Best Practices in Executing Your Talent Management Goals in a Fluid Environment

Best practices for talent management

To compete in today’s market, talent management must be focused on growth, foundation, and resilience. Taking a definitive stance on growth and resilience will give companies a chance to pivot quickly while maintaining its strong values and foundational infrastructure that has brought the company so much success.
Research shows that traditional practices, such as annual appraisals, are outdated and lower employee morale and motivation. As a result, more organizations than ever before are turning to talent management.
This dynamic and proactive approach to improving employee performance is gaining traction in large and small businesses, including numerous Fortune 500 corporations and industry leaders.
In practice, talent management entails management’s ongoing efforts to develop their staff, set clear targets, and provide timely feedback all year round. In contrast to other evaluation methods, such as annual appraisals, employee performance management is a far more dynamic and engaged process with superior results.
Overall, talent management is a necessary means for recruiting, developing, and retaining talent and evaluating their performance to make critical decisions about their future in the company.


Why Talent Management Is Critical Today
Talent management is regarded as an ancillary function best delegated to the personnel department. Today, Talent Management is a considerably more crucial organizational function and critical to the success of a company/team.
Organizations currently spend over one-third of their revenues on employee compensation and benefits, so this focus on talent management is unavoidable. You can easily duplicate any new product you develop. If you lower your pricing, your competitors will do the same. If you go after a lucrative industry, someone will come after you.
However, it is impossible to duplicate a high-quality, highly engaged staff. The ability to successfully recruit, retain, mobilize, and engage talent—at all levels—is truly an organization’s sole true competitive advantage.
Peter Capelli, a colleague, and professor at the Wharton School at UPENN speaks about how we must deploy a new approach to people management, one that considers the current state of business unpredictability.
Fortunately, organizations already have a supply chain management model, which has been fine-tuned over decades to predict and meet demand in challenging settings. Firms can create a new model of people management that is adaptable to today’s circumstances by taking insights from operations and supply chain studies.
One such company is the largest asset management company in the world: BlackRock.
After the 2008 recession, BlackRock focused on talent growth rather than downsizing. This gave BlackRock a substantial competitive advantage over its competitors that were downsizing during that time. Even during that difficult period, the company’s sales, profitability, and stock price all performed consistently.
So, what helped BlackRock to achieve this? It exemplifies the critical characteristics of a game-changing organization: it is purpose-driven, results-oriented, and values-driven. BlackRock’s Executives said they are delighted that the firm’s 11,000-plus employees follow four core principles: be accountable to their clients, be enthusiastic about performance, be visionaries, and be “one BlackRock.”
The company’s talent strategy is laser-focused on facilitating, and in some cases, driving its financial objectives. The talent strategy of BlackRock is comprehensive, taking into account factors at the company, departmental, regional, and business unit levels. Overall the company’s talent strategy adds value and is highly effective at attracting, recruiting, retaining, and developing the best talent in the industry.
Based on the actions of BlackRock and other successful companies to manage talent in their organizations, the following are five best practices for talent management to accomplish your goals in a fluid environment.


Invest in Talent at All Levels
Investing solely in people with “managerial potential” is a proven way to disconnect your entire workforce—and waste a lot of money. A study found that firms spent more than $70 billion on training in 2016, but when they failed to consider the individual needs of employees of various roles and experience levels, the company wasted that money.
Therefore, it is essential to invest in your entire workforce by providing opportunities for training and growth that will benefit everyone. These initiatives demonstrate your commitment to your employees’ success and help build a fluid workplace environment.


Align Talent Strategy with Business Strategy
Your business objectives and strategy must drive the quality and amount of talent you require for effective talent management. Research co-created by Best Practice Institute’s top Chief Talent Officer corporate senior executive members showcases that over 90% of best-in-class companies align talent management systems and functions with and driven by corporate strategy.

Be Transparent and Streamlined
Create processes for internal mobility, even if it’s only lateral movement. Many people seek career opportunities that will allow them to advance, and if they prefer a different role, do not be hesitant to let them switch.
Providing such chances for talent mobility might help you reduce turnover by giving employees more ways to interact with your company. Consider developing an internal career development framework to assist employees in having informed and relevant career discussions. You can also create a career site for both internal and external prospects so that everyone can see what opportunities are available at your company.


Develop Leaders From Within the Organization
The development of leaders from inside the organization succeeds by continually collaborating between managers and employees. Recruiting costs and the costs of onboarding and training new staff can be very costly.
To create leaders from within the organization means that the said person already has a confirmed match with the company’s culture and that the training expenditures and resources spent turning this person into a leader will not be wasted.


Focus on Fluid Talent
Fluid talent is an ever-evolving strategy to career planning that adapts to fluctuating team member expectations. Organizations can set the framework for attracting, engaging, and retaining people by adopting flexible talent management approaches.


Final Word
Your employees are the heart and soul of your company, and you must show them you care about them. More importantly, you must provide them with the opportunity to grow out, move around, and realize their true talents. The best practices for talent management to achieve this objective are detailed above.


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