Identifying the skills gap, nurturing talent and filling vacant positions through L&D and HR interventions is a critical priority for the success and growth of any organization.  And, this calls for a sustainable talent pipeline that consistently identifies and prepares talent for open positions across the organization. But building a sustainable talent pipeline is easier said than done, which is why L&D readiness is of utmost importance to make an organization future-proof and give the desired competitive advantage.

 In a recent webcast by People Matters and UpsideLMS on L&D Readiness & Building a Sustainable Talent Pipeline, led by Anita Chhabria, Deputy General Manager, International HR at Gulf Oil International, and Amit Gautam, CEO, UpsideLMS, shared insights, tips and tricks on talent management, HR and L&D interventions for internal development, optimizing performance calibration and L&D agility.

 Here are the key learnings from the webcast:

Why align talent management with Business Strategy?

Business strategy is a compass that navigates any corporation. According to a recent study conducted by Quantum Workplace along with HBR,  81percent of the business leaders surveyed strongly agree that a highly engaged workforce performs better and is more productive towards achieving any business strategy. This finding goes on to show us that business strategy is a culmination of the vision and mission of the organization along with the organizational attributes and backed by the megatrends that operate in the market. Once the strategy is formulated, the rest of the department also derives their own vision and plan towards achieving the common business goals. Having said that, people are the most important asset for an organization so it is only natural to maintain a synergy between the business strategy as well as talent within the organization.

Anita shares, “Cognitively speaking, this is rather a simple process but when you come on ground, the reality can be very different and challenging. To achieve this one of the important ingredients is sticking to the compliances. So we need to review compliances as an enabler and not as a pause.”

Many of our hard-wired process methodologies undergo a definite change if we have a requisite mindset and this mindset will only come through rather the valuable talent within the organization. We have all these licenses, sanctions, the legality and if the regulatory policies are taken care of, it will only provide the required space for the organization to allow and grow the latent in line with the business strategy. So it is definitely an enabler that we need to value.

Channelizing the energy of talent can prove to be a real stepping-stone in formulating and achieving the success of any organization. The seamless adoption and multiple professional skills that we would want to attribute and give across to our talent is only going to help us with creating a  robust learning culture that would also provide them with a natural sense of belonging to the organization in order to achieve the business goals.

Amit shares, “ In my experience, any strategy and not just business strategy, is as good as people who would execute it.”

He further shares, “We should see talent as the skills available today but rather review our talent as- are we ready as a company to face challenges of the future. Across all the levels of the company, there should be foolproof succession planning which not only means replacing people but reskilling, upskilling, unlearning and learning new things.”

Addressing talent gaps through internal development

 Most business crises do not come up with a playbook for us. Challenges could be operational, functional, product-based, culture-induced, or talent gaps. Talent gap identification is a very standardized and uniform five-step process to be followed by any organization. It all begins with identifying the business orientation, followed by the anticipation of needs for the future- what kind of knowledge base you need, which skills you require and what attributes will the organization have value in time to come. This is followed by reviewing talent and making a repository of skills that can be leveraged in other departments to create a unified impact. This step is further followed by designing a lucid plan which eventually will result in the implantation of the learning strategy.

 Another important point shared during the webcast was to shed older practices and embrace new ways of learning. Training should not necessarily be dominated by an instructor. It could be a byte size learning, e-learning platform supported by innumerable videos, podcasts, webinars, etc. Hence, challenge the existing paradigms of learning.

The role of agility in talent management process

“Aim for the moon for if you miss, you will still stand among the stars.” This is the case with corporate agility as well. It is completely based on a mindset shift and is achieved through deep customer collaboration and adaptive learning methodology.

We are looking at quick fixes, something that is seamless, and somewhere people can be rearranged quickly and creatively without making major structural changes or even fundamental changes to the organizational setup. That is where agility takes centre stage- agility in terms of processes, in terms of methodology, in terms of solutions and execution on the ground. The utopian world we would want to live in is frankly getting replaced by a VUCA environment which doesn’t only disrupt a lot of things that we believed in or grew up with. It is completely blurring our geographical boundaries and also business leaders require to take multi-pronged approach. The brick and mortar office setup that we were also used to has to take a back seat. We need to adapt and reinvent continuously for effective talent management.

Blended learning approach is an apt example of agility which has allowed us to take learning online, digitize it, and gives us a chance to combine our functional learning, technical learning as well as a plethora of behavioral courses to deal with. It will certainly help us solve our operational challenges and help us internally develop talent.

To get complete access to the webcast, click here.