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How to Lead a Breakthrough Transformation in Talent Management

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People are one of the most significant assets to ensure the growth and competitive advantages of organisations. Traditionally, the Human Resources area is centralised in Business Services and, therefore, it is important to understand how best to organise these teams so that they can add value to the business areas through efficient, innovative and effective management of the talent of the entire organisation.

What is Talent Management?

The human resources department is a comprehensive area inside any organisation. Talent management refers to the full scope of activities from the attraction and selection of candidates to the retention and development of high-performing employees.

Managing talent means driving performance through a cohesive approach of the full talent lifecycle. The key objective of the main talent management processes is to deliver an outstanding employee experience across all the steps of the employee journey.

Talent Management Challenges

Nowadays we are witnessing a large gap between the supply and demand for talent, a shortage of skills in organisations and an increase in the turnover of resources, causing serious talent retention challenges. As a result, 27% of “high potential” workers plan to leave their current company within one year and, as far as the millennial generation is concerned, only 18% intend to keep their current job. The urgency of a disruptive transformation in Talent Management is even clearer when we note that the loss of key talent in a company has a cost equivalent to approximately 6 to 24 months of wages.

This is the background that leads most CEOs and HR Managers to put a management programme that ensures the right talent in the right roles at the top of their agendas. It is becoming increasingly clear that for an organisation to remain high performing, it is essential to be successful in attracting, developing and retaining talent.

The journey to this transformation involves breaking the current paradigms of traditional HR management: rigid organisational hierarchy with little collaboration, timely reporting of non-relevant data, and disparate technologies and platforms coupled with manual rework tasks. Achieving a truly agile model in People Management means high levels of process automation, use of the most advanced technology to improve customer experience, becoming a business consulting and partner unit, and developing a flexible and collaborative organisation.

The time and effort required for the success of this journey should not be underestimated, since it requires the collaboration of several areas and the alignment of the management teams.

How HR can Develop and Support Organisational Talent

We have gathered the fundamental principles that will help leaders mobilise and inspire change in people and talent management across Business Services.

Create a service model based on end-to-end processes and customer centricity

The typical structure of Human Resources in Business Services is vertical and with several functional silos. Adopting a horizontal structure that is organised according to the types of needs of the internal customer ensures a faster and more effective response. This organisation clearly separates the activities that require more knowledge and expertise from those that can be directed towards self-service or automation. Typically, these needs/teams are split into the following groups:

  • Service Centre/Helpdesk: simple resolution activities that do not require a specialised resource, often being automated or in self-service mode.
  • Business support: consultancy to support the needs of business area managers, for example, to attack a problem of resource rotation in a specific team. This type of activity requires working closely with managers in a partnership model.
  • Expertise Centre: provide strategic inputs such as policies and programmes across the organisation.

By assigning the right resources to solve the most suitable problems, the model becomes more proactive and end-to-end because it addresses all the internal customers’ needs. For the business areas, interaction is also made easier because the point of contact for each issue is made clearer. In addition, the creation of a multi-level service allows for more complex problems to be solved at a superior level, freeing up the remaining teams to effectively solve problems that are easier to solve.

In Business Services, customer satisfaction is directly dependent on the operational performance of the services provided, i.e., the number of problems that are solved the first time around (i.e., the absence of reoccurrences) and the time taken to solve them. The creation of this Service Model contributes to the focus on Customer Centricity. However, ensuring that all parts of this model work together is one of the biggest challenges in this transition.

Maximise added value

The transformation of the Human Resources programme requires an in-depth analysis of the administrative work performed by the team. Typically, the time spent by these teams on transactional activities with little added value averages 60%. To invert the distribution of time spent on each process, as illustrated below, it is necessary to transform transactional work into support tasks with added value.

Breakthrough transformation in Talent Management

This change implies redesigning processes, identifying all waste and reducing its Lead Time. The use of technology in HR makes it possible to sustain the improvements of the new process by automating repetitive tasks or using artificial intelligence and machine learning, for example, for the recruitment process.

Besides process reengineering, it is essential to develop new skills in the organisation to enhance the added value of the processes. Skills related to analytics, problem-solving and the ability to adapt are more important than ever.

Design an HR model that helps retain talent

Designing and integrating each of the pieces of this Human Resources model requires experience, management alignment and the establishment of steps to guide the team through this transition. Defining responsibilities, optimising and standardising processes, designing a personalised organisational structure and managing change and communication are the main stages to be successful in leading this process of breakthrough change to a Business Service.

#business services #administration and service #strategy and leadership

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