Article: Firms fail in integrating talent management

Strategic HR

Firms fail in integrating talent management

Despite recognizing talent management as a crucial aspect of business, organizations fail to take advantage of talent solutions that integrate fully with the core HR Systems
 

The most important challenge that HR practitioners face today, is to ensure that their employees feel empowered

 

Organizations attempt to adopt a global system of processes with local variations, which could be specific to individual country rules, regulation and culture

 

Despite recognizing talent management as a crucial aspect of business, organizations fail to take advantage of talent solutions that integrate fully with the core HR Systems

If we study the current business situation, a majority of senior executives throughout the world face three key challenges in meeting their business objectives: (i) Restructuring company’s processes during mergers and acquisitions, (ii) re-optimization of company’s revenue mix, which could be a result of increase in domain or region and (iii) adherence to regulatory compliances.
To address organizational business challenges, a company needs to have an agile and empowered workforce, which is capable of approaching and solving issues. Consider a case of an M&A where one of the key focus areas during the restructuring process is to find the right leaders who are empowered to absorb these reforming challenges. During any M&A, there is always a tendency of the acquired company to fail to absorb the people assets in consistency with the newly formed organization. A key feature of talent management is to analyze and model workforce skill pool to accurately plan for future.
The second aspect of talent management that is related to business is of revenue optimization. Consider a case where you are changing the revenue mix and business models; there is need to find new talent that can drive the business forward. The last aspect is related to globalization. With new regulatory pressures emerging worldwide, organizations need to be consistent with its policies and develop talent just to maintain regional interest.

An integrated approach for better and effective Talent Management
Talent management is an integrated and comprehensive process. Within the organization, the process must be top down. The integrated approach would entail the following:

(i) Companies must identify its business objective, whether the focus is on growth, whether on restructuring or perhaps a combination of both and how it translates down to people objectives.
(ii) Then, you need to optimize employee contribution by delivering the right learning in the most effective format.
(iii) There should be continuous measurement and refinement of company objectives and also objectives laid down for people that should be aligned to the corporate objectives. This whole alignment of objectives and measuring people against those objectives is the crux of what is traditionally called Performance Management.
(iv) The fourth step is compensation, benefits and how to reward people. A total rewards profile for the employees should be maintained, which is indexed with corporate objectives as well as individual results.
(v) Finally comes succession planning, where you identify your top talent and develop a formal succession plan.

The role of the HR practitioner today is to bring all this together and be able to measure the impact of the HR process against corporate business objectives.

Latest HCM industry trends
HCM industry trends today are two dimensional, regional and industry based. Organizations attempt to adopt a global system of processes with local variations, which could be specific to individual country rules, regulation and culture. We call this a ‘Glocal’ solution, implying that though the system and processes are global, it has a strong influence of the local trends of that country.
Talent management is also going through a similar phase – developing talent and more importantly cultivating leaders and viewing leadership as a collaborative process. The idea of creating leaders from within the organization holds importance today. Interestingly, one other trend prevalent in international markets is the co-existence of multiple generations in the workforce, popularly called Gen X, Gen Y and Gen Z – all performing very similar roles, but with very different aspirations.
Another aspect catered by the HCM cycle is workforce planning, for instance, how to plan the workforce five years hence, keeping in mind regulatory pressures; or how training should be organized so that employees are ready to move on to the next level within three to five years.

THE CHALLENGES
The most important challenge that HR practitioners face today is to ensure that their employees feel empowered.
In addition to this, employees need to be motivated and retained. Employee recognition and a need for a formal employee engagement and workforce communication system to interact with them is also a mandate. Another challenge which must be addressed is to enable employees to communicate their aspirations, problems and also involve them to have a collaborative view in the decision making process and contain their opinion on where they would like to see the business go.
The most important characteristic to address these challenges is the ability of the organization’s will to acknowledge that there is a challenge. Implementing clear, consistent and collaborative processes across the organization can be another step to address challenges. Technology plays a vital role in supporting talent management. Organizations can address its needs and challenges by adopting a comprehensive solution that can effectively manage an organization’s talent and the entire HCM lifecycle together. Developing and maintaining a database, which maintains accurate employee information, profiles in the prescribed format, competencies, skill sets, performance ratings, training records among other details, go a long way in producing positive results.


Anand Subbaraman is Senior Director, Product Strategy and Human Resource Capital at Oracle

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Topics: Strategic HR, Performance Management

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