Everything you need to know about talent management. A talented employee with high potential can make a significant difference to the current and future performance of the organization.
In fact, talent management is considered as a driver to organizational success.
According to the Society of Human Resource Management’s (SHRM) glossary of terms, talent management is ‘the implementation of integrated strategies of systems designed to increase workplace productivity by developing improved processes for attracting, developing, retaining, and utilizing people with the required skills and aptitude to meet current and future needs’.
Talent management involves individual and organizational development in response to a changing and complex operating environment. It includes the creation and maintenance of a supportive and people-oriented organizational culture.
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Decisions about talent management shape and mould the competencies of organizations and their ultimate success. From the perspective of individuals, these decisions determine the path and pace of their careers. Talent management practices, in the long run, can have a crucial impact on the society as well.
Learn about:- 1. Introduction and Meaning of Talent Management 2. Evolution of Talent Management 3. Components 4. Strategies 5. Process 6. Talent Mapping and Its Programmes 7. Issues 8. Contribution.
Talent Management – Meaning, Evolution, Components, Strategies, Process, Issues and Other Details
Contents:
- Introduction and Meaning of Talent Management
- Evolution of Talent Management
- Components of Talent Management
- Strategies for Talent Management
- Process of Talent Management
- Talent Mapping and Its Programme
- Issues of Talent Management
- Contribution of HR to Talent Management Arena
Talent Management – Introduction and Meaning
A talented employee with high potential can make a significant difference to the current and future performance of the organization. In fact, talent management is considered as a driver to organizational success.
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According to the Society of Human Resource Management’s (SHRM) glossary of terms, talent management is ‘the implementation of integrated strategies of systems designed to increase workplace productivity by developing improved processes for attracting, developing, retaining, and utilizing people with the required skills and aptitude to meet current and future needs’.
In other words, talent management is an integrated system to attract, develop, retain, and utilize people having the requisite knowledge, skills, aptitude, and attitude to contribute towards the achievement of an organization’s present and future objectives and goals.
SHRM undertook a survey to gather views on some aspects of talent management from the HR professionals from different types of industries scattered over different territories of the USA. SHRM surveyed a total of 388 HR professionals who shared their views with the SHRM team.
In simple terms, talent management is simply the art and science of attracting, developing, and retaining talents. These are the three key deliverables of the HR function. Talent management describes the process through which employers of all kinds anticipate their human capital needs and set about meeting them.
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Procuring the right people with the requisite knowledge and right skills for the right jobs is the main purpose of talent management. The focus of talent management tends to be more on management and executive positions. It has a direct and a quantifiable connection to the overall business risk management, business improvement, and cost management.
Talent management involves individual and organizational development in response to a changing and complex operating environment. It includes the creation and maintenance of a supportive and people-oriented organizational culture. Decisions about talent management shape and mould the competencies of organizations and their ultimate success. From the perspective of individuals, these decisions determine the path and pace of their careers. Talent management practices, in the long run, can have a crucial impact on the society as well.
The key to talent management begins with talent searching and recognizing individuals for their unique strengths. Managers need this skill at observing the unique differences between individuals and their talents. Organizations have to ensure that this talent is provided with the environment to flourish.
In order to spot talent at a recruitment interview or at work, one has to keep an open mind and go beyond the accepted norms of the pedigree, academic credentials, and social impression. The mantra is to see beyond the first impression and beyond the existing knowledge, skills, and attitude and look for passion.
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Once managers discover the applicant’s edge, they should give them a chance to serve the organization even if they do not fit the ‘norms’; they should believe in them and support them.
Talent management encompasses manpower planning and recruitment, induction and placement, performance management system, development system, multi-source feedback, potential appraisal and career system, compensation management, reward system, separation and beyond, and developing workers and sub-staff.
Talent Management – Top 5 Stages of Evolution
The stages of talent management in the evolutionary process include:
Stage I – Significance of talent was not recognised. All employees are treated at par. Therefore, no separate strategies for talent management were developed.
