Performance Management - Employee engagement & management

Talent Management – Retaining Top Talent

“The Renewed Challenge that really should never have gone away”

There is little doubt that financing was a key area for organisational competitive advantage before the global financial crisis (GFC). For directors, the challenges now appear to be around the management of human capital and the fight for talent in organisations. As directors become more in tune with this, it is inevitable that boards will seek human resource information with the same degree of integrity as that expected of financial information. Systems and processes will become vital in establishing data that enables boards to proactively manage human capital – real people!

The US experience after 9/11 and after the GFC-driven downturn provides the “canary” for Australian directors. The thought of a W-shaped global growth pattern and the emergence of potential downturns in Australia only heighten the need for directors to become focussed on retaining top talent.

Identifying, cultivating and adopting more appropriate measures for top talent can be the key to recovery and long term growth. But how will you know who your most talented and productive individuals are? And, how will you know if they already have one foot out of the door?

Why Retention Matters

While there may be a number of people your company may not be sorry to see go, valuable others may be on the fence. Retaining team members critical to business processes and continuity is critical. Ironically, these most valuable professionals (MVP’s) may not be the “usual suspects” – certainly the C-level suite is important, but there may also be key individuals among the ranks whose experience, knowledge, charisma, vision and wisdom are vital to progress.

Identifying these MVP’s and keeping them on your team is important beyond the parameters of human resources. So much of a company’s success, its value to customers and its potential for growth reside within its people. Keeping your most talented team members on your side – fully engaged – helps to retail:

Institutional Memory – the how and the why of your operations, history, client values and methodologies. Change rarely happens in a vacuum and understanding the historical context for changes maintains a foundation for growth.
Relationships – with customers and other employees. Particularly where cross-departmental collaboration is concerned, internal relationships can be vital for optimising performance and knowing who to turn to get things done.
Knowledge base – the technical skills, operational expertise and experience of team members. When this is lost, so too is the opportunity to leverage this inherent knowledge across the organisation.
Investment – in your employees as valuable human capital. If you’ve invested education, skills building and professional development for an employee, the return on investment is gone the minute he/she walks out the door.

By thinking of your employees as human capital – something in which you invest and that pays dividends – you can look beyond output and production to determine their real value to the organisation

Making the Investment

While employees understandably want compensation equal to their skills and effort, they also want to feel invested in as people and professionals. To retain top talent and knowledge while maintaining employee engagement, loyalty and commitment, companies should consider the following:

Comprehensive talent-management tools that can integrate all of these functions – from HR and training to career and succession planning to measuring and understanding the performance effect on business success – within a single cross-functional platform. An integrated solution makes it easy and economical to manage the diverse, yet interconnected, needs of an effective human capital-management strategy without a massive upheaval in process, exorbitant capital expenditure or a lengthy and complicated roll out. Also any such program must include a sophisticated, but transparent, agenda for knowledge capture and transfer.

To learn more contact us.