CareerCurve™

In memory of many and in honor of all, THANK YOU!

As we all know, attracting and retaining top talent is a big concern for HR.  This is a guest post on the topic that I hope you will find helpful. 

There are many elements to talent optimization. Two of the chief ones are ensuring you’re making the most of your current staffing resources, and hiring the right skills when necessary.

Your talent management processes can help you achieve your talent optimization goals in a variety of ways. Talent management encompasses everything from recruiting, hiring and onboarding, to performance management, employee development, succession planning, compensation and offboarding. When done well, these processes can help you:

Set Clear Expectations for Work

There are a variety of ways you can and should do this.

The primary way most organizations set work expectations is through employee performance appraisals. Performance appraisals generally outline core and job specific competencies and the goals the employee is expected to achieve. Employee goals are important because they lay out “what” you expect the employee to accomplish over the review period. Competencies are used to define “how” you want work to be performed, and to communicate corporate culture and values. Ideally, each employee goal should be linked to and aligned with a high level organizational goal it supports. This gives the employee a clear context for their work, helps them understand their value to the organization, and aligns your entire workforce.

In addition to performance appraisals, it’s a good idea to have a clear, detailed job description for every role that outlines: the job duties and responsibilities, education and experience requirements, competencies important to the role and the organization, scope of decision-making and reporting, etc. In fact, job descriptions should actually be used to guide both performance appraisals for the role and any job requisitions/postings.

Laying out clear performance expectations has been shown to contribute to employee engagement, and is the best way to align your workforce and encourage high performance – all keys to talent optimization.

Give Employee the Feedback and Coaching They Need to Improve and Succeed

Employee performance management should be an ongoing activity and dialogue between managers and employees, not a once-a-year event conducted as a performance appraisal. To be their best, meet expectations, continually learn, and adapt to changing work priorities and challenges, employees need ongoing feedback and coaching. To help support this, some companies implement quarterly performance appraisals, or periodic goal setting/review sessions and development reviews. These processes are simply ways to formalize and encourage what should be an ongoing activity. By giving their employees ongoing feedback and coaching, managers can address performance problems when they are small, and better manage their employees’ work and performance.

Support Employee Development

You and your organization can also optimize your workforce and foster high performance by supporting employee development. Employee development can take a variety of forms, including: formal training, conferences, webinars, e-learning, mentoring, job shadowing, reading, work assignments, participation in cross-functional teams, volunteer work, continuing education, etc. Managers should work with their employees to identify performance gaps, career aspirations and organization needs. Then, they should put development plans in place to help the employee broaden or deepen their knowledge/skills/experience, achieve their goals and improve their performance. This is typically done as part of the employee’s performance appraisal, but can be run as a separate process.

Being given the opportunity to develop is also a contributor to employee engagement and retention. But it also helps you develop the staffing resources you have today to meet your organization’s changing needs, and develop a more highly skilled workforce.

Reward and Encourage High Performance

Another way you foster high performance is by rewarding it. While your compensation and rewards programs should take education, experience and market data into consideration, they also need to be rooted in employee performance. Your program should include a wide variety of means to reward, recognize and encourage high performance – money isn’t always the answer. In fact, employee engagement surveys tell us that simple recognition and praise are strong performance motivators.

Attract High Performers

If you have good talent management processes in place, let candidates know about them during the hiring process. It may help weed out candidates who aren’t committed to their personal performance and development, and make your organization more attractive to those who are. When recruiting, you can also use your job descriptions and even your performance appraisal forms and process results to identify the qualities/skills/experience/attitudes that lead to high performance and success in a role. Then make sure you onboard your new hires, start them off with goals, support them with development and monitor their progress. Hiring the right people, right from the start, and setting them up for success are the best ways to ensure high performance and an optimized workforce.

Conclusion

Talent management best practices are all designed to drive employee high performance. They can be some of your most powerful talent optimization tools. Why not use them to help you attract and retain a world class workforce and drive organizational success.

Sean Conrad is a Certified Human Capital Strategist and Senior Product Analyst at Halogen Software, one of the leading providers of talent management software. For more of his insights on talent management, read his posts on the Halogen Software blog.

Today I wanted to write a quick and personal post thanking all of you for your support, comments and feedback and wishing you good fortune and happiness for the coming year. Getting involved with social media and blogging since March has meant that this year has been a huge learning experience and a lot of fun! To say I had no idea what to expect from this year would be an understatement – what an experience! There are so many of you who have been so positive and encouraging, it is overwhelming. Hearing how social media can help develop relationships and then witnessing it happen has been amazing. I only hope that I have been successful in providing value and assisting all of you wherever possible.

I hope you are all as excited as I am for 2011! I will continue to do my best to help all of you, both with content and support. Please have a fun and safe New Year’s Eve and do not hesitate to let me know if I can be of assistance to you in the coming year.

One subject that I see over and over on Twitter, in LinkedIn conversations, and on blogs is workplace bullying.  It is sad to me that this is an issue at all, let alone one that has become more prevalent than discriminatory harassment.  Although similar to harassment, bullying is typically unable to be placed into one category such as race or gender related harassment.  The economy and unemployment rate seems to have turned the workplace into more of a competitive environment where it is every man for himself and if an employee must push others around to come out on top, so be it.