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Stage II – This stage is evolved by isolated and ad hoc tactics for talent management rather than development of comprehensive strategies.
Stage III – This stage is characterised by the development or integrated and comprehensive talent management strategies for a particular segment of an organisation.
Stage IV – Talent management strategies are designed to contribute to the HR strategies and corporate strategies. Formal talent management initiatives are linked horizontally to HR management initiatives and linked vertically to corporate strategies.
Stage V – Talent management strategies design corporate strategies and corporate strategies design talent management strategies.
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Individual and pooled talent is assessed and it taken into consideration in strategic management process.
Talent Management – 8 Key Components of Highly Effective Talent Management Process
Key components of highly effective talent management process are:
1. Understand the current and future business strategies of the organisation.
2. Identify the key gaps between the talent in place and the talent required to for the business to succeed in the marketplace.
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3. Integrate the strategic and business plans by duly closing the talent gaps.
4. Hire accurately as per job requirements and decide judiciously and diligently on promotions.
5. Empower individuals and teams to get connected to corporate goals, and provide clear feedback to manage performance.
6. Enhance performance in current positions as well as readiness for transition to the next level.
7. Focus on every element of talent management for successful execution.
8. Measure the effectiveness of the talent management decisions by analysing the conditions before and after the talent management decisions.
Talent Management – Strategies
Organisations have to design organisational strategies and continuously monitor them as they form the solid basis for the talent management. However, available talent in the organisation may often form the basis for corporate strategies.
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The talent management strategies include:
i. Relationship management – Organisations have to build relationship with talented employers beyond normal employee-employer and employment relationship. This relationship would be based on friendship relations, human relations and family-oriented relations.
ii. Job title – The talented employee should be given job title as ‘partner’.
iii. Bondage – In addition to the partner-title, the employee should be offered profit-sharing, employee-stock-option, productivity sharing, enabling the employee to take part in success as well as failure events.
iv. Empowerment and participation – Talented employee should be allowed to take part in decision-making of top level decisions, strategy making and access to critical information. In addition, talented employee should be empowered with regard to his/her job.
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v. Representing the company – Company should allow and enable the talented employees to represent the company in various committees, celebrations, negotiations and arguments.
vi. Pay, benefits and allowances – Companies should pay special and discriminatory salary, benefits and allowances to talented employees to retain them and get the best out of them.
vii. Career and succession planning – Companies should plan for career of talented employees as special ground and it should be challenging and competitive. Despite all these strategies some talented employees prefer to leave the company and join other companies. In such cases, companies should prepare succession planning.
viii. Recognition – The contributions of talented employees should be recognised appropriately.
ix. Nature of work – Talented employees should be given challenging, competitive, innovative and creative work in order to tap their creative skills and potentialities.
x. Work environment – Companies should provide conducive work environment – Physical, Social and Psychological that should be appreciated for talented employees.
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xi. Change’ and creativity – Talented employees prefer change, challenge and creativity at the work place. So the organisations should initiate, encourage and introduce change and also provide smooth transition for the projects based on change. Similarly, organisations encourage creativity in order to enhance organisational efficiency.
xii. Freedom – Talented employees should be given freedom with regard to nature of work, working hours, rules and regulation, work place, working methods and styles.
xiii. Learning and development – Learning, growth and development of skill, knowledge, values and abilities are crucial for talented employees to up-date, and prevent possible obsolescence in their talents. Therefore, companies should specially design the continuous learning and development programmes for talent employees.
These strategies would enable the organisations to retain, develop and utilise the talent. In addition, these strategies would ensure the use of talents in appropriate projects and activities.
Talent Management – 10 Important Steps Involved in the Process: Acquiring Talent, Retaining Talent, Nurturing Talent, Multiplying Talent, Developing Talent and a Few Others
A talented employee with high potential can make a significant difference to the current and future performance of the organization. In fact, talent management is considered as a driver to organizational success.
