Talent Management Skills

Talent is any organisation’s most important asset. A good talent management strategy produces more engaged employees, improved performance, and big impact on the bottom line. Our solutions will help you to implement a strategy that meets your goals.

With the constantly increasing pace of change in the business world, and the competition to recruit and retain the best talent high, having a strong talent management strategy should be firmly at the top of your organisation’s agenda. Recruiting and retaining the best people in the right place at the right time has never been more challenging.

Research has shown that organisations with a strong talent management strategy are 31% more effective in engaging their employees and have only 1% turnover rate among their high performers.

Deloitte

Do you truly understand what your organisation needs in order to implement its strategy and achieve its goals? Can you demonstrate how your department contributes to the company’s overall financial performance through well-placed and effectively managed employees?

The skill involved in revolves around the fact that what is considered to be ‘talent’ is unique to that organisation, especially where it directly supports a particular strategic priority. Whether attempting to develop the existing workforce or attract new talent, you will need to define “what good looks like” in the context of your own organisation and map your employees onto a matrix of performance and potential. This benchmarking process provides a clearer picture of your talent pipeline and any anticipated shortfalls should any high-value individuals move on.

So how do you ensure you have a winning talent strategy?

The key to real success is to align your strategy with the goals of the organisation, allowing you to be one-step ahead of your competitors, prepared to compete in the market, enabling you to quickly take on new opportunities that may arise. This goal alignment also means you are empowering your workforce by setting them up for success, ensuring they are ready and capable to meet those overall goals.

Knowing what the business really needs to succeed is the first step in placing (and keeping) the most talented and appropriate individuals to enable those plans. A comprehensive talent strategy does not just focus on new hires; it serves the entire employee lifecycle, including training or redeploying existing resource to fill those without incurring huge cost.

Some of the key components of your talent strategy should include:

• Business strategy alignment
• Recruitment
• Learning and development
• Performance management
• Reward and recognition
• Organisational performance
• Succession planning

Once you are clear on the goals and strategic direction of your organisation, you will then be in a position to begin looking at what skills and expertise is required to help drive this forward.

The next step is to identify the talent that you have in your organisation and create a benchmark. At Thomas, we recommend profiling your workforce to allow you to explore and map out the competencies, strengths, hard and soft skills and training needs for each individual.

Following your analysis, you now have the data required to begin to truly understand your workforce. What motivates each individual? How do they like to work? What are their strengths and their weaknesses? How do they like to communicate? Being able to answer these types of questions opens up the opportunity for managers to be able to adapt to the preferences of their team members, and delegate projects that will maximise the strengths of each individual. By assigning tasks to the most appropriately skilled worker means they will be more satisfied in their role, productivity and engagement will increase, and in turn, the organisation as a whole will benefit from a happier, more productive workforce, who are more likely to want to stay and progress in the organisation.

This data will also help you to assess any development needs across the business, and future recruitment can be guided by skills gaps that have been identified.

A properly aligned talent strategy can require additional support to aid the implementation, such as change management and training and development. Implementing a new talent strategy can drive change, so careful planning of that process will also be required, to assess readiness for the change, identify any barriers and create a plan to smooth the transition. To achieve maximum value from your investment in the talent strategy, your managers must be motivated and fully trained on the new tools and processes, so training and development requirements will go beyond those identified within the strategy.

A one size fits all approach to your talent strategy will not lead to success. It is critical to value your employees as individuals and to understand their specific needs. Our solutions will help you to develop, shape and implement a strategy that meets the goals of your organisation