Article: Future talent managers will influence, not control

Technology

Future talent managers will influence, not control

Rajesh Padmanabhan, President & Group CHRO of Vedanta Group says technology commands more involvement of future leaders
Future talent managers will influence, not control
 

A talent manager needs to change his/her approach towards talent management and become an influencer rather than a manager

 

Technology will become a core differentiator for HR in the future. Leaders and talent managers will be spending much more time with talent compared to what they do now. While technology will make working relationships different, there will be a greater need for building personal connections. Telepresence, virtual working, remote partnerships will become commonplace realities, but talent managers cannot continue with the assumption that such conveniences will automatically translate into happy talent. They will have to put genuine efforts to build an engaged workforce.

There will be four key areas where technology will have the maximum influence in the way HR operates. They are:

Talent acquisition: Technology is already disrupting the talent acquisition space and more radical changes are expected. Passive talent searches do not reside in talent databases and talent acquisition managers are talking about building communities, networks and the power of connections. The introduction of Big Data will undoubtedly make massive transformations in the way recruiters view talent and the market. A lot of the talent acquisition in the future will be churned out of networks.

Social learning: Learning of the future will become much less formal and will be driven by the community. There will be less prevalence of enterprise learning modules as it will be a function of how effectively an organization steers learning from the outside world. Talent organization’s biggest job will be ensuring the enablement of external learning.

Employee engagement: The world of employee sentiment and feedback is already taking social forms and engagement will be driven by what people are saying within and outside the organization. Management of engagement, therefore, cannot make distinctions between internal and external.

Brand: The key necessity of brand engagement would be to propagate the enterprise and employer brand within and outside the organization. There is a great need for internal employees to perceive the brand well, while external talent should also get the right impressions about the brand. Employer branding, therefore, will converge the internal and the external.

The biggest change that a talent manager needs to bring is the approach towards talent management. A talent manager needs to become an influencer rather than a manager. Her/his job should be to influence sentiment, rather than manage individual aspects of the function. All individual aspects will be executed and managed better through technology than they currently are. As a result, the need for a manager or a leader to increase her/his touch points with teams and people in the organization will increase. Their primary goal would be to influence people in the organization, not control them. Technology, therefore, will not empower them to have greater control over people. On the contrary, given that talent management will be a function driven by the talent participants themselves, the investments needed by leaders and managers to influence positive energy will become greater.

One cannot discount the impact of Big Data and analytics in human resource management in the future. These will be the tools that a talent manager will have to accurately identify and predict talent indicators such as leadership needs, customer sentiment and employee issues. It will be genuinely possible for a talent manager to take these indicators and tie them to business needs of the organization. Cloud holds the most amount of promise in the HR technology space. Cloud simplifies several pieces of the technology puzzle that talent managers face. They include easier administration, hosting, and servicing. Cloud will also be one of the biggest reasons of bringing down employee costs in the future.

The influence of technology in HR and talent management in the future cannot be emphasized enough. The biggest change in the HR and talent manager’s role portfolio that technology will bring is the execution of the core essence of HR – relationships.

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Topics: Technology, #BestPractices, #ExpertViews

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