According to the Society of Human Resource Management’s (SHRM) glossary of terms, talent management is ‘the implementation of integrated strategies of systems designed to increase workplace productivity by developing improved processes for attracting, developing, retaining, and utilizing people with the required skills and aptitude to meet current and future needs’.
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In other words, talent management is an integrated system to attract, develop, retain, and utilize people having the requisite knowledge, skills, aptitude, and attitude to contribute towards the achievement of an organization’s present and future objectives and goals.
The important steps in the process of talent management:
Step # 1. Acquiring Talent – Manpower Planning and Recruitment:
In order to recruit the right people, an organization has to structure its manpower planning and recruitment process. Manpower or human resource planning forms the core of HRM, and deals with the acquiring of human resources of an organization.
Planning consists of the process of knowing how to select appropriate individuals as employees based on their skills, knowledge, pragmatism, maturity, etc., and making sure that they are smoothly fitted into their assigned roles as well as the overall system. Thus, smooth functioning of the organization to achieve its business objectives and goals is ensured. Planning further refers to using the available assets for the effective implementation of the production plans.
After the preparation of plans, people are grouped together to achieve the organizational objectives. Apart from selecting suitable employees, manpower planning also deals with the process of upgrading the existing employees. The human resources are the most valuable assets of any organization and are the only resource that appreciates. This is because they contribute to the realization of its business objectives.
Human resources also contribute their time and expertise to the overall functioning of their organization. Thus, the process of manpower planning and staffing is crucial to the business development of an organization.
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The recruitment and selection activities are by far the major functions of the HR department as they create the competitive strength of the company. Recruitment process must be based on a strategy formulated by the company. The company has to decide the positions to be filled through manpower planning, carrying out job analysis, developing the job description and job specifications, followed by finalizing the man specification. Obviously, the company must utilize a band of people accustomed for this job.
This is followed by designing the advertisement by conforming to the attract-interest- desire-action (AIDA) model strictly in that order to attract talent for the company, selecting suitable selection tools to facilitate background investigations, job specifications, tests for screening, etc.
Selection tools that are meticulously used also help a company to avoid ‘select error’ and ‘reject error’. Select error refers to the situation when a person is selected and cannot perform the assigned tasks or contribute anything to achieve the goals. This happens either due to choice of wrong selection tools or some defects in administering the tool.
On the other hand, reject error refers to the mistake when the attributes of a well-qualified person remain unidentified during the selection process and he/she is rejected. Being rejected by the interviewers of one company, he/she may join some other company at the same or higher position and is seen to perform there.
There are a few more points that managers must keep in mind to avoid problems or mistakes at this level:
a. Focus recruiting efforts on young talent from small towns and cities, and base their compensation packages on the job role and skill sets rather than only on their qualifications. Remember that youth from villages, small towns, and cities are likely to be more ethical. Probabilities of attrition will be less, too.
b. Performance reviews should be conducted at close intervals, say at six-month intervals rather than annually. They can even design and provide certain innovative reward programs over the more traditional ones of recognizing employee performance.
c. Allow the employees to identify their developmental needs. Place learning and educational responsibilities solely on them. It is advisable to forego conventional company-mandated training. Provide employees with professional development opportunities.
d. Offer skill-based and performance-based compensation and long-term incentives to employees.
e. Try to identify and eliminate as many routine and tedious processes and jobs as possible.
f. Allocate human resources to vigorous entry-level training.
Scarcity of resources might be an issue in India and the rest of the world in the years to come. However, we can continue to be optimistic for many reasons. India has a rich source of educated young talent base. It is important to understand that they can be developed to be readily usable for industries through macro level planning.
Step # 2. Retaining Talent – Induction and Placement:
Every organization conducts an induction programme for new recruits. During this programme, the organization tries to identify the inner potential of the recruits such as their likes and dislikes, motives, personality attributes, lifestyle inventories, and attempts to place them accordingly to derive the best from them. Placement based on psychological attributes reduces attrition.
Once the selection and administrative formalities are complete, an employee is placed in an appropriate job. He then needs to be familiarized with the job and the organization by way of induction. Induction is the process of receiving and welcoming an employee when he first joins the company and the basic information to settle down is shared with him, after which he is able to start work.
