Keep Your Keepers! A Winning Talent Strategy for 2017 – Part 1

Build a Foundation of Integrated Talent Management that Drives Engagement!

As we embark on a promising new year, organizations are positioning talent strategies to meet their business goals. Regardless of the industry, achieving alignment of talent goals with business objectives is essential for strategic and organizational success. Foundational to effective talent management is an integrated approach that facilitates engagement. To effectively identify your organization’s top talent management priorities, it is crucial to understand your business strategy. Only then can talent management processes be aligned effectively to that strategy.

Organizations of all sizes are realizing the value of technology to support the integration of talent processes and achieve efficiencies and effectiveness. Wherever you are in this integration strategy, change management forms the foundation to success. That takes a significant commitment of time and leadership buy-in from the top of the organization to front line leaders and across functions.

Bersin’s Integrated talent management (TM) model demonstrates that central to successful integration of various talent processes is the goal to drive engagement and ultimately increase retention.

In fact, this is one of the primary reasons integrated TM is so vital. Based on extensive research, by increasing engagement and retention, organizations achieve significant bottom line results:

• 26% higher revenue per employee
• 28% less likely to have downsized in the 2008 recession
• 40% lower turnover among high performers
• 17% lower overall voluntary turnover
• 87% greater ability to “hire the best people”
• 156% greater ability to “develop the best leaders”
• 92% greater ability to “respond to changing economic conditions”
• 144% greater ability to “plan for future workforce needs”

A 3-Step Model of Engagement

Understanding engagement is therefore crucial to facilitate these bottom line results. Simply put, engagement results in discretionary effort toward attaining organizational goals. Harrison Assessments’ research presents a 3-step model to engagement:

1. Achieve the right job fit. Harrison’s research demonstrates that people who enjoy at least 75% of their work, are 4 times more likely to succeed!
2. Identify employees’ expectations. Meet expectations through a shared process involving employees and the organization’s leadership. Harrison’s model measures 8 key dimensions including important employee expectations that impact the organization, teams and work/life balance.



3. Measure employees’ motivations and attitudes. Achievement of expectations is not solely dependent on external factors like benefits, resources and enablers. Harrison Assessments’ talent analytics system emphasizes the importance of internal motivators and attitudinal factors; by measuring these intrinsic factors, Harrison enables organizations to measure both expectations and motivations specifically for the employee and groups.

In the following example the employee’s development expectations are Wants Development and Wants Advancement. When gaps are identified, supervisors can effectively address them with the employee – here the employee has a potential performance gap in Self Improvement.

With Harrison Assessments’ Engagement & Retention Analysis for groups, Learning & OD professionals are able to measure gaps for key populations to address consistent patterns of needs impacting success within the organization, such as millennials, high potentials or geographic and functional groups. For example, if a group of millennials rate the expectation Wants Development high, while a significant percentage have low to moderate scores in the motivator Enthusiastic, this reflects a Motivational Gap that must be addressed to ensure engagement and retention. The trait Enthusiastic relates to personal goals; moderate to low scores suggest employees may need to clarify their goals and discuss with their supervisors how they align with organizational goals. In addition, there may be a need for clarity of career paths and opportunities for development. Organizations must define developmental tasks, skills, competencies and knowledge, as well as available resources, mentors and trainers to facilitate development.

Summary

There are many reasons why increasing engagement has become a strategic objective; one of the most compelling is that engaged employees are innovative, productive and energized. With this understanding of the importance for integrated talent management combined with an effective approach to engagement, in Part 2 of Keeping your Keepers, we will present 10 winning talent strategies to help you achieve your strategic and business goals in 2017.