Talent Management is like the proportional representation voting system – it’s often considered a good
idea but nobody can quite agree on the form it should take and no one can quite get it to work properly.
The reason Talent Management is understood to be important is simple – for organizations today people really are their greatest asset. But moving from this platitude to constructive, effective action is a complicated and seldom completed journey. Just like proportional representation…
By contrast, Talent Optimization attempts to tackle the same issue but in a different way. And it is this difference which enables Talent Optimization to be successful where Talent Management fails.
Whereas Talent Management traditionally collects information about employees’ competencies and turns that into learning and staffing plans, Talent Optimization takes a holistic view of the individual and makes that data available for them to use themselves, enabling each to do their job better.
The key issue for Talent Management lies in how it is perceived – as a bureaucratic, top down approach. In today’s busy world, it’s increasingly difficult to persuade employees to participate in initiatives without clearly answering the question: what’s in it for me? Traditionally implemented Talent Management programs have pretty much failed to answer this question. The knock-on effect: employees feel no motivation to enter personal data. Yet, every single talent system runs on data.
Without sufficient data any talent system will fall into a vicious spiral of decline. Unable to generate useful reports, the system leaves managers and employees unimpressed. In turn, individuals become reluctant to enter data, and managers are unlikely to give their teams time to keep reports up to date. The result: data begins to age, no longer giving a contemporary view of talent in the organization.
Even worse is the often-witnessed alternative: managers persuade employees to enter data about their skills, but they rush the process, providing inaccurate data (for example by selecting the same level across each in a set of competencies). The result: the data ceases to be clean and useful, and the entire system is brought into disrepute.
Talent Optimization, in contrast, captures data easily and quickly.
As well as considering individual skills (the traditional purview of Talent Management), it considers, among other things, knowledge. This is particularly important in today’s business world where the ‘secret sauce’ that underpins an organization’s success is often in the hands of its employees –product knowledge, knowledge of processes and systems. The intellectual property of the organization is usually its one key differentiator. Understanding what people know, and making sure it gets shared rapidly, successfully, is a key part of Talent Optimization.
And in capturing data, Infor’s Talent Optimization process uses smart techniques to secure information about employees through “naturally acquired information”. Rather than persuade people to enter skills data reluctantly, why not gather it through the data trail that we naturally create in our daily working lives? Whether we’re using social media, business systems or any online tool, our pattern of usage creates a rich source of information about what we do and don’t know and about the strength of our skills.
This combination of gathering skills data indirectly and analyzing people’s knowledge as well as their skills makes Talent Optimization a very different beast to Talent Management. With fresher, more comprehensive data that shows employees in the round, it enables employers to do more with their data and their people – allowing organizations finally to live up to their claim that their employees really are their greatest asset.
To be continued…
Tarik Taman,
General Manager HCM