Induction of new recruits helps in building a two-way channel of communication between management and employees, and facilitates creating an informal atmosphere and building team work. Effective induction helps to integrate the new employee into the organization and to develop a sense of belonging.
A formal induction programme makes it easier for the recruits to have a good start. Familiarization of the recruits with the organization is the main concern during induction, as a lot of information about the organization is supplied to the recruits.
The curriculum of an induction should include genesis and evolution of the organization, operations, organization structure, policies and procedures, products and services, infrastructure, safety measures, benefits and services of employees, standing orders and disciplinary procedures, opportunities for training, promotions, transfer, suggestion schemes, rules and regulations, grievance redressal system, etc.
After the stage of induction is completed, the process of placement begins. It is a process of assigning a specific job to each of the new recruits. It involves assigning a specific task and responsibility to an individual, considering the prerequisites of the task and knowledge base and skills possessed by the new recruit. This process of matching is vital for organizational effectiveness and satisfaction of the recruit.
A carefully-designed placement system can improve employee morale, helps in reducing employee turnover and absenteeism, helps in diminishing accident rates, avoids misfit between the employee and the job, and finally helps the employee to work as per the predetermined objectives of the organization.
To remain competitive, companies need performers or talents. After attracting and placing them at appropriate job profiles, companies need to develop methods to retain the new talent.
Step # 3. Nurturing Talent – Performance Management System:
Potential capabilities of human resources must be honed through a structured performance management system. Nurturing talent refers to managing and developing employees to achieve business goals. Performance management system focuses on every employee because each of them has a bearing on business performance.
Performance concerns the behaviour directed towards achieving an organization’s missions and business goals, and manufacturing products or services resulting from that behaviour. In other words, it refers to only the behaviour related to the production of goods or services by maintaining the qualitative requirements.
Performance is a multidimensional variable and is a conglomerate of several dimensions. Hence, people high on one dimension may not be high on the other, and such standings may change over time.
Performance management is the means through which managers ensure that employees’ activities and output are congruent with the organization’s goal. It is central to gaining competitive advantage, and comprises three phases—defining performance, measuring performance, and taking a feedback on the performance.
Managing performance is interactive, interrelated, and interdependent with managing people. History is littered with examples of poor performance management. It has been evidenced that organizations could not excel as they focused only on results and not actions.
It is important for companies to define their long-term and short-term goals, rigidly apply a single doctrinaire approach, involve the use of jargons, and install suitable support measures to excel. The goals and targets of successful performance management are very specific and quantifiable, easy to understand, and consist of continuous and ongoing activities concerned with the results.
Step # 4. Multiplying Talent – Development System:
In today’s world, it has become important to multiply the talent of an organization to succeed in the market. Training and development, performance management system, and performance appraisal are some of the processes that are used to multiply talent in an organization.
Besides these, members of the organizations also need professional development through coaching, mentoring, and counselling. Coaching is organized for employees to develop skills to perform their roles better, mentoring is meant to aid development in work leadership, and counselling is carried out to cope with the stress.
Training is an HRD mechanism that improves the knowledge, skills, and performance of an employee. Most of the organizations identify specific training needs prior to training its people. Once the training needs are identified, development of the training objectives should be carried out. This involves designing the syllabus, framing the training curriculum, and selecting the training methodology considering the profile of the participants. Trained and developed talents have a greater probability of staying and growing in a company.
Performance appraisal is another form of multiplying talent. It is a written formal assessment of the employee showing his strengths and weaknesses, achievements, degree of various attributes, etc., which organizations perform annually. It is a part of performance management system.
Step # 5. Developing Talent – Multi-Source Feedback:
Multi-source assessment and feedback system (MAFS) is also known as ‘360-degree feedback’ or ‘multi-raters appraisal system’. This system has gained great popularity and manifests its importance for developing talent. Almost every Fortune 500 company has implemented MAFS in some form or the other. MAFS enables multiple raters to measure employee behaviour critical to performance; at the same time, questionnaires designed by the HR department could also be used.
