieving this balance is harder than it sounds and when you have the magic formula, you need to guard it as long as possible. This requires good succession planning which should be built into your business model from the start.
Understand the key roles within your organization, these are the roles that make your business work: managers, consultants, bosses, efficient workers. You will need equivalents in place when people retire or move on, which is part of the function of proper recruitment and training.
Conclusion
Talent management is not a simple undertaking. You need to understand the nature of the business, the business goals and the type of talent needed to achieve those goals. This talent can be brought in from outside or hired internally, but in each case you will need to provide adequate training and career progression options for staff.
Talent Management is as much about producing talent as it is about acquiring and utilising it. Hire staff members with the raw ingredients for what you need to reach your business goals then mould them through training and learning. Also make sure you understand the strengths and weaknesses of staff and deploy them in more effective ways.
