Best Practices in Talent Management

Talent Management is an organization-wide, all-inclusive strategy for hiring, training, and retaining top-performing employees. In today’s competitive world, having a talent management system in place is indispensable. When the organization faces an economic downturn, an effective Talent Management system is what will help you weather through it.

The workplace processes and systems that must effectively work together to produce a talent management strategy that will provide results for an organization have been highlighted. Further, an ASTD/i4cp study identified factors that are present more of the time in organizations that have a successful talent management strategy operating.

The most intriguing idea that emerged in the review of talent management was the success of implementing talent management review meetings. By talking about talented employees and making their knowledge, skills, and potential known to other managers in different parts of the organization, the potential use and development of internal talent are magnified for both the organization and the talented employees.

Talent management includes the following activities and work processes:

• Develop clear job descriptions, so you know the skills, abilities, and experience needed from a new employee.
• Select appropriate employees who have superior potential and fit your organization’s culture, with an appropriate selection process.
• Negotiate requirements and accomplishment-based performance standards, outcomes, and measures within a performance development planning system.
• Provide effective employee onboarding and ongoing training and development opportunities that reflect both the employee’s and the organization’s needs.
• Provide on-going coaching, mentoring, and feedback, so the employee feels valued and important.
• Conduct quarterly performance development planning discussions that focus on the employee’s interests for career development.
• Design effective compensation and recognition systems that reward people for their contributions. Even if all of the rest of your employment processes are employee-oriented, people still work for money. Employers of choice aim to pay above market for talented employees.
• Provide promotional and career development opportunities for employees within a system that includes career paths, succession planning, and on-the-job training opportunities.
• Hold exit interviews to understand why a valued employee decided to leave the organization. If the reasons provide information about company systems that you can improve, make the changes that will better retain talented employees.

Conduct regular employee reviews to keep employee performance on the track

The value of a well-defined performance management process is three-fold.

First, a performance appraisal is an important opportunity for employees & managers to discuss goals & competencies, challenges and development needs if any. Getting regular feedback helps employees perform at their best.

Second, appraisals help managers and HR identify those who are not performing well and take corrective action for the same.

Finally, documenting the history of an employee’s performance helps managers and HR make critical decisions such as workforce restructuring and rightsizing, as and when needed.

Align individual and organizational goals and effectively track their progress

Aligning the goals of an individual with those of the organization is an important talent management best-practice. It is the responsibility of the companies to make sure that their employees are all focused on contributing to their success. You need to ensure that everyone is working on the right things such that the organization is pushed further ahead in the direction of its goals.  Leaders need to step in and take corrective measures as and when sufficient progress is not being made.

Quickly and effectively communicating any change in priorities or strategies is equally important. Changes that impact the goals of an organization need to be communicated to everyone whose individual goals are linked to those of the organization.

Provide ongoing feedback to maximize performance

Regular feedback helps everyone maximize their performance. Managers and employees can quickly take corrective actions when things start to go off track. Ongoing feedback makes performance appraisal faster and easier for everyone to complete. Having quarterly or semi-annual reviews is more effective than the formal, annual ones.

Identify and reward high performing employees

Know who your high potential and well-performing employees are. You may not always be able to reward them with salary hikes or bonuses but demonstrating the commitment of the organization towards such individuals will help in the long run. You could reward them with initiatives that will help them move up in their career, perhaps even prepare for a promotion. Acknowledging their performance and potential will help retain such employees.

Invest in performance-based development

Use your employees’ appraisals to identify gaps in their skills and offer the right kind of training that they need. The Learning and Development department should spot areas where employees individually have scored low and offer training to each accordingly. Similarly, they need to look at the overall scores and identify the critical competencies lacking in the employees. It is important that you also extract value from such training by measuring the change in employee performance as against the appraisal process.