The Best Advice You Could Ever Get About Talent Management
More than a buzzword, talent management is a strategy designed to help companies attract and retain productive, engaged employees. As many organizations have already discovered, effective talent management makes good business sense. One survey found that companies with strong talent management practices increased their revenue 2.2 times faster and increased profit 1.5 times faster than companies without an effective talent management strategy.
There are many ideas and resources available to help with effective talent management, and the talent management programs you implement will evolve as your organization grows. To help you get started, here is some great advice that will help you better manage and develop your organization’s most valuable resource.
Develop a Comprehensive Talent Management Strategy
To effectively attract and retain talent, you need a well-thought-out strategy for how to recruit, develop, and reward employees for their work. For example, with talent acquisition, you’ll need to develop a program that helps to identify not just great talent, but the individual skills and behaviors that fit best with your organization and culture. The candidate selection process will be a key component in any comprehensive talent management strategy, as explained in one article that suggests a range of specific interview questions that can help to gauge a candidate’s fit with your company culture.
Talent is a resource to be cultivated, so your talent management strategy should include activities that develop employee skills and provide opportunities for growth and promotion, such as training, coaching, and stretch assignments. It’s also important to remember that talent management strategy is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Yours needs to align with your long-term business strategy, so that company talent can effectively enable growth.
Hire and Develop Leaders That Will Drive Talent Management Success
One of the best levers for effective talent management is having leaders who can strongly influence performance outcomes and coach employees to continuously improve. In addition to hiring strong leaders, you’ll benefit from a focus on leadership development and training that helps existing leaders understand what is expected of them and how they can positively influence the behavior of others. Other activities that can help you build and develop strong leaders include:
- Developing leadership competencies – Develop and communicate leadership competencies so that everyone in the organization knows the skills and behaviors that define strong leadership. You can also hire and promote leaders based on their mastery of those competencies.
- Leading by example – Ensure executive leaders understand the importance of their own actions in leading and managing others.
- Building leadership accountability – Institute feedback mechanisms for leaders at all levels to reinforce the importance of accountability and results.
Leverage Talent Management Tools
From self-service platforms and chatbots that provide employee policy information to pulse surveys that gauge employee engagement, there is a broad range of talent management tools that benefit both the company and employees. Some examples of talent management tools that can help shape your strategy include:
- Internal social networks that enable people to share experiences and develop relationships
- Enhanced onboarding strategies that include video messages from senior leaders
- Fully automated performance management systems that provide frequent feedback desired by a growing number of employees (according to one survey, 65% of employees want more feedback than they’re getting)
- Collaborative org chart software that helps organizations better plan for upcoming hires or reorganization of teams
Get the Culture Right
Culture is the glue that holds all of your talent management activities together, so you’ll need to create the right environment for employees to thrive. Whether your goal is a high-performance culture, a culture of collaboration, or a fraternal culture where the workplace feels like a family environment, you need to weave your organizational culture goals into all of your talent management activities. From hiring for cultural fit to creating feedback loops that help you better understand how employees experience your culture, there are many activities you can undertake to build the culture you desire and in which employees have the best opportunity to perform to their potential.
While there’s not a single piece of advice that will give you all the answers for effective talent management, there are a few good places to start, like creating a thoughtful talent management strategy and cultivating a culture that will support programs for recruiting, performance management, and employee development. With a wealth of available digital tools to help you implement your talent management strategy, you’ll find new, creative ways to build an engaged and productive workforce.