Seeing this topic over and over has led me to wonder at how much this must cost a company.  I can’t imagine being able to actually calculate with any accuracy the amount of money wasted when bullying is present in a company – I don’t mean to try.  But I am in awe of what that number must be when you sit down and think about the effects.  Talk about a downward spiral.

Consider these factors when thinking about the cost to your organization:

1. Distraction from tasks by the bully, the victim, and by witnesses.
2. Poor performance by victims given inaccurate or incomplete information to do their job by the bully. This results in decreased motivation and low energy.
3. Increased stress, which leads to poor health, which leads to absenteeism, which leads to insurance claims which can also lead to Worker’s Comp claims. 
4. Increased insurance costs due to claims listed above.
5. Turnover – both by the victim and by the witnesses.  (Witnesses quit two-thirds as often as victims.)
6.  Inability to reach corporate goals due to lack of communication by the staff.  When bullying is taking place your team will not collaborate and problem solve so goals cannot be met.
7. Legal costs
8. Settlement fees for successful litigation by victims or wrongful termination litigation by bullies.
9. Loss of revenue due to low engagement, a toxic corporate culture, and an inability to attract top talent.
10. Waste of time.  Look for a future post on the ways bullying wastes time.

Do you have a policy in place to handle bullies in your organization?  Have you considered the dollars and cents that are lost when bullies are present?  Can you imagine what that total cost must be?

Sustainability is a word we hear all the time now. It can mean many different things and is used in many different contexts but the definition I am referring to is from a business perspective. A sustainable enterprise is one that balances social, environmental, and economic factors for short and long-term performance.

I’ve written about HR’s success at playing a strategic role in an organization and earning a “seat at the table” but it occurred to me that Human Resources should be heavily involved in working toward the company’s sustainability.

HR professionals can make a strong contribution in organizational development.

Think about your skills: 

Facilitation and conflict management
Change management
Culture change
Alignment of human resource and other systems and processes

Research shows that HR is relatively uninvolved with sustainability efforts due to being largely unfamiliar with the concept of sustainability and as a result, many organizations are making implementation mistakes.

Wouldn’t becoming well-versed in sustainability help you become more of a strategic partner in your organization? You have the knowledge of HR challenges and the skills, like those listed above, to overcome them. Sustainability is a goal that requires these skills in order to be achieved effectively.

Are you involved in sustainability efforts within your organization? Do you stay up to speed on sustainability and help develop and implement strategies to achieve it? Do you agree that HR as a whole is relatively unfamiliar with this business concept?

One of the top priorities of Human Resource Departments everywhere is creating and maintaining an engaged workforce.  This means employees are excited (or dare I say inspired) to be there, they are happy and they are productive.

There are numerous articles, resources, and studies out there explaining different ways to achieve this utopian state.  I’ve written many of them myself on how important trust is, being transparent, empowering your employees, and managing with values instead of rules.  But how can you tell if you’re there yet?  Rather than focusing on the negative – behaviors that show a lack of engagement – what are some signs that your workforce IS engaged?

Do you have employees who come in early or leave late?  A good sign of engagement is that your people don’t clock watch.  It’s more about getting the job done than getting off on time.

Do your employees look happy?  I spent 3 1/2 hours last week at a company with highly engaged employees.  How did I know this?  Well, when you take a step back and really look around, if it’s there, you can’t miss it.

Are your employees proactive with solutions?  Research shows that engaged workers think creatively and will approach their managers with solutions.  They feel comfortable enough not only to think outside the box, but to proactively discuss their solutions with their colleagues.

Do your employees take ownership of their projects?  If you have a workforce who has a high level of accountability, chances are they are highly engaged as well.

Do your employees continually ask for more responsibility and embrace challenges?  Research indicates that the most highly engaged employees want the chance to learn and are not shy about asking for it.

When you hear work-related conversations between employees do they use the words we and us?  If your employees are engaged with your organization they tend to speak as if they are a member of a team.  You will not hear references to they or them when referring to the company.

What other signs can you share in the comments that show your workforce is engaged?

I have a family member who recently received an invite by his employer to a corporate function on a Saturday night. He is excited to attend and that got me thinking about how many times these things backfire. When my current company plans activities, I also look forward to them and do not feel that it will affect my career if I am unable to attend. But this was not always the case.

In my previous life, I worked for various organizations that planned golf trips (I LOVE golf but trust me, many of my co-workers didn’t), “fun” days involving obstacle courses and relay races (ugh – should’ve called them “Unfun” days), and Whirly-Ball and Paintball outings that we had to pay for ourselves. Each of these, although usually on Saturdays and not necessarily free, certainly felt mandatory. To summarize, my take on corporate social functions was this: If you’re going to make me spend my day off with people from work I would love to define what I consider to be fun. Why should I have to participate and pay for something I have no interest in doing? And I was not the minority.

