4D
“4D”: Define - Discover - Develop - Deploy(&Retain)
Talent-powered organizations pursue four activities in concert.
Talent-powered organizations pursue four activities in concert.
1. Define the talent needs based on a clear understanding of mission-critical jobs and key workforce skills and competencies, and in light of current and future strategic goals.
It’s not enough for executives to have an intuitive understanding of the way talent helps an organization meet its strategic goals and achieve business successes. Leaders of talent-powered organizations clearly articulate how talent creates value for the organization.
Two elements are crucial to successfully charting the pathway from workforce skills and capabilities to business outcomes: a clear understanding of how the business creates value for customers, and deep insight into the parts of the organization’s workforce that have the greatest strategic impact.
It is imperative for talent-powered organizations to define their talent needs in terms of their strategic contribution to the business. However, these organizations must also understand their talent needs at the level of workforce skills and competencies in order to define the specific nature of the talent that needs to be developed or recruited. Best-practice talent management processes are connected through a competency model that provides a common language to drive all talent processes, from recruitment to deployment, learning and performance management.
2. Discover new sources of talent by seeking out diverse talent pools, considering novel options for accessing the talent they need, and offering comprehensive value propositions to current and prospective employees.
Contributing to the extraordinary complexity of today’s global talent market has been the emergence of talent pools of unprecedented diversity. Talent-powered organizations draw on a wide range of capabilities new to the world of people management, such as supply chain management for sourcing talent, and marketing and branding to appeal to diverse talent.
As the global economy continues to grow, geographic diversity will play a major role in the way companies discover new sources of talent. The ability to strategically and systematically discover diverse talent sources ensures that talent-powered organizations are not locked into particular locations or smaller, more limited talent pools.
Companies are beginning to develop "talent supply chains" to rapidly adapt sourcing channels and targeted talent pools to new strategic objectives and changing business conditions.
For example, Texas-based oil-refining giant Valero Energy Corporation won Workforce Management’s award for innovation in 2006 for developing one of the first talent supply chains. Beginning in 2002, Valero used the chain to reduce the time required to fill an open position from 120 days to 40 days, and to reduce the cost per hire from $12,000 to $2,300. This improvement came while the company was growing phenomenally, from 2,000 employees in 2000 to about 22,000 by 2006, with annual revenues of $75 billion.
The most significant results, however, were strategic. The talent supply chain enables Valero to forecast demand for talent three years out, at the division and job-title level. These projections allow the company to make strategic decisions about whether to hire new employees, enlist contractors or outsource the work. Dan Hilbert, the Valero executive in charge of the project, notes that "for the first time, talent pipelines can now be developed years in advance to meet specific future talent needs. It’s pretty revolutionary stuff."
This capability has become essential in a multi-polar world, as organizations everywhere need to understand global talent markets, how to access new talent and where they should consider alternative talent-sourcing strategies. To maintain a future flow of talent and the adaptability necessary to respond to changing market conditions, this understanding must become second nature.
3. Develop talent’s potential by building individual skills, knowledge and competencies in ways that expand the organization’s collective capabilities.
Career development efforts in large corporations are too often limited to programs that target "high potentials" and future leaders. This approach is shortsighted. In the knowledge economy, the skills demanded of employees at all levels are constantly being redefined. To deal successfully with that reality, talent-powered organizations invest in developing the capabilities of all employees, with a particular focus on accelerating the development of skills and workforces that are most clearly linked to business strategy. And they are using technology extensively to accelerate learning and connect people to better share knowledge and experience.
An important element of the business strategy of Avaya, a communications systems, applications and services company, is accelerated new-product introduction. The company is thus keen to ensure that employee training is linked to this strategic goal. To that end, it has employed a methodology called "business interlock" that, among other things, links training to the new-product development process, ensuring that investments in training are aligned with strategic objectives and deliver measurable results.
To improve performance while accelerating talent development, talent-powered organizations also use technology to better enable collaboration and distribute work globally. The field of radiology boasts a number of innovators in this area. Donald Resnick, M.D., a professor of radiology at the University of California, San Diego, explains how the global distribution of radiology work creates opportunities for accelerated learning by providing doctors with more varied cases. "At one site you might have only chronic diseases, but at another place you might get only sports medicine," he says. "So all of a sudden these fellows are getting experience in [chronic diseases and] sports medicine. To me, the educational value is spectacular."
Talent-powered organizations accelerate the development of key skills and critical workforces by embedding learning into job assignments in a structured way. And they make this learning available at the point of need, based on a clear understanding of the competencies and experience required to be effective in different jobs and roles.
4. Deploy(&Retain) the right talent in the right place at the right time to align employees’ strengths and aspirations with the organization’s goals.
Engaging employees by deploying talent in ways that create the best possible match between their talents and aspirations and the strategic goals of the business is an essential capability for talent-powered organizations.
Instilling a strong sense of engagement among employees is both more important and more difficult than ever. Engaged employees do better work and are more committed to the organization’s goals; engaged workforces are also more cohesive. But changes in the nature of work and in attitudes toward the work–life balance can make engagement an elusive goal.
Talent-powered organizations deploy talent in ways that enable people to draw on their personal and professional aspirations to create value for the organization.
For example, Yahoo! Inc. engages its people by offering meaningful career opportunities in the form of challenges that can have strategic impact. The company aligns individual aspirations with organizational goals by combining the promise of a valuable career experience with pride in a professional contribution ("How big can you think?"). The company seeks to connect employees to something bigger than themselves: "Working here, your day-to-day efforts will not only impact your future, but the web’s too."
Aligning work demands and performance expectations with employees’ personal work preferences is another route to engagement and high performance.
For the 4,000 people working at its corporate headquarters, Best Buy Co. has established the Results-Only Work Environment, in which employees create their own schedules and decide where they will work and how they will get their jobs done. As long as the work gets done and employees meet productivity goals, no one cares how, when or where employees work. The results have been impressive. Employee engagement scores have gone up, productivity has increased by 35 percent and retention has improved.
News Center
As the global economy is developing at different paces,geographic diversity will play a major role in the way companies discover new sources of talent.
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