Traditionally, an appraisal was done only by one’s immediate senior colleague. This type of an appraisal/assessment could be biased due to interpersonal relations. Keeping this point in view, presently, appraisals are carried out by many persons including the immediate superior, internal customers, external customers, suppliers, colleagues, seniors of cross-functional areas, and immediate subordinates.
The all-round capability of a person can only be judged if the views of all the persons regularly interacting with him are gathered. It is also important that the raters’ or appraisers’ identity is kept confidential. Thus, in this system the content of the remark is more important than the person marking it.
To eliminate any sort of bias, external consultants are engaged to collect the assessment sheets and analyse the comments of different appraisers in order to identify different competencies of different employees. MAFS lays emphasis on softer dimensions of performance such as leadership, creativity, originality, innovation, teamwork, initiative, entrepreneurship, and emotional intelligence, which have emerged as crucial organizational needs in recent times.
The principal objectives are performance- linked pay or rewards, culture building, leadership development, team building, succession planning, and development.
In order to make this system more successful, top management needs to the build the confidence of its employees on the appraisal methodology, create opportunities for employees, invest time and effort, take the current appraisal system seriously, conduct performance reviews, and agree to be assessed by subordinates. Employees or candidates must be ready to welcome the MAFS.
There are certain indicators to assess the readiness of the candidate, such as the candidates intent to be better, are receptive and respect the views of others, are learning-oriented individuals, have an aptitude for healthy competition, etc. The candidate should have a direct relationship with at least six individuals who can rate him.
The values of 360-degree feedback are manifold. The set of feedbacks enables an organization to focus on developmental efforts. A carefully-designed questionnaire helps to get a realistic feedback. An appraise, on accepting the views of the raters, gains acceptance of the multiple stakeholders. Most managers are surprised and delighted by the amount of positive feedback on introspection.
T. V. Rao learning system (TVRLS) was developed using the RSDQ model (roles, styles, delegation, and qualities) for Indian top and senior management levels to measure the managerial and leadership competencies (www(dot)tvrls(dot)com).
Roles are the extent to which individuals play various leadership and managerial roles and activities.
Style, an element of McKinsey’s 7S framework, is the way in which managers discharge their leadership roles. The model envisages that managers may play most roles well, and devote time and effort, but could be insensitive to the style with which they carry out these activities. The model mentions three styles—benevolent or paternalistic leadership style, critical leadership style, and developmental leadership style.
Delegation is an important part of a senior executive’s effectiveness as he/she delegates not only for offloading oneself but also diverting the time in performing creative higher order tasks. The model envisages that managers should exhibit qualities of leaders and world-class managers (e.g., pro-action, listening, communication, positive approach, participative nature, quality orientation, etc.).
Such qualities not only affect the effectiveness with which top level managers perform various roles, but also have an impact on the leadership style, and hence are very critical.
Step # 6. Advancing Talent – Potential Appraisal and Career System:
Potential appraisal and career system help to advance the talents in an organization.
Potential appraisal refers to the identification and exploration of an employee’s potential and capabilities, hitherto unknown, to perform new roles and responsibilities in view of changing customer demands. Thus, identifying the hidden capability is known as potential appraisal. An employee tries to perform the tasks assigned to him to the utmost satisfaction of his superiors.
The company keeps growing continuously because of the contribution of all the employees at all levels. A dynamic organization reviews, structures systems, creates new roles, and assigns new responsibilities at all possible times to explore hidden potential.
Career denotes all the jobs that one holds in one’s working life. Career planning is a process that fixes career goals and lays down the path to meet these goals, provides answers to questions such as ‘Where shall I be after five, 10, or 15 years?’. The purpose of career planning is to provide continuity, order, and meaning to a person’s work life.
It is not an event or an end in itself. It tells the employees/prospects about the ways in which they can advance in the company. A career aims to integrate individual and organizational goals.
