Three Talent Management Practices To Build a “Talent Magnet” Workplace

Digital workforce planning and management has to become more analytic and systematic, strategic and innovative.

At the age of digital, businesses today need nothing less than a paradigm shift in their thinking about the fundamentals of how organizations work and fine tune the structure to build an engaging workforce and “talent magnet” workplace. The reality is that the organizational structures and relationships with and between employees were designed for a very different age. It's not just a leadership/ management issue; most organizations are grossly dysfunctional, despite often noble attempts at change by the leadership team. What are the best and next workforce practices to improve employees’ engagement and satisfaction and achieve long term high performance of the business?

Attraction: If businesses are wanting to grow, the first question is how they are attracting the brightest and talented people for lifting companies to the next level. Building an inspiring employer brand is a huge challenge for most companies. It is easier to attract talent than to find it, the challenge for organizations is to attempt to become an "employer of choice." It requires outreach and constantly being on the lookout for opportunities to raise your profile where it can be most productive. So it is important for a company who injects an "employment brand/personality" into their recruiting messaging and efforts. Leveraging the emergent digital talent management pipeline and take integral approach. An employer's brand stems from its internal company culture. Leveraging this in recruiting efforts is a great way to attract and retain top candidates for the business's long term prosperity.

Engagement: How do you engage people, and then how do their remuneration and performance management systems reinforce the organizational strategy. The “talent magnet” organizations are good at putting the right people with the right capability in the right position to solve the right problems. The studies show that the majority of people are not engaged in their jobs because their talent is not being utilized; though every employee has individual reasons for not being engaged that is rarely revealed by engagement and exit studies. If you have someone in a role where their natural strengths and talents are being recognized and utilized, they will be engaged. They will also have greater passion because they are doing what they are good at doing. It is also important to pay more attention to those top culprits of low employee engagement include: poor communication from the top down; lack of development opportunities or career prospects; lack of healthy culture such as fairness, innovation, learning, etc, and lack of visionary leadership to motivate employees and leap their organization up to the next level.  

Potential & Performance management: Performance keeps your business running, and potential enables the business growth, it is important to manage both well. The top team has significant influence on implementing Performance Management into practice in the digital way. The true value of an employee would rather be measured by his or her quality, creativity, and productivity. There is a big difference between cost and quality. The true value of an employee is demonstrated when the employee acts as an ambassador of the organization; brings the advanced digital mindset, knowledge, skills, abilities and personal attitude that translates into expected performance outcomes. A valuable employee is a self motivator who makes positive influence; stays current in their field/profession; freely innovates, creates alternative solutions to existing or emergent problems, figure out the new ways of working; mentors and coaches others (reducing training and development costs and positively impacting on the performance of others), each one of them is also like the magnet to attract more talented people to come to the board. Measure both "thinking performance" and "doer performance," accordingly, in order to enhance both the hard and soft success factors of the business. Performance Management should not be confined at the top but to all levels, at strategic areas where Performance Management can bring desired results for the business via an integral people management solution for the business’s long term prosperity.

Digital workforce planning and management has to become more analytic and systematic, strategic and innovative, do not just think people as cost or resource only, but as assets and capital to invest in. It does mean that whatever workforce management programs you run align with business’s strategic goal; follow digital trend and leverage the latest digital platforms for developing the next and best practices, to unleash the collective human potential and achieve long term business results.

Posted in: Principle/Practice,Talent Master