Was HR aware of this? Did they care? It felt like they probably knew that this is what we thought but that their job was to plan these things, not worry about whether anyone actually got anything out of it.

For HR, two of the challenges with planning corporate events have to be what to do and how to get people to do it. What to do should be relatively simple to decide if you communicate with your employees. Put together well-constructed surveys and vary the types of activities based on the feedback you receive. But how do you avoid the “it’s not mandatory but if you don’t show your face its career suicide” impression?

Is this a product of the culture? I wrote last week about transparency. Transparency breeds trust. Could it really be as simple as that? If you have that trust and you extend an invite that is just that – an invite that employees can respond to in any way they choose – does the feeling that they better at least make an appearance go away because they trust that you say what you mean and mean what you say? If you say it isn’t mandatory, the employees trust that it isn’t?

Is it the delivery? Does it make a difference if the invitation feels like an invitation and not a corporate mandate? Have you ever considered the wording and how it impacts the perception?

Do you know what your employees really think about the social functions your company plans? Are they considered mandatory even though you say they’re not? Is this perception by the employees related to your culture? Do you, in fact, want them to feel they are mandatory? Why? Please share any feedback in the comments.

How can performance reviews work if they don’t take into account many of the intangibles that are often not even recognized, let alone monitored?  Let’s say for example you have a team working on a project and one personality on that team has an endless supply of optimism.  Are you aware of it if you do not interact with the team all day?  Can you place a value on that?  Depending on how challenging the project is and the personality of the other team members, this could very well be the instrumental ability required to get the project completed on time and under budget – a positive mindset and  a never give up attitude. 

There are employees whose strengths drive the entire team dynamics but are these personality traits taken into consideration at review time?  Aren’t these just as important as many of the tangible skills required to create a functional and productive team?

A performance review is designed to motivate and engage employees.  Many times they have the opposite effect.  A negative review will lower morale but a positive review has virtually no effect.  Imagine you are working productively and you receive a good review.  Is this news to you?  Do you feel more motivated or do you feel as if you are a professional doing your job and wow, someone recognized that?  Don’t most people believe they do good work? (And many don’t do good work, so haven’t you just increased the odds that most everyone will be disappointed by their review?)

Are reviews motivating to your employees? Can an employee be motivated by a review that discounts many of their strengths?

Does your company have a review process?  Have you been trained to give feedback?  If you don’t think they are effective, what do you do instead to evaluate your employees and their value to the company?

I recently read an article about complaining at work that reminded me of an email that flew around years ago.  It was supposedly a speech given by Bill Gates to graduating college students and it hung on my refrigerator for years.  In fact, it may still be there under our soccer, baseball and gymnastic schedules and fundraiser information.  This was the one that tried to reel in the expectations for a graduate by pointing out things like “Life is not fair – get used to it!” and “Flipping burgers is not beneath you.”   I believe this was back in the day when things were great all around and my generation (I’m dating myself) kind of disgusted me as being spoiled and  ridiculous.  The more I think about it, it probably is buried somewhere on my fridge – I wanted to have it in case I had kids someday.

I think this article is well written and to the point – it names the complaint and possible solutions for the employee recommending that complaining will get you no where.   I am interested in how many of these complaints really cause disruption.  Some of them make sense professionally, such as having too large of a workload, but do your employees really invest a lot of time in complaining about there being a lack of decent restaurants within the vicinity of the office?  Wouldn’t this be something that was known prior to accepting the position?  

Hasn’t there been an attidue adjustment with the economical changes most companies have experienced that would mean an automatic reduction in complaining in general?   I, for one, am grateful to have a job at all so even if I had all kinds of issues, (which luckily, I do not) my attitude would still be one of gratitude.  Of course, my experience with people currently looking for work may be a little too close for objectivity.  How disruptive are these complaints in real life and has there been any reduction in the amount or type of complaints you deal with?

My name is Jen Turi and I am writing CareerCurve’s blog.  I am the Manager of Social Media for this outplacement firm and am very passionate about what we do.  Please see the About CareerCurve and About the Author page to learn a little bit more about us and me personally.  My goal in writing this blog is to connect with all kinds of readers and initiate conversation that is thought-provoking, interesting, and insightful.  I want to both learn and share experiences in the world of career transition in the hope that this will provide a platform to help anyone going through a downsizing or reorganization, from any perspective.  The last couple of years have been very difficult in our economy on everyone – employees who have been laid off, employers who have had to do the laying off, retained employees who have had to adjust to less assistance and fewer co-workers, directors of organizations who have had to restructure to make do with much smaller budgets and resources –  the list goes on and on. 

I hope that by creating a forum to share individual experiences we can all learn and make transition easier and less painful, no matter who you are.  Being that CareerCurve provides these types of services, I also hope to gather information to continually improve quality for both our clients and our candidates.  The best way to know what really works is to ask and  I encourage  comments.   I also look forward to recommendations for more information on post topics, content suggestions and to reading your blogs.   If you want to comment offline, my email address is jturi@careercurve.com and you can learn more about the company at www.careercurve.com.  Thank you for reading and I look forward to getting to know you and learning from you!