Editor’s note: This article was first published in May 2012, and its opening refers to the situation in Spain then, with pay freezes, a higher retirement age and the crisis holding companies back.
Some topics are hot on the desks of Human Resources departments right now. The times we live in are pushing companies to talk about pay freezes, raising the retirement age or talent drain. These are live debates that companies are working through: some because of their financial results, others because of the experience and cost of their longest-serving employees, without forgetting that the star performers in our company may be tempted by third parties to change jobs and earn better salaries.
It is up to Human Resources to protect, support and look after the talent they have hired so that it doesn’t give in to the temptation of switching sides. These people are the real engine of the company’s growth and recovery once the crisis allows it to move forward.
That is why companies need to work on a set of guidelines and lines of action to make the most of the talent they already have and spread it across the workforce and the business. Among other things, companies are launching a range of measures to manage talent as a way of gaining a competitive edge over others.
Some of these lines of action are:
Workforce assessment: the company must know the employees who work for it, their needs, aspirations, future ambitions and how their talent actually performs in the job. It wouldn’t be the first time we hire the best candidate only to find they don’t fit into the work environment.
The company needs to know how all its employees apply their knowledge to productive work, so it can tell which ones have potential and which are falling behind as the business grows.
Workforce assessment is the most essential tool for managing a group of employees in a productive business.
Identify talent and make use of it: this follows naturally from the assessment. A good set of measures for gauging professional abilities will make a few employees stand out, consign others to oblivion, and leave a majority in the middle, neither moving forward nor falling back.
Once the employees with the most potential have been identified, all that remains is to work with them and use their talent to achieve better results.
Motivate young people by drawing on the experience of veterans. A veteran employee undoubtedly has more knowledge and experience than young recent graduates. We should create synergies between the two to get the most out of the experience of some and the knowledge of others.
It is a combination in which the voice of experience will recognize whether or not the young employee assigned to the veteran has potential. We may or may not have got the pairing right, but it is the knowledge transfer itself that will deliver the result we are looking for.
Put knowledge transfer systems in place: drawing up working methods and training mechanisms with quantified and qualifiable objectives are some of the methods the company can make available to its employees so they succeed in their work.
Bear in mind that when other employees leave, for whatever reason, knowledge transfer systems are what keep companies going when workers are missing.
Human Resources as strategy: when it comes to people (commercial criteria are another matter), it is the HR department that should say where the company has to go and how it should proceed to reach its goal. That is the strategy, the leadership of the department that drives the people who work in a company: the company’s true asset, its workers.
With a clear idea of where we are going and how, a set of guidelines, approaches and attitudes can be established to help us reach the productive goals we need to become the best.
Efficient reward systems: we should tip the balance so that pay is adjusted for mutual benefit, along the lines of “as you perform, so I reward you”. An employee who is motivated, enthusiastic and works hard for the company’s success should be better rewarded financially than those who strictly comply with the company’s rules but without the slightest motivation or drive to go further.
They simply justify their salary by being present, not by their talent. Once again, this brings us back to the need to assess each employee’s productivity in order to pay accordingly.
Encourage leadership. A good leader will achieve better results. The leader, as the team’s coach, must motivate, inspire and resolve conflicts in their area. In doing so, they will get better results in their department.
The leader is responsible for making the area work and for managing the whole team equally, so that it rows in sync with all the parts that make up the company.
Further reading
Featured image: Julien Harneis, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr.
