Talent Management: What You Need to Know to Ensure Top Performers, Team Success, and Retention

Transcription

1 White Paper Talent Management: What You Need to Know to Ensure Top Performers, Team Success, and Retention Contents What You Need to Know About Performance Metrics for Team Success....2 Ways to Attract and Keep Top Performers....4 About Ziff Davis B2B Ziff Davis B2B is a leading provider of research to technology buyers and high-quality leads to IT vendors. As part of the Ziff Davis family, Ziff Davis B2B has access to over 50 million in-market technology buyers every month and supports the company s core mission of enabling technology buyers to make more informed business decisions. Copyright 2014 Ziff Davis B2B. All rights reserved. Contact Ziff Davis B2B 100 California Street, Suite 650 San Francisco, CA Tel: Fax: marty_fettig@ziffdavis.com

2 What You Need to Know About Performance Metrics for Team Success These days, organizations are under unprecedented pressure to achieve peak performance levels from their employees. At the same time, the market is flush with performance management tools ranging from web-based scorecards to sophisticated data analytics. Yet many human resources managers miss the mark when it comes to properly assessing their employees strengths and weaknesses. Part of the problem, according to Paul Rubenstein, leader of talent solutions and strategies at Aon Hewitt, is that HR professionals often focus on insignificant measures such as attendance rates and years of experience. Instead, Rubenstein says HR professionals would be wise to conduct in-depth analyses of who their best performers are, what are their experiences and what are their core personality characteristics. Fortunately, Rubenstein offers six tips for delving deeper into the data that matters key performance metrics that can help businesses build strong teams in a tough economy. 1. Measure the Measurers Sometimes HR leaders become so preoccupied with nurturing top performers that they forget to measure the people who matter most: the hiring managers who regularly identify and recruit star employees. For this reason, Rubenstein says, organizations should be able to look at who are the people who picked [the company s top performers], who interviewed them, and what are they doing right to yield these superstars. For example, how does a hiring manager with an excellent track record onboard new hires? How do they ensure new hires are socially connected to a company s workforce? How often are employee performance reviews conducted and what type of training are top performers receiving? Only by taking the time to examine a hiring manager s recipe for success can organizations identify the metrics they need for finding top talent. 2. Move beyond annual reviews Long the key weapon in any HR leader s arsenal, annual performance reviews are slowly falling out of fashion. And for good reason: We re at a crossroads in performance measurement, says Rubenstein. We have relied so heavily on the annual performance review which gives some numerical rating. But that annual performance review isn t enough. That cadence just doesn t match the way companies perform. For instance, Rubenstein points to today s new generation of workers 20-something Millennials who crave real-time recognition and rewards for their accomplishments, not annual bonuses. However, by setting goals that can only be achieved within the annual performance cycle, Rubenstein warns that organizations risk losing long-term shareholder value while reinforcing short-term gains. ziffdavis.com 2 of 5

3 3. Create a portfolio for custom metrics Financial organizations have long recognized the importance of portfolios separating areas of investment or corporate activity into distinct parts, and then creating custom performance levels and expectations for each. It s a paradigm that more and more HR departments should embrace in lieu of today s one-size-fits-all approach to measuring performance. Most businesses aren t articulating the individual portfolio business problems and the talent challenges of those business problems with the right level of specificity and granularity for each business unit, laments Rubenstein. As a result, differing departments and teams are being held to the same talent strategies when, in fact, organizations actually benefit from varying levels of turnover and productivity across departments. However, by creating a portfolio, organizations can better use the data they re collecting to address talent deficiencies and barriers to productivity on a much more granular level for greater results. 4. Hire the right people for measuring An increasing number of companies are embracing data analytics tools to help identify top talent and better measure performance. But not all HR leaders have the data science skills necessary to make the most of these sophisticated tools. This is the conundrum, says Rubenstein. You can t just throw a data scientist at the HR function. You really have to have people who understand both. The question is how do you take that data and put it in the hands of the HR field people so they can use it. In the end, Rubenstein says organizations should look for HR leaders or data scientists who can mine the data for correlations. For example, who are a company s star performers and what training modules helped boost their performance? Or alternatively, which employees are lagging behind and how did a poor onboarding experience contribute to their current status? 5. Hire, then test For some organizations, the most important guidelines aren t the metrics that help hiring managers identify top talent but the traits that make employees the best that they can be. For example, Rubenstein points to a recent client who has adopted a lights-out approach to hiring. Having decided that it s better to test for success than hire for fit, Rubenstein says the organization maintains unrestrictive hiring standards and instead, makes sure that each new hire enters a 90-day probation period. During this time, an enormous emphasis is placed on training, developing and onboarding these new employees. ziffdavis.com 3 of 5

