Cracking the "talent" code...

By Zeynep Ural

As the business world and talent landscape have transformed over the years, I have continued to grow as a Human Resources leader but one thing has remained constant in my talent philosophy: a company’s greatest asset is its talent – and not just any talent, but an engaged one. As business leaders, we have the responsibility to inspire a work environment that allows our talent to connect and flourish in a way that fits the organization. In doing so, we create a unique culture that translates into brand, and a brand that translates into a sustainable competitive advantage.

Based on the study “State of the Global Workplace 2017” conducted by Gallup*, business units in the top quartile of their global employee database were 17% more productive and 21% more profitable than those in the bottom quartile. 1 However, this finding is starkly contrasted by the fact that only 15% of full-time employees worldwide are engaged at work.1 With such staggering statistics, we are seeing many companies face the consequences of an disengaged workforce, such as the cost of high turnover, damaging impact on client relationships, poor employer brand deterring top talent… and the list goes on.

In this ever-evolving and increasingly competitive talent marketplace, engaging and retaining employees should be top of mind for business leaders. Talent engagement has to be a dynamic, agile approach that is engrained into an organization’s culture to be successful and sustainable in today’s world.

Over the years, I have identified the following four steps to define a simple yet powerful way to drive a sustainable culture that engages and retains top talent…. essentially, cracking the “talent” code:

 1.    Starting the movement for change.

Tackling talent engagement is about embedding cultural and behavioral changes into the fiber of your organization. It’s about mobilizing people around a shared purpose right from the start. It’s a movement that will define and drive the culture of your organization, starting with open communication and conversations with key stakeholders across the organization to understand the current landscape and priorities for change. Engaging and formalizing those stakeholder groups at the early stages will help promote transparency, consensus and support for the vision of the movement across business units and levels – paving the way for collaborative and creative solutions that are truly unique to the culture of your organization. The assessment may range from one-on-one discussions with senior leadership to direct interviews with employees at various levels, from benchmarking against industry standards to assessing internal data (such as employee engagement survey results, client feedback, exit interviews, and other internally-tracked talent metrics).

2.    Pinpointing top priorities for change.

At the beginning of the movement, more often than not, we are faced with more priorities than we can and should handle. Guided by a clear vision and strong leadership, it’s particularly important to assess the competing priorities in a way that consistently adds value across the various stakeholder groups. I’ve found it most insightful to map out those priorities through an impact/urgency analysis (high-low impact/urgent-not urgent), which can also be a powerful tool in demonstrating the business value to your stakeholder groups.

3.    Joining forces to rally for change.

To engage talent across your organization, you must first engage your key stakeholders. In my experience, the most effective way of engaging stakeholders is to collaborate with them. As you engage and formalize your stakeholder groups at the early stages of the movement, establishing leadership and employee advisory groups can be incredibly valuable to the development and implementation stages. Bringing these groups into play early on creates a greater sense of ownership and shortens the learning curve. These groups are able to provide and rally support from the grassroots to the executive level – breaking down barriers from the water cooler to the boardroom.

4.    Demonstrating direct, quantifiable and ongoing value to the business.

Given the various stakeholder groups and competing priorities across the movement, the next step or perhaps question we should ask is “how do we define success and how we tell the story that resonates beyond the HR function and grants buy-in from the business?” In today’s data-driven world, it has become necessary for HR functions to be able to demonstrate direct, quantifable and ongoing (both short- and long-term) value to the business for all movements for change. The HR function of the future will have to break the historical siloed thinking on basic metrics around hire-to-retire processes and become more sophisticated, and more integrated into the core business. As we define new net KPIs for this movement for change, we have a myriad of data sources that are at our disposal today such as predictive analytics, social media data, and periodic pulse checks – to name a few. This approach generates more sustainable results and more consistent, meaningful connections with leadership and stakeholder groups that will drive and motivate them to be advocates for change.

These simple yet powerful steps can help organizations proactively identify initiatives to improve their KPIs, creating a truly dynamic and agile approach to talent engagement. Navigating the “talent” code of an organization is complex and there is no simple algorithm for pinpointing those issues, but creating open channels for your employees to communicate and participate in building the culture and future of your organization is a pivotal step in the right direction. So, do you know your “talent” code? If not, how will you crack it?

* State of the Global Workplace, Gallup, 2017