Career planning has many terms related to it, some of which are career goals, career cycle, career paths, career anchors, career progression, career development, and career counselling. Career goals represent the future positions one may want to occupy. Career cycle involves the stages through which a person’s career evolves. Career paths are the flexible lines of progression through which an employee moves.
Career anchors are distinct patterns of self-perceived talents, attitudes, motives, and values that guide and stabilize a person’s career. Career progression refers to the progress made by an individual in one’s career through a series of right moves. Career development means actions undertaken by a person to achieve the career goals. Career counselling is the process of advising employees in setting career goals, and assisting them to find suitable career paths.
Career planning system manifests its importance in attracting competent persons, providing suitable promotional and advancement opportunities, providing challenging work, enabling them to develop, boosting their morale, increasing their motivation, utilizing their managerial reserves, and retaining talent.
Career counselling helps employees to understand the job more clearly, identify strengths and weaknesses, develop an outlook, achieve and enjoy greater satisfaction, and realize the forces and dynamics in the system. Career planning has certain limitations too as it is more suitable for small organizations, and not so effective for a large number of employees.
It is not appropriate for illiterate employees, the workforce, and the backward classes. As expectations of organizational members are growing, it is not effective for a longer period of time such as 10 years or more. Changes in environment, political interventions, nepotism, and favouritism are also responsible behind limitations of career planning.
The success of career planning depends on certain factors. Top management’s commitment is essential for successful career planning. The enterprise should be expanding and must have clear corporate goals. The workforce should be motivated and jobs should be assigned to the right people. There must be a balance of age in the organization. Fair promotion policy and management of career or occupational stress further smoothens out the career planning system.
Step # 7. Recognizing Talent – Reward System:
Rewarding an employee for the good work done by him/her is extremely essential. This can be done by recognizing his/her splendid contribution towards the organization. Rewards and recognition play a crucial role in developing the levels of motivation, commitment, and loyalty of employees towards the organization. Talents are no exception to this. Rewards are often linked with performance.
Rewards also help to promote the desired values, attitudes, and behaviour. Rewards are further linked to the quality of work and improvement. Rewards need not always be of a high cost. They can also be of a low cost value such as a token appreciation reward.
There are many companies where rewards are linked to career advancement or development. It is important that the rewards system must be structured, documented, and communicated to the employees. The system should be unambiguous and objective. This is essential to avoid demotivation of those who aspired, but did not receive any reward.
Step # 8. Promoting Talent – Compensation Management:
Presently, compensation management is a strategic issue and includes all forms of pay and rewards given to employees. Compensation includes both direct financial payments and indirect financial payments that employees receive during their employment period. A sound and effective compensation management system is the key driver of motivation, employee retention, and enhanced quality of work life. The term compensation refers to the disbursement of incentives with regard to salary and wage administration.
The compensation system considers both intrinsic (intangible) and extrinsic (tangible) components. Extrinsic compensation covers both monetary and non-monetary rewards, whereas intrinsic compensation reflects an employee’s emotional satisfaction through accomplishment of the job.
Designing and administering compensation needs certain legal considerations such as acts relating to the framework for remuneration of the top management of Indian companies, conformance to minimum pay, maximum hours, and overtime pay. Other considerations are child labour protection, ensuring equal pay for women doing the same work as men, and unemployment compensation for workers.
Step # 9. Networking Talent – Separation and Beyond:
Separation is a term used to refer to the resignation or termination of service. It is generally classified as layoff, voluntary resignation, or discharge. The entire separation process is conducted in such a way that the separating employee does not feel harassed or embarrassed.
Smooth transitions and return of company property is ensured. A departing employee naturally feels emotional and can also share valuable insights about the organization. Keeping this in view, an organization arranges an exit interview that helps the organization reduce future attrition.
Employee departures are a natural part of the employee life cycle. Whether caused by voluntary resignation, retirement, or company induced termination, employee separations need to be efficiently managed by the HR. The separation needs to be handled with sensitivity, discretion, and speed so that exits can happen without burning bridges with the employee. After all, it is also important to remember that a leaving employee can be the most effective brand ambassador of the company.