4 Ways to Attract and Keep Top Performers For most HR professionals, filling seats is a cinch. After all, there are plenty of people looking for work these days, but identifying an individual with the right set of skills for an organization is never easy. Making matters even more challenging is today s ever-expanding roster of channels for candidates to connect with potential employers. Everyone we talk to is completely overwhelmed with the number of applications, qualified or not, for every single job, says Paul Rubenstein, leader of talent solutions and strategies at Aon Hewitt. You hear stories about people about not being able to hire but there s no shortage of applicants. Qualified applicants, however, is a whole other story. Separating the wheat from the chaff the music from the noise is increasingly difficult because we ve created a very easy set of channels for people to deliver their information. Job boards, , LinkedIn, even Twitter they re all delivery vehicles contributing to a deluge of curriculum vitae. Fortunately, there are steps leaders can take to attract and retain top talent. Here s how: 1. Expand your mind Organizations are facing unprecedented pressure to hire the perfect candidate. After all, says Rubenstein, We have squeezed headcounts and have such margin pressure that every hire is precious. So there is a much larger bias to hiring the perfect candidate and the perfect fit than hiring somebody who could be the next great star. For this reason, Rubenstein recommends that hiring managers look beyond basic credentials such as work history, industry experience, skills and location when selecting candidates. Rather, he says hiring managers should broaden their horizons in search of employees with the potential to become top performers with the right amount of training, career development and mentoring. 2. Dig deep into performance management These days, performance management involves more than simply conducting an annual review of employee performance. Rather, according to research firm i4cp, 47 percent of high-performance organizations use performance management to tighten strategic alignment between skills and business goals. Beyond evaluating employees strengths and weaknesses, savvy organizations are using sophisticated performance management systems to connect the dots between star performers and specific skill sets, training modules, incentives and mentorship programs. By delving deeper into employee profiles, and highlighting important connections, Donna Parrey, an i4cp senior research analyst and author of the report, Purpose Driven Performance Management in High-Performance Organizations, says that organizations can drive the greatest results and better determine whether weaknesses should be addressed internally or externally. ziffdavis.com 4 of 5

5 3. Unite HR and business via workforce analytics Workforce analytics tools are helping countless organizations attract and retain top talent. But there are multiple ways to interpret the mounds of data that these systems regularly collect and crunch. And these varying interpretations can have a profound impact on the calibre of a company s overall workforce. For example, Rubenstein of Aon Hewitt says that when delving deep into data, HR tends to ask single record-keeping system questions like turnover rated whereas business line leaders want the data to reveal who the best salespeople are, what made them that way, where did we hire them from and what training did we give them. The solution, says Rubenstein, is to populate a workforce analytics system with a mashup of data from both business-oriented and HR systems, such as Salesforce, CRM, learning modules and HRIS software. By integrating data from these various sources, HR leaders cannot only better identify top performers but show business line leaders what s important to focus on to keep top performers happy and continuously risking through the ranks. 4. Take advantage of social media With LinkedIn boasting over 135 million active members, HR leaders can t afford to ignore social media sites and their ability to locate hard-to-find talent. In fact, recruiting software provider Bullhorn Reach reports that 21 percent of recruiters are connected to all three social networks LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Luckily, an increasing number of tools are helping leaders separate social chitchat from insightful online conversations in order to identify and retain top talent. Dice.com, TalentBin and Gild are among the vendors offering technologies that help users sift through social media data to unearth qualified candidates. For example, Dice.com s OpenWeb gathers information from nearly 500 million personal profiles on more than 50 social and professional networking sites. By pulling together data from multiple platforms, Dice.com CEO Scott Melland says users are more likely to get a complete snapshot of a candidate including both hard and soft skills. In fact, social media is also proving to be a powerful retention tool. Social media monitoring tools such as HootSuite and Spredfast can alert organizations to employees who are taking to social media channels to seek out new employment opportunities before it s too late. ziffdavis.com 5 of 5