The art of strategic talent management is multifaceted in its approach, so that the right people with the right attitude are recruited, rewarded and retained. It’s also a slightly subjective topic to discuss because it relies on a stable definition of what a great employee looks like.
Different companies may have different definitions of what a great employee is. Attitudes and aptitudes are considered more important than formal qualifications, at least according to UCAS. Did you know that half of employers don’t hire young people because they don’t have the right attitude? However, some businesses may not care about attitude or aptitude, as long as the new hire was plucked from Oxford or Cambridge.
Yet, there are working models in place to help organisations manage people regardless of subjectivity. The key to a fruitful, long-term business outcome is in having a crack team of talent professionals who know how these models work.
Let’s dig deeper into what effective, inclusive talent management looks like, and what employers can do to build and support HR talent management teams.
Having a people-first outlook
Technology could help many organisations operate more effectively and efficiently. In fact, despite rising business costs, IT spend in the UK is expected to hold steady. Analysts predict business leaders will spend more on IT solutions with a view to solving challenging problems. Technology, it appears, isn’t something to scrimp on, even when times are tough.
However, technology alone solves nothing. People are at the heart of every great endeavour, and the challenges businesses face can be met with this in mind. If talent management is the process of onboarding the right talent and helping them develop, the skills required to do this won’t be found in computer code. This is because computers haven’t developed soft skills (yet).
These in-demand skills, as outlined by the BBC, comprise qualities such as critical thinking, communication, empathy, teamwork and compassion. Soft skills are often associated with emotional intelligence. These are skills cited as being essential components for developing talent. For instance, emotional intelligence expert Daniel Goleman highlights how self-awareness can help leaders better recognise emotional cues in those around them.
A focus on investment in training soft skills could go a long way towards nurturing a culture of emotional intelligence. A people-first outlook could propel larger organisations into top ten lists of ‘best companies to work for’. For instance, Dutch design company Arcadis cited its people-first culture as influential in gaining a high ranking on such a list.
The Arcadis UK CEO, Mark Cowland, gave this enlightening quote: ‘We’ve been listening to the needs of our colleagues and have implemented actions and improvements such as strengthening leadership skills and improving our processes to recognise colleagues.’
Being able to recognise and reward colleagues
As Mark Cowland says, leadership skills play a significant role. To improve HR talent management practices and encourage inclusive talent management, business leaders should lead from the front. It is managers who know and understand what is expected from employees, and it is managers that know and understand employee wants and needs. It should also be managers who know when management teams are ‘the cause of obstruction’ (Vistage: Talent management: The comprehensive guide for leadership teams).
Yet, it takes training and development to build a reliable management structure that can underpin the cultural values of an organisation. The ONS states that ‘employees who participate in in-work training and education are more likely to receive managerial or supervisory responsibilities’. This highlights the significant impact training and development schemes can have on improving in-house leadership skills.
Organisations should ensure inclusivity is embedded into their talent management programmes. When business leaders and managers drive change in what employees do daily, employees will see the most impact. Furthermore, if talent management training emphasises the significance of how better business outcomes derive from managing people better, all the good. This is a point Andrea Walsh and Alison Thumel press home in their article, Embedding inclusion and diversity into your talent management strategy. They add that it’s important to provide managers with the tools they need to ‘help them bring inclusion and diversity strategy to life’.
When business leaders recognise and reward employees at all levels of the business, organisations may see better productivity outcomes (77% of employees say they would work harder if they felt better recognised). Inclusive, in this context of course, meaning the opposite of exclusive, where the talents of a few high-potential workers are rewarded. The key is to recognise the talents of everyone (and with training, be able to).
Avoid the costs of employee churn
It could be reasonably argued that it takes soft skills and emotional intelligence to know when dormant talent exists. Some employees may have worked in one department for too long without stretching their capabilities. Some managers, relying on performance and productivity metrics perhaps, may see this employee as having ‘past their best’. A well-trained, emotionally intelligent manager may consider an alternative scenario, where the employee finds new life and enthusiasm elsewhere in the business.
This is an example of smart, inclusive leadership. The ability to read social cues that inform our decisions as employers could be better than relying on performance algorithms. A spreadsheet may tell us one thing, but an empathetic manager may well have an alternative read on a specific situation.
It’s these situations employers should look to nurture, so that organisational culture becomes a sustainable, fertile environment for recruiting and retaining talent. Backed by a robust talent management programme, organisations could avoid a costly scenario that sees employees leave en masse. Employee churn can lead to the deterioration of company culture, not to mention the financial repercussions.
With so much at stake in a competitive landscape, it’s worth investing in talent management programmes that strengthen businesses from within.
