If your organization’s future success could be predicted by how well you attract, develop, and retain talented employees, would you bet on your organization’s future? Talent is, in fact, the strongest predictor of success, and an organization’s ability to attract, develop, engage, and retain talent will continue to contribute its competitive advantage.
Has your talent management strategy positioned you for future success?
Most business leaders understand the obvious challenges facing them when it comes to talent acquisition. Countless reports have cited the many contributing factors to filling open positions: demographic shifts, fewer post-baby-boom workers ready and available to replace the retiring baby-boomers, low unemployment suggesting that those who want a job are able to get a job, and a growing economy likely to further add jobs to the marketplace. Additionally, while the war to attract talent continues, many business leaders have been quietly battling a second front focused on retaining their top talent.
Are Your Employees Targets?
It will give you no comfort in knowing that your employees are potential targets for your competitors, suppliers, distributors, affiliates, and in some cases, entirely different industries. As the competition for talent continues to grow, active acquisition will be an emphasis of the game plan.
As a business leader, you have an opportunity to minimize your losses, and in doing so, improve your position to attract job seekers. Here are a few things you can do to support your organization’s ability to enhance employee-staying power.
Make Talent Management a strategic directive. The best investment an organization can make is in the formulation of a strategic plan to guide the organization’s growth. A critical component of any plan must address talent capacity, knowledge, and the capability needed to support existing business and execute on future growth initiatives.
Identify short-term and long-range talent-related risks and opportunities. Talent management extends beyond recruitment, development, and retention efforts. Conducting a comprehensive assessment of your organization’s talent management approach as a means of identifying immediate actions will help to shore up recruitment processes, onboarding, training, development, and engagement opportunities.
Develop your leaders and emphasize their importance in talent management. To be effective in managing talent, leaders must be more deliberate with their actions. They need to recognize that while they make hiring and firing decisions, their daily actions create the working environment, influence attitudes and behaviors by the example they set, and foster engagement of workers through comments, feedback, evaluation, and coaching. Developing your leaders to be consistently effective will have a multiplying effect on the work culture and positively impact retention and recruitment efforts.
Foster a culture that promotes learning and development. For more than 20 years, research has predicted business growth would outpace availability of a talented workforce. It should now be clear to everyone that the skills shortage is an ever-present challenge. Unless you can afford to pay premium rates for short-term gains, your best long-term bet is to invest in employee development and grow the type of talent you need.
Seek to understand and optimize employee engagement. Different things can influence engagement for different people. Seek to understand what motivates your employees and how to optimize those opportunities to create value for your employees. Employees who feel valued are more likely to be engaged, report being happier, are more content with their work, tend to be more productive, and are less likely to change jobs.
When it comes to business performance, there are many factors that predict success, none as critical as the capacity of the right talent to remain actively engaged in executing on mission critical work. Today more than ever, mission critical is all about the talent. Without it, you’re not growing…and, according to William S. Burroughs, ‘When you stop growing, you start dying.”