Is talent management just for the good times?
Editorial by Alberto Gabbai Chairman of the Board of Cezanne Software
Everybody agrees that people generate value for the organization they work for. It this wasn’t true, no employer would ever choose to hire an employee and bear the relevant compensation cost. But the value people generate can vary dramatically, even in organizations that are similar to one another; based upon many factors that are not so easy to identify, measure and control.
The organizations that succeed in building the strategic value of people are those that set themselves some specific goals, and manage to achieve them:
- Align people behaviors with the organization’s goals,
- Know what talent, represented by skills, competencies, commitments and attitudes are required, and have the ability to build, deploy and redeploy such talent dynamically,
- Have compensation policies and practices which are consistent with the organization’s strategy,
- Build a flexible organization that facilitates the changes demanded by evolving business requirements.
To put it shortly: employees have a better performance when their work, their talent, their compensation and their motivation are aligned with the strategies and objectives of the entire organization.
In theory this is apparently simple. But in practice it is quite difficult, especially in today’s large, complex and often global organizations.
First there is a need to have a clearly defined strategy, which is not always easy; then it has to be well communicated so that it is known and shared, which again is not so easy; and finally it has to be articulated in a way that fits different goals, different management styles, and often different cultures, in different parts of the organization.
This kind of activity can be effectively managed using a set of tools and techniques that today go under the name of Talent Management, or Employee Performance Management (EPM).
And here we come to the contribution that Cezanne provides to talent management.
Cezanne’s technology is designed and delivered with the intent to help build a comprehensive employee performance management system - encompassing the full scope of talent management from recruitment though competency and performance management to succession and career planning - that will help organizations to reach many key goals.
Moreover, Cezanne’s technology is also designed, developed and delivered in such a way that allows these goals to be to addressed one at a time, but within the framework of a broader project, so that it can facilitate the building of a comprehensive talent management system without requiring a huge project and a huge upfront commitment.
One final thought before closing.
We are currently in the midst of one of the worst economic crises of the last decades, and this will certainly affect all our plans and priorities. For some time we will probably work with a shorter-term vision, more careful to optimize the present than to build a brighter future.
Does this mean that talent management is a luxury we can’t afford, and we should leave it aside until a more prosperous time? In my opinion talent management is not only for good times, it is for all times; but just like we shift priorities in business strategies, we should also shift priorities in talent management. In hard economic times, we may choose to assign priority to optimization tools, especially those that help to optimize costs and the financial side of managing and optimizing our people.
For example, by investing in compensation tools that let us accurately develop different reward scenarios, we can identify those options that allow us to save the most money without jeopardizing the loyalty of key individuals, while performance and succession management tools can help us more easily identify who these key performers are and ensure they are ready to step into new roles when we need them to.
