As organization become more and more flat, growth for an individual will come from enhanced knowledge or depth, and the ability to learn and do new things. The focus of talent management will be to help people manage their growth by actively enchaining job knowledge along with cross functional exposure.

The new workplace would focus on developing domain expertise, while providing adequate movement to people within roles to allow the required excitement at work. While it is essential to provide the gen next workforce with variety in role and experience to maintain their excitement at work, the same can become counter-productive if organizations shy away from creating domain expertise. Therefore, the challenge for managers will be to find innovative ways to provide job movement and job enrichment, by allowing adequate focus on building domain expertise along with ensuring that the focus does not take away the excitement from the job, and this will call for innovations in the talent management strategy.

To manage growth expectations of people at Kotak, we have brought about a change in our performance management system. The earlier system envisaged a biannual performance feedback system which was more developmental in nature. The current endeavor is to move it to a more granular performance management system which allows a formal meeting on a monthly basis with one’s supervisor to help individuals to be aware of what has worked well for him/her and what requires more attention.

Going forward, the HR function will need to practice a certain amount of flexibility in managing talent. The older and more stringent processes with strict timelines may not work when managing the challenges of the new talent pool. HR will also have to focus on enabling greater productivity by helping talent settle down quickly on the job. The onboarding process will take a new shape to provide the required infrastructure for people to become productive quickly. Thus, talent management in the new workplace will primarily focus on enabling flexibility and productivity at the workplace.