Talent Management

What is it?

Talent management enables you to attract and retain the right people for your organisation to deliver superior performance.

Why is it important?

To quote the clichés – ‘people are your greatest asset’ and ‘people provide your competitive advantage’. But as everyone has experienced, employing people with the right skills, attitudes and behaviours makes a huge difference to business success.

First you need to attract and recruit talented people, then you need to develop them, keep them motivated and reward them appropriately. All this needs HR policies and procedures which support these requirements and training and guidance to implement them effectively.

Recruitment

The hardest – and the most critical stage. Get this right and you have a new asset for your organisation; get it wrong and you have a liability. How well do you identify what job you want done and what skills and attribute someone needs to be successful in that job? What tools and techniques can and do you use to assess the candidates? The statistics demonstrate that interviews alone are a poor predictor of potential. We can help you plan a strategy to attract good candidates and assess their aptitudes for the job(s) you want them to do.

Development

Many organisations use 360 degree feedback to identify development needs, particularly for managers. Using this method a person can seek feedback about their performance against a range of specific behaviours from their boss, colleagues and direct reports against which their own assessment can be compared. The results identify strengths and areas for development. The strengths can be used to plan new areas of activity or responsibility or perhaps the next career move. There is a school of thought, which I subscribe to, that if people can work in a role that plays to their strengths, they are much more likely to enjoy what they do and therefore to be successful. There is lots of evidence that development which enables people to become even better in their areas of strength is much more successful provides a return on investment compared to focussing on remedial actions to improve areas which need development.

We work with an associate company which designs web based 360 degree feedback tools which can be directly tailored to and linked with your organisation’s competency framework.

Succession Planning

What are you currently doing to build the future leaders in your organisation? How do you identify them and what is in place to develop their skills and abilities to face the business challenges of the future.

We can work with you to develop strategies to address gaps in this area.

Organisational Culture

What does your organisation pay attention to? There are explicit and tacit signs of this. The explicit signs might be espoused organisational values, displayed in your premises, set out in employee literature and referred to in your performance management systems. The implicit signs could be how people are recognised and rewarded, which may or may not fit with what is written in the employee handbook.

Organisational culture is ‘the way things are done around here’ – and in the most successful organisations there is alignment between what is said and done. And action speaks louder than words, so regardless of what is written in the company newsletter or the employee handbook, people know that what they see happening is what counts.

Changing organisational culture is not for the faint-hearted – yet there are huge benefits of doing so! And there are approaches which really can make a difference. Building on employee strengths is one of these. Organisations like Sony, Yahoo, BAE Systems and Microsoft are using a strengths-based approach to improve retention and improve levels of employee engagement to great effect. Supported by the use of psychometric tools like Strengthscope (link to it on Tools page) and coaching, adopting a strengths based approach can help support and embed culture change – for the positive.

The following link explains more about the benefits of using strengths to change organisational culture:

• The strong shall inherit the earth

Employee Engagement

What proportion of your employees believe that life is what happens outside work? Imagine what it would be like if they were really involved and engaged in what they are doing at work? But how to achieve that….? That is where we can help. We can help you identify appropriate practices for your business and train key people at all levels to lead and facilitate this process.

Performance Management

Having in place a performance management process that both adds value to business performance and creates a developmental, satisfying and rewarding place to work is a challenge for many organisations. We can help design, test and implement a performance management framework that drives your business forward. One of the most important success criteria is training and coaching managers to talk tough – to tell employees how it is and identify what needs to be done to improve levels of performance. We can help you identify the means to assess current levels of performance. Coupled with feedback, this can enable you to measure what needs to change to improve performance at an individual, team, departmental or corporate level (or indeed all of them).

Pay

What determines pay progression in your organisation – market, performance, contribution or just being there? Pay is seen by many as an important element in performance management schemes because they believe it is a key motivator; it delivers the message that performance and competence are important, and it is fair to reward people according to their performance, contribution or competence. We can help you ensure that your approach to pay is aligned with your business goals.