Marketing

updated 4:45 pm October 8, 2010

Talent Management: Talent Management in the Web 2.0 Age

The latest and best talent management solutions offer such integrated Web 2.0 or social networking capabilities to provide a dynamic and interactive web-based experience

Properly managing your talent will garner company-wide benefits.

Effective talent management is the key to unlocking the potential within a company’s workforce. All organisations have a strategy and all departments will align their strategies to those of the company. HR must ensure it supports those strategies by putting the right people in the right roles at the right time, paying them appropriately, and ensuring employees are engaged.

This requires the coordination of many key HR functions: Manpower Planning, Recruiting, On-boarding, Career Development, Performance Management, Learning & Development, Compensation Management and Succession Planning. Central to all the processes that underlie these HR functions is the need for common definitions or profiles that are competency-based; this is crucial. Essentially, whilst HR departments have always undertaken all (or most) of these functions, the key to maximising their benefit is to ensure they are fully integrated with each other.

“Who are My Stars?”

Integration is essential because although the task of developing leaders starts with knowing what potential exists within the organisation; many organisations still struggle to understand what ‘talent’ they currently have among their ranks. The integration of all talent management processes benefits greatly from an integrated talent management system.

A well-constructed talent management system should have various analytical tools embedded into the HR processes themselves that will allow managers and HR practitioners to easily view and analyse their current talent pool for specific purposes, for example, a fairly sophisticated comparison of existing skills with future operational requirements of the organisation. An integrated talent management system will ensure a consistency of process throughout the life cycle and enable HR departments to manage the extensive data inter-relationships that would simply be too complex to manage manually.

Talent management also requires many people from different departments to participate together, and Web 2.0 tools can help enhance this process. The latest and best talent management solutions offer such integrated Web 2.0 or social networking capabilities to provide a dynamic and interactive web-based experience, with features such as forums, chat, workspaces, wikis, blogs, and more.

Web 2.0 enabled solutions also support the creation of business objectives (for operating units) and crucially allows these objectives to be ‘inherited’ by departmental employees to be used by them to help create performance appraisal objectives and define the profiles for roles within the organisation. This is a good example of a ‘closed-loop process’ that helps ensure that employee activity is directed and aligned with the achievement of corporate strategy.

“How Much of a Pay Rise Does She Deserve?”

Let us take a simple example of a manager wanting to give one of his employees a pay rise or bonus increase. To do so effectively (and equitably, when compared to other increases being considered for other staff), that manager needs to discuss the employee’s performance with the people he worked for – he would need to look-up company policy and standards, and may need to liaise with the HR/Compensation Dept, and so forth.

Historically, there would be many emails flying about with the usual delays and un-replied messages. Instead, with integrated Web 2.0 or social networking capabilities in the talent management system – forums, chat, wikis, blogs, etc – the ‘manager’ can have immediate access to those people and the necessary information. A Web 2.0 enabled system seeks to ensure that all information necessary for making decisions is brought together in one place, at one time, ensuring the processes are completed as efficiently as possible.

In the case of our example, the manager’s compensation screen would show details of the employees that report to the manager and their current remuneration (salary, bonuses, benefits, etc). The related data tabs could provide access to related areas such as performance evaluation, salary survey data, Wikis detailing company pay rules, analytics directly related to the manager’s staff, and so forth. In summary, the manager has immediate, relevant access to the additional related information necessary to complete the main task of processing an employee’s pay or bonus increase.

Talent Management + Competency Profiles = CRUCIAL

In summary, these points bear repeating: base all talent management processes and systems on profiles that are competency based – getting this area right first is very important, especially with Web 2.0.

Next, have an HR service delivery model in place: decide ‘how’ HR services are offered to and consumed by ‘users’ (perhaps utilising some of the following features – shared services, outsourcing, self-service, devolvement of responsibilities to line managers, regional HR units, etc.). The delivery of technology based talent management capabilities crucially depends on this.

Then, make sure core HR administrative processes are as optimised and efficient as possible. This is important as it ensures a solid data and process foundation upon which consistent talent management decisions can be based.

These best practices will help ensure that the talent management system is fully integrated for consistency of process throughout the life cycle, enabling HR departments to manage the extensive data inter-relationships that would simply be too complex to manage manually.