Departing employees present an opportunity for the organization to gather a wealth of valuable feedback and insights on its strengths and weaknesses. However, all separations are not similar. Sometimes, it is worthwhile to go an extra mile in trying to retain a separating employee. The end of an employment relationship is frequently associated with emotional distress.
Step # 10. Engaging Talent – Developing Workers and Sub-Staff:
Employee engagement is a measure of their commitment or loyalty to the organization, and the degree of their willingness to perform tasks to achieve quantitative targets and conform to the qualitative requirements. Employees must work above and beyond the expectations of the organization. An organization and its employees should conduct day-to-day business based on a common set of shared values.
Managers of the organization should effectively communicate and be emphatic listeners for effective leadership. Recognition, both extrinsic and intrinsic, is essential for a job well-done and, the doer should be recognized spontaneously. The organization must develop a proper mechanism to let the employees understand how their work contributes to the organization’s overall success.
Employees must be involved in decision-making that affects their work. Each employee should get opportunities to advance and grow in his/her professional career by means of personal development. Employees must be made to understand that their pay and benefits are fair and competitive in the marketplace.
Thus, the seven engagement elements or levers that matter the most are shared values, effective leadership, motivational recognition, contribution to success, employee involvement or engagement, personal development, and economic self-interest.
Talent Management – Talent Mapping and Its Programme
Organizations should develop talent mapping programmes to facilitate assessing the effectiveness of people management. It is essential to critically evaluate the working of an organization’s talent mapping and performance management programme. Sheth (2008) suggests the need for examining a few factors.
1. Does the business environment facilitate optimal performance management?
2. What is the organization-wide perception of a performance management programme?
3. What are the monitoring methodologies and who are the stakeholders?
4. Are the right people implementing these programmes?
The purpose of answering these questions is to create an alignment between performance management processes and strategic priorities. Consistency, identity, and genuineness of a talent management programme ensure its longevity.
It is vital to assess an organization’s talent management programme and partners. Certain pillars of assessment are clarity and communication, design, implementation, assessment and rewards, reviews, environment and culture, cost, impact, deployability, and objectivity. These pillars must be given proper attention during the process of talent mapping.
Clarity and communication – The purpose of performance management system should be clear and it should be communicated to all in the organization.
Design – One has to identify the way in which the performance management system was designed and check whether the system reflects company vision and values, whether it is simple and scientific, etc. One must ensure that the system is free from amalgamation of complex HR jargons and concepts. It should be user-friendly.
Implementation – Organizations must assign the responsibility of implementing the performance management system to a responsible person. He/she has to verify to what extent the performance evaluation is linked to the success of the talent mapping programme.
Assessment and rewards – Measurability of the success of performance management needs assessment. Further, it is required to check the availability of monetary and non-monetary rewards for performance.
Reviews – Along with the changing business environment, the business strategy also changes. Periodical reviews are also essential in redefining talent management strategies so that they align with the business strategies.
Environment and culture – Management needs to foster an environment and culture to support the talent mapping programme.
Cost – The performance management system should be cost-effective. One has to ensure that it does not need a higher budget.
Impact – It is necessary to ascertain the impact of the performance management system; it should be applicable for the whole organization and its applicability should not be confined only to limited departments.
Deployability – The performance management system should be deployable at all levels and in all geographies.
Objectivity – It is wiser to collect objective third-party views about an organization’s performance management system. The views should neither be biased nor emotional as the purpose of gathering third-party views would then be useless.
Talent Management – Challenging Issues of Talent Management Confronting HR
Many challenging issues confront HR, including:
i. Heightened competition for skilled workers.
ii. Impending retirement of the baby boomers.
iii. Low levels of employee engagement.
iv. Acknowledgement of the high cost of turnover.
v. Arduous demands of managing global workforces.
vi. Importance of succession planning.
vii. Offshoring and outsourcing trends.
This requires new thinking and a new mission to achieve business success. These factors—coupled with the need to align people directly with corporate goals—are forcing HR to evolve from policy creation, cost reduction, process efficiency, and risk management to driving a new talent mindset in the organisation.
One important distinction is the evolution of the difference between tactical HR and strategic talent management. Transactional HR activities are administrative overhead. Talent management is a continuous process that delivers the optimal workforce for your business.
In this new model—instead of being the owners of processes, forms, and compliance—HR becomes the strategic enabler of talent management processes that empower managers and employees while creating business value.
With this view, talent management may be defined as the implementation of integrated strategies or systems designed to improve processes for recruiting, developing and retaining people with the required skills and aptitude to meet current and future organisational needs.
Talent management is often defined as performance management, incentive compensation, or talent acquisition. Talent management is also often confused with leadership development. Although leadership development is a crucial function of your organisation, focusing on it exclusively is a legacy of last century. Our modern service and knowledge economies in the talent age require a broad and holistic view. A high performance business depends on a wide range of talent.
Workforce cost is the largest category of spend for most organisations. Automation and analysis of recruiting and hiring processes provides the immediate workforce visibility and insight need to significantly improve bottom line. Performance management provides the ongoing processes and practices to maintain a stellar workforce.
Talent Management – Contribution of HR to Talent Management Arena
HR is one of the most misunderstood and misinterpreted functions in an organization. Other functions such as production, maintenance, quality control, marketing, and sales do not have this problem. However, HR plays the role of the guardian of human capital.
In today s competitive business scenario, organizations seek to hire and engage talents. It is seen that since the 1990s, the HR personnel have been trying their best to align HR efforts with the business objectives. Many journals of repute have addressed HR professionals as players of the business, strategic partners, and other similar terms.
The HR Proposition, Ulrich and Brockbank et al. (2005), mentions the following:
‘For the last decade, HR professionals have aspired to be the most complete players relative to the core issues of the businesses, as described in a number of business roles—business partners, strategic partners, full contributors, players in the business, and so forth. These aspirations are appropriate and desirable, but the fact that HR professionals continue to frame aspirations in these terms communicates a continuing concern.’
The concerns of the HR professionals force them to contribute in the arena of talent management as well.
Thorne and Pellant (2007) highlight the HR’s credibility debate and mention a roadmap and guidelines as follows:
1. The HR director and the head of learning and development need to establish strong relationship with the business.
2. Both the HR director and learning and development professionals need to develop sound understanding of the business—its overall goals, the business strategy, and associated functions.
3. Audit is a verification of activities. An audit of services and products, quality of response, solutions, and most importantly, the expertise of HR staff should be organized for finding facts that cannot otherwise be identified.
4. Conversations need to take place with all business relations to identify likely future requirements with the ultimate aim of improvement.
5. Change is an inevitable need and as such, people must be committed to accept changes, which should be sequentially undertaken—unfreezing, moving, and refreezing. Unfreezing is the stage to loosen emotional and intellectual forces, and recognizing and enhancing the driving forces to reduce the resistance to change. The moving stage indicates readiness of the individuals for new behaviour and the change perspective. Refreezing is the final phase of the change process leading to the reinforcement of the new desirable behaviour.
6. Using the knowledge base, the HR and the learning and development professionals can really start to build a meaningful relationship with the business.
7. Sometimes, people development processes (PDP) appear somewhat similar to the corporate agenda such as business process reengineering (BPR), introduction of new technology, modernization, or IT implementation. During this phase, the HR might feel frustrated and isolated. This is quite natural when one should not feel isolated, as it is merely a temporary phase.
8. With the growing realization that people are operators of various systems, focusing on the enhancement of the capabilities of individuals to transform their performances is a critical role of all training, learning, and development professionals.
9. HR as well as learning and development strategies and visions need to be built considering the overall business strategy and vision. Thus, these strategies must address the business requirements and be based on key business deliverables.
10. The HR should constantly strive to develop a pool of talents exercising ownership of the talent agenda. They should seek a response to the question, ‘How much of what we need have we currently got?’